Title: “There is no Utopia Nowhere”: Heterotopia Writing and Historical Construction in The Shawl

Abstract: Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl focuses on Rosa’s witnessing infanticide in the concentration camp and her traumatic postwar life. Rosa has undergone a transformation from a succumber to a speaker and accuser in the heterotopia spaces of the concentration camp, a second-hand shop in New York and hotels in Miami. The characterization of victim’s image spreads Holocaust history and crisis awareness, and constructs the national postwar community. Ozick reinforces the awareness of Holocaust history with special spatial art, and forms a historical memory, characterized by the electrified fence as the Holocaust carrier, and the stagnation of time and space. It clarifies the trauma subject’s inner grief and historical responsibility, and presents the historical continuity between spatial memory and the traumatic events of the Holocaust.

Keywords: heterotopia, Holocaust, historical construction, Michel Foucault, Cynthia Ozick

Author: Na Zhao, Associate Professor, School of Foreign Studies, Anhui Normal University, Wuhu, Anhui, China.