Deconstruction Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Walter Benn Michaels

Critical Essay by Walter Benn Michaels

SOURCE: Michaels, Walter Benn. “‘You Who Never Was There’: Slavery and the New Historicism—Deconstruction and the Holocaust.” In The Americanization of the Holocaust, edited by Hilene Flanzbaum, pp. 181-97. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Michaels uses the example of the treatment of the Holocaust by American academics as an example of the importance of upholding cultural myths.

Do the Americans Believe Their Myths? Or, Beloved

The title of this section is derived from Paul Veyne's Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?—a book that I read several years ago, first with great eagerness and then with a certain disappointment. The eagerness stemmed from my curiosity about whether the Greeks really thought, to take one of Veyne's examples, that events like “the amorous adventures of Aphrodite and Ares caught in bed by her husband” had actually happened;¹ the disappointment stemmed from Veyne's commitment to regarding such curiosity as naive. The book's subtitle is An...
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