Abstract
New ways of experiencing trauma, history, and memory have employed affect as a tool to enhance the instructive nature of transmedial representations of the Holocaust: literary fiction, sites of memory, and film. In the absence of direct contact with such “limit situations”, the transfer from individual memory to collective and cultural memory occurs through “mass technologies”, constituting what Alison Landsberg termed “prosthetic memory”. In the case of cinema, the medium dramatizes the past. It is capable of adapting the viewers’ perspectives by offering not merely a historical narrative, but a personal experience to which they naturally had no access. Performativity involves the abstraction of discourse through what Vivian Sobchack calls “structures of direct experience”, which have the capacity to suggest the sensation of the real (movement, hearing, sight). This paper will discuss the effects produced by the transmediality of two artifacts of prosthetic memory in the context of adapting the novel The Zone of Interest (2014) into Jonathan Glazer’s homonymous film (2023). It will compare the effects of these two forms and analyze the strategies through which cinematic and literary expressions engage with one another and with traumatic memory.