Abstract. This review of Anne Rothe’s monograph “Popular Trauma Culture: Selling the Pain of Others in the Mass Media” (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011) defines the particular approach which applied by the author to the Holocaust phenomenon perceived as discourse, trope, specific cultural practice in American popular culture. A set of various cultural events (of literary, cinema and TV genres) are configured by Rothe around narrative about heroic survival of the victim and victim talk rhetoric, and seen both in historical and media contexts. Among them: social Darwinist and traumatic discourses, and huge popularity of sensational genres. Taking into account the growing interest of the humanities to the Holocaust, Rothe’s work is remarkable for its intellectual revision of American popular culture.
Keywords: American popular culture, trauma, Holocaust, media representation, discourse.