Zugl.: Berlin, Freie Univ., Diss., 2009

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2006. / Principal faculty advisor: Susan Goodman & Carl Dawson, Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2005. Graduate Programme in Women's Studies. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 192-201). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNR11579

ix, 213 p. A print copy of this title is available from the UO Libraries, under the call number: KNIGHT PQ673 .C53 2007 / This dissertation is an analysis of the ways in which the remembered past of childhood is inscribed in four francophone novels written at the turn of the twenty-first century: Nina Bouraoui's L'âge blessé and Garçon manqué, Ying Chen's Le champ dans la mer, and Gisèle Pineau's L'espérance-macadam. These texts belong to a substantial corpus of contemporary narratives in which the remembering of childhood experiences plays a central role. Within that corpus we find a new approach to childhood emerging, one in which an unfamiliar past returns through the remembered voice of a wounded child. This voice overwhelms the text, fracturing the narrative through the irruption of images that it cannot contain. This dissertation is a study of the characteristics of this new "aesthetics of rupture." Memories of childhood in these texts are overshadowed by shattering past events that went unrecognized and unacknowledged. As a result of the wounds inflicted upon the child, the adult narrator remembers the past through physical symptoms of pain. Far from suturing the wounds of the past, remembering childhood becomes an incessant confrontational engagement with past traumas. The reader is then able to hear the scream of the wide-eyed child through a process of empathetic identification with the narrator's visceral memories. My introductory chapters provide a historical context to the development of representations of childhood in French and Francophone literature. Chapter III studies the ways in which childhood memories can actualize the past as a set of interruptive and destabilizing images. Theories of the non-representational revelation of the past serve as a starting point to my reading of Bouraoui's L'âge blessé. Chapter IV concentrates on the affective quality of memories so as to understand the narrator's ambivalent affective relationship to the past of childhood in Chen's Le champ dans la mer. Chapter V attempts to capture the ways in which the memory of a child's voice can be heard as a literary scream in Bouraoui's Garçon manqué. Chapter VI is a reading of Pineau's L'espérance-macadam in which I take into account the unseen gaze of the child to consider the role of hope in this text. / Adviser: Karen McPherson

Orientador: Márcio Orlando Seligmann Silva / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-25T13:12:14Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Santos_BrunoMendesdos_M.pdf: 1426800 bytes, checksum: d5e451f4db00da1f0cfd93ce9ad5765b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014 / Resumo: Este trabalho trata dos limites entre memória e ficção em algumas obras de Günter Grass (1927-) - a saber, O tambor (1959), Gato e rato (1961), Anos de cão (1965) e Nas peles da cebola (2006) - tendo em vista o seu teor testemunhal sobre o período entre guerras e pós-guerra, levando em conta a situação do autor como sujeito e objeto social, em um dos ambientes mais representativos da história global no século XX. Com o suporte de teorias da literatura, da cultura e da filosofia, além do aparato de textos críticos, ensaísticos e jornalísticos, bem como de outros textos literários sob perspectiva comparativa, deseja-se observar os processos de ficcionalização da memória individual, de romanceação da autobiografia e de construção da memória cultural através da literatura / Abstract: This work deals with the boundaries between memory and fiction in some pieces of Günter Grass (1927-) - namely, "The tim drum" (1959), "Cat and mouse" (1961), "Dog years" (1965) and "Peeling the onion" (2006) - taking into account its testimonial content from Nazism and postwar era, considering the author's position as social subject and object, in one of the most representative environments of world history in the twentieth century. Using theories of literature, culture and philosophy as support, as well as critics, essays and journalistic texts, besides other literary texts in a comparative perspective, it aims to observe the processes of fictionalizing individual memories, writing an autobiography in the form of a novel and building cultural memory through literature / Mestrado / Teoria e Critica Literaria / Mestre em Teoria e História Literária

Focusing on novels by three contemporary German authors and one multi-author theater text, “A Multidirectional Europe” investigates how their writing responds to post-1989 memory paradigms in which post-socialist memory, in relation to the Holocaust and Second World War, has received asymmetrical attention. Conceived as an interdisciplinary and comparative study, this dissertation analyzes how narrative texts by Herta Müller (1953-), Nino Haratischwili (1983-), Saša Stanišić (1978-) and the play Ein europäisches Abendmahl [2017] frame the memory of socialism in relation to the Holocaust, considering the ways in which these authors challenge the larger post- or transnational discourse of a supposedly “unified Europe.” Having migrated from Romania, Georgia, and Bosnia respectively, these authors, I argue, integrate post-socialist memories into German, and European, memory discourses through their play with genre, narrative structure, figurative language, and intertextuality. Although sociohistorical context is crucial in my readings for questions of memory, this dissertation seeks to transcend bounded definitions of memory, embracing a dynamic approach that is more inclusive in terms of the (hi)stories that are told and that contribute to the imagination of a heterogenous continent. Combining cultural studies, literary analysis, and memory theory, I move away from reading these works under the lens of autobiographical trauma, seeking instead to examine the negotiation of post-socialist memory through attending to generic and formal elements of the literary texts. My literary close readings methodologically draw on individual texts, while reflecting how literature is in exchange with other media and also present in the public sphere. Rather than a homogeneous entity, I show, the invoked Europe constitutes a multidirectional network. Through my focus on contexts beyond East Germany and its experience of state socialism, I address the intersections of migration and memory and their relevance for contemporary and future Germany and Europe, while counteracting approaches that traditionally center West Central Europe in discussions of the continent. In dialogue with Michael Rothberg’s conceptualization of multidirectional memory, I furthermore contribute to ongoing debates on different histories of violence, such as the current discussion about the relation or interaction between the memories of colonialism and the Holocaust.

Jorge Semprún’s work is the fruit of an incarceration in the concentration camp of Buchenwald as a resistance fighter and his expulsion from the Partido Comunista Español in 1964. Due to these biographical circumstances, many critical literary studies to date limit the discussion of his works to the autobiographical and the realm of Holocaust studies. Together with the texts that do not fit adequately into this categories, his self-identification as a Spanish exile has up to now been neglected. The present thesis aims to provide a more global view of his oeuvre by extending the literary analyses to texts that have deserved little critical attention. In order to achieve this, it investigates the role played by memory and self-representation in a variety of works by Semprún. Aspects connected to memory such as exile and nostalgia, the Holocaust, the interplay between memory and writing, politics and collective memory, postmemory and identity are examined by means of a detailed analysis of the selected works and are discussed thematically. Differences in genre are discarded for the discussion and interconnections between the various narratives are highlighted. With the help of memory and trauma theories, we come to the conclusion that memory is the overarching principle of Semprún’s writing and that he invests it with an aesthetic and ethical value which is interpreted as the justification for his devotion to writing.

Luis Cernuda (1902-1963) was exiled from Spain in 1938 due to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. He lived in Great Britain, America and Mexico and he never returned to his homeland. Until the mid-1960s, he was considered by the Spanish literary establishment to be an evasive and astringent poet. Since then, critics have recognised and praised the ethical quality and nature of his work and he is now considered to be one of the most profound and influential Spanish poets of the twentieth century. Despite the growing body of critical work on Cernuda, the salient role played by memory in his poetry has received little sustained critical attention. Critics have tended to stress the nostalgic and the evasive rather than the ethical and contemplative role played by memory in his work both before and after his departure from Spain. The objective of this thesis is to provide a more balanced view of the poet’s use of memory in his early and mature poetry. Rather than limiting his concept of memory to nostalgia for his youth or his homeland, it argues that he deploys memory as an instrument of self-analysis, self-discovery and self-criticism. The first chapter concentrates on his pre-exilic poetry in order to show that memory plays a fundamental role in his poetics prior to the experience of physical exile. The central body of the thesis examines the increasingly analytical and philosophical role played by memory in a selection of his mature prose and verse texts written outwith Spain.

Published in 1985, Marguerite Duras' La Douleur is a collection of six autobiographical and semi-autobiographical short stories written during and just after the German Occupation. Echoing the French national sentiment of the 1970s and 1980s, these stories examine Duras' own capacity for good and evil, for forgetting, repressing, and remembering. The first of these narratives, the eponymous "La douleur," is the only story in the collection to take the form of a diary, and it is this narrative, along with a posthumously published earlier draft of the same text, that will be the focus of this thesis. In both versions, Duras recounts her last tortuous months of waiting for her husband, Robert Antelme, to return from a German concentration camp after he was arrested and deported for his participation in the French Resistance. Though Duras claims in her 1985 preface to "La douleur" that she has no memory of having written this diary and that it has "nothing to do with literature," when it is compared to the original version it becomes clear that substantial changes in style and tone were made to the 1985 version before publication. Though many of Duras' peers disregarded this rewritten version of "La douleur" as a shameful distortion of the truth, it is my contention that historical accuracy was never Duras' primary goal. Instead, what manifests in these two versions of the same story is Duras' path toward understanding and closure in the wake of a traumatic event. Using a combination of psychoanalytic and post-structuralist theory, I will show that Truth and History are essentially incompatible when narrating trauma. Instead what is central to these two texts is their emotional accuracy: the manner in which the feelings and impressions associated with a traumatic event are accurately portrayed.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wollongong, 2005. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references: leaf 224-250.