“A Scandalous Woman”? Beauvoir in Paris, January 2008

Romance Languages and Literature

Irene Nemirovsky and the 'Jewish Question' in Interwar France

Literature and Comparative LiteratureRomance Languages and Literature

When the Perpetrator becomes a Reliable Witness of the Holocaust: On Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes

Purporting to be the first-person narrative of a former SS officer writing many years after World War II, Jonathan Littell's Les bienveillantes, published in France in 2006, became the biggest best seller of the year and won the most prestigious French literary prize, the Prix Goncourt. The author, an American, wrote the book in French. Many critics praised the novel, comparing it to War and Peace and other masterpieces, while others were quite hostile. In this essay I argue that Les bienveillantes accomplishes a rare, indeed a totally original, feat: representing a Nazi perpetrator as a reliable historical—and even moral—witness of the Holocaust. Whether one admires Les bienveillantes or loathes it depends largely on how one responds to this improbable combination of perpetrator and reliable witness. One problematic aspect of the novel is its use of the Oresteia theme: by making his protagonist a matricide, does Littell weaken his effectiveness as a historical witness?Romance Languages and Literature

Memory Troubles: Remembering the Occupation in Simone de Beauvoir's Les Mandarins

Critics generally agree that Beauvoir's novel Les Mandarins, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1954, is an important work of historical fiction, chronicling the lives and loves of left-wing intellectuals in Paris during the years following World War II. In this essay I argue that Les Mandarins is as much about the war as about the postwar, and that its meaning for contemporary readers was deeply linked (even if not in a fully recognized way) to memories of the troubled period of the Occupation. I develop the concept of “ambivalent memory,” as it refers in particular to two of the most problematic aspects of that period: the role of the Vichy government in the persecution of Jews, and the ambiguities and disagreements concerning the Resistance. More generally, the novel raises questions about memory and its inevitable obverse, forgetting. It is from our own contemporary perspective, heavily informed by concerns over memory and World War II, that this aspect of Les Mandarins comes to the fore.Literature and Comparative Literatur

Famille, Langue, Identité: La venue à l’écriture dans Le Vin de solitude

Romance Languages and Literature

The Question of Readability in Avant-Garde Fiction

All avant-garde literature is in some sense «unreadable»—that is, unintelligible in terms of prevailing norms of intelligibility. Avant-garde fiction aggressively proclaims its transgressions of traditional narrative «logic,» and thus challenges at the same time the reader\u27s belief in his or her sense-making ability; the reader may react to this threat by counter-attacking, dismissing the text as «unreadable.» Paradoxically, the term «readable» has a negative value in Roland Barthes\u27s terminology, where the «readable text» is opposed to Barthes\u27s idealized notion of the truly modern «writable text.» According to Barthes, the «writable text» refuses commentary, defies all attempt at a logical, systematic reading. This view is a romantic one. Barthes suggests that the only appropriate way to read modern texts is by adopting their fragmentariness, yielding to them in a kind of ecstasy (jouissance). I suggest, however, that at least two other ways of reading such texts are possible, and desirable: one way consists in the discovery of new rules of readability, which admittedly tend to lead to new codifications and a new canon (this, I argue, is what has occurred in the case of Robbe-Grillet\u27s «transgressive» fictions); the other way consists in seeing how modern texts inscribe the question of their «unreadability» within themselves—in other words, how they thematize the opposition between readable and unreadable, unity and fragmentation, order and transgression. Maurice Roche\u27s Compact serves as the text of reference in this latter discussion

Oneself as Another : Identification and Mourning in Patrick Modiano\u27s Dora Bruder

Taking off from Paul Ricoeur\u27s book Soi-même comme un autre (Oneself as Another), this essay discusses two kinds of identification in Modiano\u27s relation to Dora: identification as appropriation, where the writer assimilates Dora\u27s story in order to explore his own relation to his parents, especially his father; and identification as empathy, where the writer underlines the differences between his and Dora\u27s stories and also seeks to come to a historical understanding of what happened to her. In that process, he also evokes the fate of other Jews who, like Dora and her family, were deported from France. I conclude that this kind of empathetic identification leads to mourning, which is the realization that the death of a person has left (as Jacques Lacan puts it) a hole in the real

After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future

Imre Kertész's fatelessness : fiction as testimony / J. Hillis Miller -- Challenges for the successor generations of German-Jewish authors in Germany / Beatrice Sandberg -- Recent literature confronting the past : France and beyond / Philippe Mesnard, translated by Terence Cave -- Performing a perpetrator as witness : Jonathan Littell's Les bienveillantes / Susan Rubin Suleiman -- The ethics and aesthetics of backward narration in Martin Amis's Time's arrow / James Phelan -- The face-to-face encounter in Holocaust narrative / Jeremy Hawthorn -- Knowing little, adding nothing : the ethics and aesthetics of remembering in Espen Søbye's Kathe, always lived in Norway / Anniken Greve -- "When facts are scarce" : authenticating strategies in writing by children of survivors / Irene Kacandes -- Objects of return / Marianne Hirsch -- Narrative, memory, and visual image : W.G. Sebald's Luftkrieg und Literatur and Austerlitz / Jakob Lothe -- Which narrative of Auschwitz? A narrative analysis of Laurence Rees's documentary Auschwitz : the Nazis and "the final solution" / Anette H. Storeide -- Moving testimonies : "unhomed geography" and the Holocaust documentary of return / Janet Walker -- From Auschwitz to the Temple Mount : binding and unbinding the Israeli narrative / Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi -- The melancholy generation : Grossman's Book of interior grammar / Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan -- Fractured relations : the multidirectional Holocaust memory of Caryl Phillips / Michael Rothberg -- Hiroshima and the Holocaust : tales of war and defeat in Japan and Germany-a contrastive perspective / Anne ThelleItem embargoed for five year

Chapitre II. Le Désir narratif : l’« affaire Aubrac » et la mémoire nationale de la Résistance française

Contrairement à ce que l’on peut lire ou entendre ici ou là, les Français ne refusent pas, depuis un certain nombre d’années, de se souvenir des « années sombres » de Vichy (1940-44). Si les aspects les plus honteux du régime – notamment la collaboration avec l’occupant allemand, y compris pour l’arrestation et la déportation de 75000 juifs à partir de la France – ont représenté pendant des années un sujet tabou, absent du discours public comme du champ de la recherche universitaire, ce n’est..

"Oneself as Another": Identification and Mourning in Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder

Taking off from Paul Ricoeur's book Soi-même comme un autre (Oneself as Another) , this essay discusses two kinds of identification in Modiano's relation to Dora: identification as appropriation, where the writer "assimilates" Dora's story in order to explore his own relation to his parents, especially his father; and identification as empathy, where the writer underlines the differences between his and Dora's stories and also seeks to come to a historical understanding of what happened to her. In that process, he also evokes the fate of other Jews who, like Dora and her family, were deported from France. I conclude that this kind of empathetic identification leads to mourning, which is the realization that the death of a person has left (as Jacques Lacan puts it) a "hole in the real.