From Cultural Amnesia to ‘Anamnesia’ in Reading Life-Writing Narratives of the French Occupation: The Lost Manuscript, the ‘Handwritingness’ of History and the Broken Narrative


Published: May 1, 2010
Keywords:
cultural amnesia narratives french broken narrative
Debra Kelly
Abstract

No abstract (available).

Article Details
  • Section
  • Articles
Downloads
Download data is not yet available.
Author Biography
Debra Kelly, University of Westminister

Debra Kelly is Professor of French and Francophone Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster, London. She has particular research interests in text and image studies, war and culture studies, the relationship between literature and cultural memory, and Franco-British cultural relations. Her major publications are Pierre Albert-Birot: A Poetics in Movement, A Poetics of Movement (Associated University Presses, 1997) and Autobiography and Independence: Selfhood and Creativity in North African PostcolonialWriting in French (Liverpool University Press, 2005). She has published articles and chapters on writers including Guillaume Apollinaire, Philippe Soupault, Jean Tardieu, Robert Pinget and Albert Camus. She is also the Director of the Group for War and Culture Studies, an international network of researchers, and she has edited and co-edited volumes of essays in this field, including France at War in the Twentieth Century: Propaganda, Mythand Metaphor (Berghahn, 2000), Remembering and Representing the Experience of War in Twentieth-Century France (Mellen, 2000), and “Humour as a Strategy in War,” a double issue of The Journal of European Studies (2001). She is also an editor of the Journal of War and Culture Studies. She is currently co-ordinating a collective project on the History of the French in London from the Huguenots to the Present Day.

References
Adams, Tim. “Feel the pain.” Observer 29 Jan. 2006.
Anon. “Bloomsbury finds ‘real-life’ Suite française.” The Bookseller 11 Oct. 2007.
Anon. “The extraordinary courage of women who resisted.” Daily Mail 4 Dec. 2008.
Bellos, David. “France and the Jews.” Berr 277-91.
Bellos, David. "Introduction". Berr 1-7.
Berr, Hélène. Journal. Paris: Tallandier, 2008. Trans. David Bellos. London: MacLehose Press, 2008.
Bickerton, Emilie. “The timeless Marguerite Duras.” Times Literary Supplement 25 July 2007.
Burke, Jason. “France finds its own Anne Frank as young Jewish woman’s diary hits the shelves.” Observer 7 Jan. 2008.
Callil, Carmen. Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006.
Callil, Carmen. “Testament to that other Holocaust.” Guardian 6 Sep. 2006.
Callil, Carmen. “The Translated life.” Observer 12 Jan. 2008.
Castelli, Elizabeth and James McBride. “Beyond the Language and Memory of the Fathers: Feminist Perspectives in Religious Studies.” Transcending Boundaries: Multi-Disciplinary Approaches to the Study of Gender. Eds. Pamela Frese and Michael Cogglehall. New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1990. 113-50.
Collier, Peter, Anna Magdalena Elsner and Olga Smith, eds. Anamnesia: Private and Public Memory in Modern French Culture. Bern: Peter Lang, 2009.
Customers’ reviews of Agnès Humbert’s Résistance: Memoirs of Occupied France on Amazon.co.uk. Web Jul. 14 2009.
Damlé, Amaleena. “Phantasmal Relics: Psychoanalytical and Deconstructive Ghosts in Moi L’Intedite and Pagli by Ananda Devi.” Anamnesia: Private and Public Memory in Modern French Culture. Eds. Peter Collier, Anna Magdalena Elsner and Olga Smith. Bern: Peter Lang, 2009. 229-40.
Derrida, Jacques. “‘A Self-Unsealing Poetic Text’: Poetics and Politics of Witnessing.” Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Revenge of the Aesthetic. The Place of Literature in Theory Today. Ed. Michael P. Clark. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 180-207.
Dirda, Michael. “The journal of Hélène Berr. A girl’s diary that turned into a chilling record.” Washington Post 23 Nov. 2008.
Dowling, Siobhán. “Hélène Berr’s diary flies off the shelves.” Der Spiegel (online), 7 Sep. 2009.
Duras, Marguerite. Carnets de la Guerre at autres textes. Paris: P.O.L; Paris: Folio, 2006. Wartime
Notebooks and other texts. Trans. Linda Coverdale. London: MacLehose Press, 2008.
Duras, Marguerite. La Douleur. Paris: P.O.L., 1985.
Elsner, Anna Magdalena. “‘L’obscénité absolue du projet de comprendre’: The Communicabilty of Traumatic Knowledge in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah.” Anamnesia: Private and Public Memory in Modern French Culture. Eds. Peter Collier, Anna Magdalena Elsner and Olga Smith. Bern: Peter Lang, 2009. 41-55.
Fell, Alison S., ed. French and Francophone Women Facing War/Les femmes face à la guerre. Peter Lang: Bern, 2009.
Fell, Alison S. “Gendering the War Story.” Journal of War and Culture Studies 1.1 (2008): 53-58.
Felman, Shosannah and Dori Laub. Testimony. Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychanalysis and
History. London: Routledge, 1992.
Genette, Gérard. Seuils. Paris: Seuil, 1987.
Grey, Tobias. “Diary of a propagandist. A Paris art historian recorded her opposition to the Nazis.” Washington Post 30 Nov. 2008.
Grice, Elizabeth. “How the diary of Hélène Berr, the ‘Anne Frank of France,’ came to be published.” Telegraph 30 Oct. 2008.
Guerin, Frances and Roger Hallas. The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture. London-New York: Wallpaper Press, 2007.
Holgate, Andrew. “History Books of the Year.” Sunday Times 30 Nov. 2008.
Humbert, Agnès. Notre Guerre. Souvenirs de Résistance. 1946. Paris: Tallandier, 2004. Résistance: A Woman’s Journal of Struggle and Defiance in Occupied France (hb); Résistance: Memoirs of Occupied France (pb). Trans. Barbara Mellor. London: Bloomsbury, 2008.
Hussein, Aamer. “A paper trail that leads far from Vietnam.” Independent 15 Feb. 2008.
Jackson, Julian. France: The Dark Years 1940-1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Jacob, Gerald. “How France discovered its own Anne Frank.” The Jewish Chronicle Online. Web Jul.14 2009.
Jolly Margaretta, ed. The Encyclopaedia of Life-Writing. Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001.
Kansteiner, Wulf. “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies.” History and Theory 41.2 (2002): 179-97.
Kelly, Debra and Gill Rye, eds. The Witness and the Text. Spec. issue of Journal of Romance Studies 9.3 (2009): 1-122.
Laing, Olivia. “The power and the glory of passionate woman.” Observer 20 Jan. 2008.
Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte Autobiographique. Paris: Seuil, 1975.
Levisalles, Nathalie. “La vie brève.” Libération 20 Dec. 2007.
Mandell, Barrett J. “Full of Life Now.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton. NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.
Massie, Allan. “Paris under the swastika.” Literary Review Sep. 2008.
Moorhead, Caroline. “A war of words.” Spectator 17 Sep. 2008.
Moorhead, Caroline. “The yellow star of courage.” Spectator 22 Oct. 2008.
Némirovsky, Irène. Suite Française. Paris: Denoël, 2004. Trans. Sandra Smith. London: Chatto and Windus, 2006.
Paxton, Robert. Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order. New York: Knopf, 1972.
Peras, Delphine and Simone Veil. “Pourquoi il faut lire Hélène Berr.” L’Express 10 Jan. 2008. Radstone, Susannah. “Memory Studies: For and Against.” Memory Studies 1.1 (2008): 31-39.
Readers’ comments to Sorin, Raphaël: “Une étoile jaune pour Hélène Berr.” Lettres ouvertes. Les divagations de Raphaël Sorin. Web Jul.14 2009.
Roberts, Michèle. “Wartime Notebooks by Marguerite Duras.” Sunday Times 2 Mar. 2008.
Rousso, Henry. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944. Cambridge MA:
Harvard University Press, 1991.
Teele, Elinor. “The courage to resist.” California Literary Review 28 Oct. 2008.
Wilson, Emma. "Preface". Anamnesia: Private and Public Memory in Modern French Culture. Eds. Peter Collier, Anna Magdalena Elsner and Olga Smith. Bern: Peter Lang, 2009. xiii-xiv.