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

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Published: May 1, 2010
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/syn.16497
Keywords:
cultural amnesia narratives french broken narrative
Debra Kelly
University of Westminister
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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.

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