Le témoignage littéraire chez Charlotte Delbo : fiction et devoir de mémoire

Details

Supervisors

Engel, Vincent ; Nannicini, Chiara

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en langues et lettres françaises et romanes, orientation français langue étrangère, à finalité approfondie

Abstract

enThis thesis proposes an analysis of the issues and textuality of literary testimony in the work of Charlotte Delbo (1913–1985), from the perspective of the interplay between veracity and literariness. The research corpus consists of Charlotte Delbo’s tetralogy "Auschwitz and After": "None of Us Will Return" (1965), "Useless Knowledge" (1970), "Measure of Our Days" (1971), and "Memory and Days" (2025). The thesis is divided into three parts, intended to address the following research questions: What are the stylistic and ideological specificities of testimonial writing? How do the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of Charlotte Delbo’s literary testimony intersect? How are these two dimensions inscribed in the textuality of the testimonial narrative? The first part, entitled “The Poetics of Testimonial Writing,” examines the theoretical foundations of literary testimony as a genre, as well as the relationship between ethics and aesthetics within testimonial writing. The second part, “Memory and Truth in Charlotte Delbo’s "Auschwitz and After" Tetralogy,” explores the interplay between truthfulness and literariness in Charlotte Delbo’s work through the modalities of memory and the ethical stakes of testimony. The third part, “"Auschwitz and After": An Impossible Narrative,” focuses on the writer’s narrative strategies (particularly, immersion and polyphony), which enable her to put the unimaginable into words.