Life-Writing and War in Twentieth-Century Europe
On the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the publication of Robert Antelme’s The Human Race and Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, the Yale University Memory Studies in Modern Europe working group invites doctoral students from all disciplines to share their research in a workshop devoted to life-writing and war in Europe in the long 20th century. This workshop offers a forum to discuss methodology and work in progress as well as to connect with fellow scholars at various stages of research. Selected participants will have 15 minutes to present their paper, followed by a 15-minute discussion with the audience.
Topics to be explored in presentations may include (but are not limited to)
- Representations of war, conflict, or genocide in autobiographies, biographies, diaries, letters, memoirs, and personal accounts
- Literary works of testimony, such as those by Holocaust survivors
- The relationship between writing and remembering war
- Transnational memory and comparative approaches in life writings about war
- The relevance of individually written memories in the formation of collective or public narratives
- Silences, exclusions, “forgetting” in war recollections and their implications
- Fake memories, truth claims, and reliability of written testimonies
- Questions of authority, anonymity, and pseudonymity
- Genre and gender implications in life writings about war
- Aphasia, amnesia, and traumatic memory of the war
- Return to ordinary life: writing in the aftermath of the war