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Call for Papers - Seeing Charlotte Delbo / Seeing the Shoah

Call for Papers - Seeing Charlotte Delbo / Seeing the Shoah

Publié le par Pierre-Louis Fort (Source : Audrey Brunetaux)

 

Call for Papers for an edited volume on Charlotte Delbo 

 

"Seeing Charlotte Delbo / Seeing the Shoah"

            Following World War II, survivors of the Holocaust struggled to recount an experience that remained beyond the boundary of words.  How could Auschwitz be described in a way that someone who had not known its horrors might conceivably find factual?  How to “make us see” the dehumanization and the extermination that were integral to what has come to be known as the univers concentrationnaire?

            A participant in the French Resistance and a Nazi concentration camp survivor, Charlotte Delbo has, since the publication of her three-volume Auschwitz et après, been recognized as a major figure in Holocaust literature.  Her unique style combines poetry with prose and employs a wide range of literary tools to convey the traumatic experience of the atrocities that she and her fellow prisoners endured daily.  In her writings, Delbo challenges her readers to see her, to see her experience, to see the dreadful and horrifying mechanisms by which the camp universe functions.  She incorporates into her narrative powerful images of the camps calculated to, as she puts it, “nous faire voir”—“make us see”—what happened in them.  Every detail of an individual victim’s experience is noted on the page.

            Delbo’s originality lies in the conflation of the visual and the written to represent in her texts the unsayable.  In her highly visual writing, words become the eye of a camera, projecting onto the page a monstrous reality.  These still photographs, made visible by the author’s rhetorical techniques, unveil physical and psychological dimensions of the tragedy that might well remain obscured in strictly historical or journalistic accounts of events.  Delbo’s traumatic, non-linear memory calls up mental images that force the reader to confront the Holocaust as it destroyed individual lives.  Reading Delbo is like viewing a photograph created by words that at once leave a trace on the page and become a repository in which is stored the memory of the dead.  In a way, Delbo’s text becomes a site of memory  not limited by the stasis of a monument.

            The volume of collected essays that we hope to publish will explore the role played by the visual in Delbo’s writing and analyze the correlation between text and image. Questions that the proposed project will address are important from a number of theoretical perspectives in memory and trauma theory related to Holocaust memoirs and will speak to current scholarly debates concerning representations of the Holocaust in literature.  A variety of themes and approaches will be considered.  These include but are not limited to photographic memory and writing; trauma and the visual; literature, representation, and silence.

            Those interested in participating in this project should send an abstract in English of 350-500 words and a curriculum vitae to Audrey Brunetaux at abruneta@colby.edu AND to Michael Koppisch at koppisch@msu.edu.  Deadline for receipt of abstracts: 15 May 2012.