Tuesday 22nd May
5.15-6.30pm, All Soul's College, Hovenden Room
5.15-6.30pm, All Soul's College, Hovenden Room
Alice Bibbings (St. Hugh's) - 'Theories of the Comic in 19th-Century France'
Rebekah Vince (University of Warwick) - 'Beyond the Récit de filiation: Affiliative Memory in Valérie Zenatti's Mensonges [Lies](2011)'
Valérie Zenatti’s novella Mensonges [Lies] (2011) combines biography, autobiography, and fiction in its account of Ukranian-Israeli Aharon Appelfeld’s experience as a Holocaust survivor and the author’s own mediatized encounter with the catastrophe through the American television series Holocaust (1978). As well as their mutual connection to the Holocaust, albeit once removed for Valérie, a link can be made between Aharon’s experience upon arrival in British Mandate Palestine in the 1940s as a young Holocaust survivor and Valérie’s experience upon arrival to Israel in the 1980s as a French Jew of North African descent. Both had to denounce their diasporic identity and assume the Zionist ideology of the “New Jew”with its mandate to forget the past. Paradoxically, it is Valérie’s lack of connection to the catastrophic past of European Jews that excludes her from the Israeli collective which by the 1980s had absorbed Holocaust memory into its national identity, whereas Aharon was marginalized for having such a connection. In this article, I employ Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, particularly her theorisation of “filial memory” and “affiliative memory” (2008: 114). In so doing, I argue that Mensonges can be read as a récit d’affiliation, an extension of the récit de filiation, which encompasses the autobiographical narrator’s appropriation of Aharon Appelfeld’s memory alongside her own family story, raising ethical questions while demonstrating the creative potential of transgenerational and cross-cultural encounter.
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