scholarly journals Escrever a dor: Marguerite Duras e a escrita literária de si / Writing the Pain: Marguerite Duras and the Literary Self-Writing

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 163
Author(s):  
Cláudia Tavares Alves

Resumo: A escritora Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) publicou, em 1985, A dor, livro que reúne uma série de textos elaborados a partir de anotações em cadernos e diários, incluindo texto homônimo ao livro. Nessa narrativa em específico, é possível reconhecer uma forte carga autobiográfica no relato da espera pelo marido feito prisioneiro durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial. Tal acontecimento acometeu justamente a escritora na década de 1940, quando seu marido naquela época, Robert Antelme, fora levado pelas forças alemãs a campos de trabalho forçado e de extermínio. Posteriormente, os textos originais, isto é, os próprios cadernos de Duras, foram organizados e publicados em novo livro, intitulado Cadernos de guerra e outros textos, algo que possibilitou uma nova abordagem à sua leitura. Sendo assim, e tendo em vista essa última publicação em que constam os diários da escritora – algo que nos permite comparar um texto a partir de suportes distintos –, a intenção desse artigo é explorar os caminhos percorridos por Duras entre a versão registrada em seus diários e a versão publicada em livro. O objetivo principal é investigar como a ideia de escrita de si passa a ganhar ressignificações quando confrontada com um novo processo de ficcionalização e publicação da escrita autobiográfica, o qual chamaremos, enfim, de escrita literária de si. Para tanto, utilizaremos os estudos de Michel Foucault e Jacques Derrida para um embasamento teórico mais aprofundado sobre as noções que regem tal processo de escrita (e reescrita) de uma experiência pessoal.Palavras-chave: Marguerite Duras; escrita de si; literatura de testemunho; diários.Abstract: In 1985, the writer Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) published the book The pain, which gathers many texts based on notes from several notebooks and diaries including a homonymous story. In this specific narrative, it is possible to recognize a great number of autobiographical elements from the writer’s life while she tells the pain of waiting for a husband captured during the second world war. The same event happened to the writer during the 1940’s, when her husband at the time, Robert Antelme, was taken by the German army to fields of forced work and extermination. Lately, the original texts, that is, Duras’ notebooks themselves, were organized and published in a new book, something that changed the way we used to read the narrative “The pain”. Therefore, and considering the later publication of the text exactly as it was written in the writer’s diary, the intention of this article is to confront the original text and the final book version of it. The main purpose is to investigate how the idea of self-writing gains different meanings when it faces a new process of fictionalization and publicization of the autobiographical writing, named in this case as a literary self-writing. Studies from Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida are going to be used as theoretical background on notions that guide the process of writing (and rewriting) a personal experience.Keywords: Marguerite Duras; Self-writing; Witness Literature; Diaries.

2020 ◽  
pp. 002200942091108
Author(s):  
Benjamin M. Schneider

During the Second World War, the US Army was faced with the problem of turning average civilians into soldiers capable of destroying the German army. To ease their adjustment to their new duties and overcome what US officers saw as the unsuitability of Americans for soldiering, the Army Ground Forces adopted a training regimen designed to produce an ‘induced urge to hate the enemy’. This training would make soldiers into enthusiastic killers by portraying the enemy as brutal and ruthless and warfare as a fundamentally lawless activity. As the war went on, hate training increasingly emphasized German atrocities, breaking down the distinctions between soldier and civilian and painting all Germans as potential threats. This antinomian approach achieved only marginal effectiveness in getting US troops to kill, but had dire results for military justice. Blurring the lines between lawful killing and murder, the army’s hate training program crippled its ability to police its soldiers. As violence against German civilians and POWs mounted, many officers felt these war crimes were the natural and inevitable result of the army’s training regimen. Unwilling to hold soldiers responsible, confessed war criminals were only lightly punished, explicitly because the Army believed they had only acted on their training.


1960 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 207-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Baron

In September 1960 a hundred years will have passed since the appearance of Jacob Burckhardt's Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. No other work has had a comparable influence on the formation of the concept of die Renaissance, and during the last one or two generations it has become an historical classic read in all western countries. Since the re-publication of Burckhardt's original text by Walter Goetz in 1922, one German reprint has followed another. After the second World War the early Italian and English translations began to share in this ever-growing popularity (America has seen three new editions recendy), while the first Spanish translation came out in South America in 1942.


Author(s):  
Pekka Kujamäki

During World War II, both the Finnish Army and its ally Germany were dependent on mediation practices provided by military personnel or civilians in the linguistic, cultural and ideological intersections of the given conflicts. By drawing on two autobiographical manuscripts – one written immediately after the war and the other later in the 1990s – this article examines the experiences of a female civilian interpreter engaged by the German Army from 1942 to 1945. In addition to directing attention to ordinary people in wartime translational tasks, this article contrasts the value of such post-hoc accounts in the historical translation analysis against the constraints imposed on them through their embeddedness in a certain communicative situation. It shows, furthermore, how the change in this communicative situation imposes changes on the writer’s emotional involvement and how this change mirrors her own stance towards the given narrative framework.


Author(s):  
Sam Ferguson

An introductory discussion takes stock of previous studies of the diary, establishes the distinct approach for the present work, and sets out some useful critical concepts. This book will reconsider some of the historical landmarks identified by previous studies, and address certain gaps in the historical account (particularly the decades after the Second World War). It adopts a more sensitive and flexible approach to fictivity than previous studies. The important concept of otherness in the diary is discussed with reference to Jacques Lacan. The author-figure and the œuvre are to be treated as products of literary discourse with a complex relationship to reality (discussed with reference to Michel Foucault). The concept of the supplement (following Jacques Derrida) will be useful in examining the marginal and subversive role of the diary. Finally, the role of gender in the history of diary-writing is addressed.


2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank-Rutger Hausmann

AbstractIn the years immediately following the Second World War, three books written by German professors of Romance Philology were published in Switzerland: Mimesis by Erich Auerbach in 1946, European literature and the Middle Ages by Ernst Robert Curtius in 1948, and Montaigne by Hugo Friedrich in 1949. Even if the subjects of these studies and the approaches of their authors are different, their aim is nevertheless the same: They want to contribute to the idea of continuity in European literature. It is certainly logical to conclude that Auerbach, banished from Germany by the Nazi authorities because of his Jewish heritage, Curtius, surviving the years from 1933 to 1945 in »inner emigration«, and Friedrich, serving as interpreter in the German army, learned the lessons of the past and evoke the heritage of literature as an antidote to ideological blindness and fanaticism. Friedrich, whose study of Montaigne’s Les Essais forms the center of the following article, is internationally known first and foremost for his bestseller Structure of modern poetry (1957), translated into thirteen languages, but also his work Montaigne, which is the first comprehensive study of Montaigne’s personality and work in German and, even today, far from being outdated. Strangely enough, the book is actually only available in the English translation by Dawn Eng. It helps the modern reader to understand not only the complex composition of Montaigne’s essays, but also their epoch-making place in French moralistic literature.


2014 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 389-414
Author(s):  
Adrian E. Wettstein

Abstract Historical spatial theories have rarely been used in operational military history. However, they can offer a fertile approach to provide a theoretical framework in operational history. This article shows the potential use of spatial theories and spatial terms in operational history by analysing urban warfare and its perception in the German army during the Second World War. Taking the battle of Stalingrad as a case study, special emphasis is given to physical and social-organisational spatial concepts.


Author(s):  
Joel Greenberg

Shortly after the end of the First World War, the German Navy learned that its encrypted communications had been read throughout the hostilities by both Britain and Russia. The German military realized that its approach to cipher security required a fundamental overhaul, and from 1926 different branches of the military began to adopt the encryption machine known as Enigma. By the start of the Second World War a series of modifications to military Enigma had made the machine yet more secure, and Enigma was at the centre of a remarkably effective military communications system. It would take some of the best minds in Britain—and before that, in Poland—to crack German military Enigma. The exact origins of the encryption machine that played such an important role in the Second World War are not entirely clear. In the early 1920s patent applications for a wheel-based cipher machine were filed by a Dutch inventor, Hugo Koch, as well as by a German engineer, Arthur Scherbius. In 1923, a company called Chiffrienmaschinen AG exhibited a heavy and bulky encryption machine at the International Postal Congress in Bern, Switzerland. This machine had a standard typewriter keyboard for input, and its design followed Scherbius’s original patent closely. Scherbius had named his machine ‘Enigma’, and this ‘Model A’ was the first of a long line of models to emerge. Models B, C, and D soon followed, and by 1927 Model D was selling widely for commercial use. A number of governments purchased Enigma machines in order to study them, and Edward Travis—the deputy head of Britain’s signals intelligence unit, the Government Code and Cypher School—bought one on behalf of the British government in the mid-1920s. In 1925, the German Navy decided to put Enigma into use the following year, despite having rejected one of Scherbius’s previous encryption mechanisms in 1918. Meanwhile, the German Army began to redesign Enigma, with the intention of strengthening its security. By 1928, Model G was in use, and in June 1930 Model I (Eins) became the standard version, deployed first by the army, then the navy in October 1934, and the air force in August 1935.


2021 ◽  
pp. 285-316
Author(s):  
David Sanz Bas

The economic activity tends to self-organize under every imaginable situation thanks to the coordinating and creative force of entrepreneurship. Thus, during the Second World War, a market economy developed spontaneously in P.O.W. camps, driven by the entrepreneurship based on the cigarette currency and on free exchange, in which prisoners tried to improve their material welfare by means of voluntary cooperation. Through the testimony of an economist, who fought in the British army and who was captured by the German army, we get to know in detail the development process of this so odd economy. The present work aims at an Austrian interpretation of R.A . Radford's testimony about the development of these processes, putting special emphasis on the leading role of entrepreneurship and evaluating their dynamic efficiency degree at all times. Key words: Entrepreneurship, dynamic efficiency, P.O.W. camp, cigarette currency. Resumen: La actividad económica tiende a auto-organizarse en todas las situaciones imaginables gracias a la fuerza coordinadora y creativa de la función empresarial. Así, en los campos de prisioneros de guerra de la Segunda Guerra Mundial se formó de manera espontánea toda una economía de mercado impulsada por la empresarialidad basada en la moneda-cigarrillo y en el intercambio libre en la que los reclusos trataban de mejorar su bienestar material mediante la cooperación voluntaria. A través del testimonio de un economista que luchó en el ejército británico y que fue capturado por el ejército alemán podemos conocer con detalle cuál fue el proceso de desarrollo de esta economía tan peculiar. El presente trabajo pretende ser una interpretación austriaca del testimonio de R.A. Radford sobre el desarrollo de estos procesos haciendo hincapié en el papel protagonista de la empresarialidad y evaluando en todo momento el grado de eficiencia dinámica de los mismos. Palabras clave: Función empresarial, eficiencia dinámica, campo de prisioneros, moneda cigarrillo.


2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-244
Author(s):  
Delphine Grass

Taking from departure Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt's divergent points of view on the cultural role of the mother tongue in totalitarian and democratic contexts, this essay investigates the writings of two poets, Yvan Goll and Eugene Jolas, who both wrote poetry in English during their exiles in New York during the Second World War. The essay analyses how issues of belonging and citizenship are approached in their works through the prism of multilingualism for Jolas, and by challenging mono-referentiality in language and proper names in Yvan Goll's Kabbalistic poetry. The essay investigates how both poets and both thinkers tried to reimagine democracy through the prism of multilingualism or mother-tongue expression in their works.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document