FRE 325 Representation of the Shoah in French Literature and Cinema
In L'écriture ou la vie, Georges Semprun wondered how survivors could tell their stories, readers could imagine the Shoah, an event that 70 years after it took place constitutes an epistemological and ontological caesura in the sense that it brings forth the fundamental issue of representation and its limits, the (im)possibility of language and images to convey it, the expression of our (in)humanity. Through diverse books and films, this course examines the relation between words, images on the one hand and things / reality on the other, between text and hors texte, and explore how some writers have not so much tried to represent the Shoah as reflect on the way the Shoah can be written and filmed.