Écriture de l’histoire et geste littéraire : la production du savoir historique chez Javier Cercas et Daniel Mendelsohn
This dissertation aims to examine the novels Lord of All the Dead by Javier Cercas and The Lost by Daniel Mendelsohn to see how their authors produce knowledge on history and on familial and collective memory. Both writers focus their novels on their great-uncles: Cercas’ great-uncle died in the Spanish civil war (1936-1939) fighting with the Francoist army. Mendelsohn’s great-uncle was killed in Poland in 1942 during the Shoah by bullets with his wife and four daughters. In their texts, Cercas and Mendelsohn reconstruct the different stages of their researches to find out about the lives and deaths of their great-uncles. In order to reflect on the literary texts they wrote and its relations to history and familial and collective memory, we first make a summary of some of the recent debates in the academic field about the relationship between literature and history. We go on by analyzing the metatextual and self-reflexive devices both authors use, to see how they reflect the ethical, methodological and epistemological issues of their approach and the complexity of the knowledge they produce. Finally, we look at how Cercas and Mendelsohn use archives in their texts. By doing so, we can see how archives, mostly photographic archives, are used as devices that reflect the identity and memorial link that connects both authors with their great-uncles.
Javier Cercas Daniel Mendelsohn Archives Shoah Literature History Historiography Memory Historical knowledge Spanish Civil War