Acknowledgements
Introduction: Don’t Mention the War
Section A: Ethics, Trauma and Interpretation
Chapter 1. Trauma and Ethics: Telling the Other’s Story
Chapter 2. Traumatic Hermeneutics: Reading and Overreading the Pain
of Others
Section B: Writing the War: Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus
Chapter 3. Sartre and Beauvoir: A Very Gentle Occupation?
Chapter 4. Camus’s War: L’Etranger and Lettres à un ami
allemand
Chapter 5. Interpreting, Ethics and Witnessing in La Peste and La
Chute
Section C: Prisoners of War Give Philosophy Lessons
Chapter 6. Life Stories: Ricoeur
Chapter 7. Afterlives: Althusser and Levinas
Chapter 8. Levinas the Novelist
Section D: Surviving, Witnessing and Telling Tales
Chapter 9. Testimony/Literature/Fiction: Jorge Semprun
Chapter 10. Elie Wiesel: Witnessing, Telling and Knowing
Chapter 11. Sarah Kofman and the Time Bomb of Memory
Conclusion: Whose War, Which War?
Bibliography
Colin Davis is a Research Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London
Reviews 'A very significant intervention in the field, likely to be
a major point of reference for future work'
Margaret Atack, University of Leeds
'Traces of War: Interpreting Ethics and Trauma in Twentieth-Century
French Writing provides a thoughtful and substantive analysis of a
wide range of authors, texts, and major debates as it explores the
traces of war found in literary works that do not explicitly
mention World War II. ... It would make a useful introductory text
because of the wide range of key figures and canonical texts
addressed, as well as its overview of major debates and key issues
present in both areas of study. At the same time, Davis’s
discussions on ethics are particularly relevant to scholars in
trauma studies, and his integration of archival material and
unpublished documents offer thought-provoking ways of reframing
texts for scholars in twentieth century French studies.'
Heidi Brown, H-France Review
'Reading Davis is like having secrets revealed by an expert analyst
who, simultaneously, casts doubt on whether secrets can be fully
revealed and on the truths that they contain. His readings of
Sempru´n and Sarah Kofman at the end are fascinating: the relations
between writer and text, and history and story, are handled in such
a nuanced way that one gets both a profound picture of their lives
and works and a sense that any picture is necessarily fictional and
incomplete. This book is ‘traumatic hermeneutics’ at its most
stimulating.'
Max Silverman, French Studies
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