Testimony and Shoah in Georges Perec's work

• Grant number: 11/51497-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: March 01, 2012
• End date: December 31, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Literature Theory
• Principal Investigator: Márcio Orlando Seligmann-Silva
• Grantee: Jacques Fux
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 12/10610-8 - Shoah, testimony and the new artistic representations in the contemporaneity, BE.EP.PD

Abstract

This work aims to study the testimony in Georges Perec's work. Perec is not a survivor of the Shoah, but his parents were killed during the World War II. His mother disappeared in Auschwitz and his father was killed in the front. The Perec's principal work in testimonial studies is W or the Memory of Childhood. This book relates the Shoah and Perec's life in a fictional way, due to the historical importance of that. However, knowing the rigid and mathematic structure of his work, we can conjecture that in La disparition, Perec further discusses the limitations, restrictions and the constraint that the act of witnessing imposes. Thus, this postdoctoral study aims to further research the second order testimony, which nas not been much discussed, and to understand how it is used by Perec as a contrainte to fill gaps in its creation. These numerous restrictions are so obsessive in his work that they intend to speak the unspeakable, to describe unique and incomparable events, to understand the limitation of what really 'remains' in literatura. La disparition would be the disappearance of all ethics, logic and knowing and the total inability to make poetry, without gaps, after the Shoah. (AU)