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| Author(s): |
Lucas Amaral de Oliveira
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Master's Dissertation |
| Press: | São Paulo. |
| Institution: | Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD) |
| Defense date: | 2013-10-11 |
| Examining board members: |
Maria Helena Oliva Augusto;
Jose Carlos Bruni;
João Carlos Soares Zuin
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| Advisor: | Maria Helena Oliva Augusto |
| Abstract | |
The Italian writer and chemist Primo Levi (1919-1987), survivor of Auschwitz, created one of the most important testimonies of the second half of the twentieth century. In this research, my aim is to convert some of the questions that appear in two of his most striking autobiographies about the extermination camp Survival in Auschwitz and The Drowned and the Saved in problems of sociological character, attempting to contribute to the field of investigations opened by the testimonies of the Jewish-Italian intellectual. I wish to interpret his testimony as a documentary source, where it is possible to apprehend informative aspects of denunciation, traces of pain, violence and death things that have signed our era with blood. Thus, in the first moment, I seek to give voice and space to the memory of Levi and to his narration about the daily aggressions in the Lager, the usual sociability in that hellish place, the human types who were striving there, and the difficulty in communication emerged as a result of the immense violence and the relegation of some people to the slave condition. From this point, I get to make some reflections about his testimony, exploring mainly the aporetic groundings on which it developed: being fragmented, incomplete and impossible in its entirety, but absolutely necessary. In these terms, I will try to verify the limits to the construction of a testimony of the barbarism and the possibilities found by Primo Levi in the representation and transmission of his experience. After all, I question about the potential of the testimony to generate new knowledge about such a traumatic event as Auschwitz has been. I also question to which extent Primo Levi\'s testimonial work can be taken as a mechanism for transmitting the experience and knowledge about that past. These questions are important because to address Levis testimony parting from a set of elements that find in the notion of memory its decisive axis makes the testimony not only an object of historical analysis, but also a prime source to reflect on violence in other contexts. (AU) | |
| FAPESP's process: | 11/03998-7 - Between drowned and saved: Primo levi's testimony and the modern barbarity |
| Grantee: | Lucas Amaral de Oliveira |
| Support Opportunities: | Scholarships in Brazil - Master |