Katherine Stevenson (Jamestown College, North Dakota): Death and Alienation in Irène Némirovsky’s  David Golder.

            An international bestseller of recent years is the posthumously published Suite Française, an unfinished work by Irène Némirovsky.  The success of this book in Europe and North America has awakened interest in the author’s prior works, which received both popular and critical acclaim when they first appeared in the second and third decades of the twentieth century.  Némirovsky’s well-to-do Jewish family had fled Russia in 1917 and taken refuge in France.  Though her native language was Russian, Némirovsky wrote and published in French and was influenced by Flaubert and Zola in French, Chekhov in Russian, and Oscar Wilde in English. When the Nazis occupied France, she was labeled an undocumented alien and sent to Auchschwitz, where she died in 1942.

            Némirovsky’s first published novel was David Golder (1929), a work that portrays a bitter, isolated international petroleum entrepreneur of Eastern European Jewish origin whose world collapses as he alienates his colleagues and family over the course of the novel.  His world of money and business deals was so clinically dissected by the author and condemned for its heartlessness that many considered the novel to be anti-Semitic.  According to members of her own social class and ethnic background, Némirovsky’s unsparing depiction of their world amounted to an act of cultural betrayal.  Through analysis of reiterated foreshadowings and motifs that point to Golder’s crisis of identity and impending death, my presentation demonstrates how Némirovsky colored her morality tale in such a way that she evoked accusations of cultural betrayal from contemporary critics.

Thomas Stokes (Wabash College): Tickling Lazarus: Narrative and Witness in Dora Bruder and La honte.

Both Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder and Annie Ernaux’s Lahonte begin with extreme situations: a disappearance and an attempted murder. Several themes are common to both books: childhood and youth, family relationships, nostalgia, and memory.

But whereas Ernaux writes in the first person and purports to tell a painful incident from her childhood, Modiano weaves together as loose threads the scant details of a life, a fabric which, though worn and threadbare, has resisted dissolution and disappearance.

The French historian, Pierre Nora, put forward the notion of lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) which symbolize and commemorate the experience of a given community. His scope is wide and his exempla varied: there are places, such as museums, cathedrals, palaces, cemeteries, memorials , archives , but also concepts and practices, such as ceremonies, commemorations, mottos, rituals. He also includes objects, in a broad sense, encompassing inherited property, commemorative monuments, manuals, emblems, and symbols. Landmarks in Paris and scarce public records of Dora Bruder and her family serve in this sense to reconstruct a plausible account of her last two years of life. Annie Ernaux turns the rituals of ordinary family life on their head in order to make sense of her father’s sudden act of aggression towards her mother and how they and she reacted afterwards to this frightening episode in their shared experience.

Montaigne writes in the Essais (I,iii) that nous ne sommes jamais chez nous, nous sommes tousjours au-delà. La crainte, le désir, l'espérance, nous eslancent vers l'advenir: et nous desrobent le sentiment et la considération de ce qui est, pour nous amuser à ce qui sera, voire quand nous ne serons plus.

But it is perhaps truer that we think and act beyond ourselves because we try to make sense of the past. In thinking about these two books together, several interesting questions arise. How does the writer serve as witness to his own or someone else’s life? To what degree does memory enlighten or confuse the issue of truth in autobiographical writing? Finally, we will consider, with regard to both these texts, Roland Barthes’s question, following Nietzsche, “Qu’est-ce que c’est pourmoi.”


Rachel McCoppin (University of Minnesota, Crookston ): Decentering the Self: Resolution from Accepting the “Other” in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.

In looking at ethical criticism in literature, a sense of the “other” is paramount to ethics. James Meffan and Kim L. Worthington, in their “Ethics before Politics: J.M Coetzee’s Disgrace,” state the philosopher Levinas’s theory of alterity: “The experience of alterity, in Levinas’s terms, is nothing more than a subjective acknowledgment of the limits of the percipient’s knowledge, of his or her inability to contain all that is perceivable within the ambit of understanding” (135). Levinas later argues that his theory of alterity will eventually lead to ethics: “ethics is the ongoing process of self-critique, in particular, of putting the knowing ego into question through the process of the exposure to and recognition of alterity, absolute Otherness” (136). If a consciousness of the “absolute other,” or a decentering of the self, leads one to gain a sense of humility, then it seems rational that a certain amount of ethical growth could ensue. This concept can relate to J. M. Coetzee’s South African novel Disgrace. Disgrace focuses on David Lurie’s, the protagonist, inability to understand the “other,” as portrayed by the immediate characters he comes into contact with – his university colleagues, his daughter’s South African neighbors, and even his daughter. In the end of this novel, Lurie grows and becomes personally responsible for his actions. This growth is directly tied to his experience with the “other;” when faced with the “other,” he is led towards an acceptance of that which he cannot ever fully understand, thus drastically changing him forever.