La representation de la tragedie humaine dans la litterature des genocides du XXe siecle : Les enjeux de la mise en recit d'une experience catastrophique

Although they are both accounts of events, the history and the novel are not commensurate; the novel's content is usually considered as opposed to that of history. It is assumed that history relates real things whereas the novel excels in dealing with the imagination (fiction). In the representation of genocides, novels and history share numerous narrative strategies giving rise to the truth of the tragic experience. Many devices induce the discourse of representation to function as bearer of a sovereign self-consciousness that goes beyond reality that is time and space related to that event. Even though either history or the novel reconstitutes the experience, the act of creating discourse results in a multilayered content that can produce for the reader the representation of a world.;This dissertation deals with how literary narratives and stories attempt to inscribe and represent the experiences in a context of genocide. In analyzing this discursive apparatus that no longer distinguishes between reality, truth and resemblance, the texts of our corpus reveal the experience of genocide and think the fractures and ruins in different parts of the world (in the Ottoman Empire, in Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, etc.). In this way, we examine the literary depiction of these horrible events that come to be according to a narrative schema that entwines sequences of fact alongside and underscores imaginary scenes the innovations and stylistic language that constitutes these novels' uniqueness and originality. By means of these characteristics, the four primary books of our corpus (Journal de deportation, Fatelessness, How the Soldier repairs the Gramophone, The Past Ahead) elaborate a literary or poetic verisimilitude that allows them to go on the quest for truth, a truth not only subjective but imbued with the historical veracity.