Table of Contents

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

About the Author

Colin Davis is a Research Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London

Reviews

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on ethics are particularly relevant to scholars in trauma studies, and his integration of archival material and unpublished documents offer thought-provoking ways of reframing texts for scholars in twentieth century French studies.'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