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Section A:Ethics, Trauma and Interpretation --1.Trauma and Ethics: Telling the Other's Story, p.11 --2.Traumatic Hermeneutics: Reading and Overreading the Pain of Others, p.29 --Seetion B:Writing the War: Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus --3.Sartre and Beauvoir: A Very Gentle Occupation?, p.49 --4.Camus's War: L'Etranger and Lettres a un ami alfemand, p.65 --5.Interpreting, Ethics and Witnessing in La Peste and La Chute, p.80 --Seetion C:Prisoners of War Give Philosophy Lessons --6.Life Stories: Riceeur, p.119 --7.Afterlives: Althusser and Levinas, p.134 --8.Levinas the Novelist, p.148 --Seetion D:Surviving, Witnessing and Telling Tales --9.Testimony/Literature/Fiction: Jorge Semprun, p.165 --10.Elie Wiesel: Witnessing, Telling and Knowing, p.193 --II.Sarah Kofman and the Time Bomb of Memory, p.218 -- Condusion: Whose War, Which War?, p.234 -- Bibliography, p.239 -- Index, p.250. The legacy of the Second World War remains unsettled; no consensus has been achieved about its meaning and its lasting impact. This is pre-eminently the case in France, where the experience of defeat and occupation created the grounds for a deeply ambiguous mixture of resistance and collaboration, pride and humiliation, heroism and abjection, which writers and politicians have been trying to disentangle ever since. This book develops a theoretical approach which draws on trauma studies and hermeneutics; and it then focuses on some of the intellectuals who lived through the war and on how their experience and troubled memories of it continue to echo through their later writing, even and especially when it is not the explicit topic. This was an astonishing generation of writers who would go on to play a pivotal role on a global scale in post-war aesthetic and philosophical endeavours. The book proposes close readings of works by some of the most brilliant amongst them: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Charlotte Delbo, Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Louis Althusser, Jorge Semprun, Elie Wiesel, and Sarah Kofman
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