Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 79-11(E), Section: A.

Adviser: Alice Kaplan.

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My dissertation, "Liberation Fictions: Space and Memory in Representations of Liberation France," demonstrates the ways in which literary representations complement and challenge historical accounts of the Liberation of France (1944-1945). I examine how six French writers rendered their personal experiences of the Liberation into literature differently depending on their political beliefs and literary projects. Fascist Robert Brasillach, conservative Marcel Ayme, and members of various Resistance groups: Edith Thomas (member of the Communist Party and the Comite National des Ecrivains), Marguerite Duras (Mouvement National de Prisonniers de Guerre et de Deportes), Roger Grenier (Ceux de la Resistance), and Albert Camus (Combat) offer diverse perspectives on the events of this period of chaotic transition. My project establishes the crucial role that fiction plays in how writers define and communicate their wartime experiences in works of literature that inflect the cultural understanding of World War II in France today.

In addition to making large-scale changes to the national geography of France, World War II transformed the functions of public and private spaces in the cities and towns where people lived their daily lives. Through the lens of Pierre Nora's notion of "sites of memory" that preserve national history and Michel de Certeau's theory of the "practice of everyday life," I analyze these writers' descriptions of different places: the streets of Paris, the Hotel de Ville, the repatriation center at the Gare d'Orsay, the ruins of bombarded town center, or the intimate space of a bedroom. I argue that literary descriptions of spaces ruined, repurposed, and reconstructed during the Liberation of France reveal the psychological impact of this historical moment for the writers in my corpus. I focus on what the idea of "Liberation" represents to each of them.

My dissertation charts both a geographical and generic progression that expands our understanding of the Liberation of France beyond its iconic representations---beginning with Paris (the city whose Liberation symbolically guaranteed the turning point in the war for France) and ending in Oran, Algeria. The literary works I study range from autobiographical, documented, and realistic representations of the Liberation of Paris (Brasillach, Thomas, Grenier) to more experimental treatments of the Liberation period beyond the capital (Duras, Ayme, Camus). Each of my five chapters focuses on a single writer and examines the relationship between his or her understanding of the Liberation of France and the literary strategies he or she uses to represent this understanding in writing.

Chapter 1, "Edith Thomas Bears Witness to the Liberation of Paris," traces the evolution in Thomas's multiple accounts of the Parisian insurrection over the course of a decade: her panegyric descriptions of the barricades of popular uprising are replaced by more mournful scenes that reflect her postwar disillusionment with the Communist Party. Chapter 2, "Imprisoned and Condemned: Robert Brasillach at the Liberation," examines how Brasillach undermines the very notion of a Liberation in the memoirs and the poems he composed both in hiding during the Parisian insurrection and in prison during the Liberation. Chapter 3, "Roger Grenier's Liberation Punchlines: Coming of Age During Wartime France" demonstrates how Grenier rectifies his own humorous descriptions of the collective Resistance efforts at Hotel de Ville during the Parisian insurrection in the novel Les Embuscades (1958) with a sombre love story, "La Guepe," written several years later.

Chapter 4, "Marguerite Duras's Intimate Liberation: Remembering the End of World War II" analyzes Marguerite Duras La Douleur (1985) as a curated collection of multiple, inter-referential texts. In transfoi ing her own experiences into a fragmented account of the Liberation, Duras offers a counter-narrative to the official version of history propagated by Charles de Gaulle and the Fourth Republic. Chapter 5, "Bitter Injustice in Marcel Ayme's Portrayal of Liberation France" examines the social and political reconfigurations in the provincial (fictional) town of Blemont in Marcel Ayme's novel, Uranus (1948), to show how Ayme's satire of politics and political engagement undercuts notions of patriotism and the Resistance. Spurred into action with the epuration , Ayme attacks the notion and execution of justice in Liberation France.

In my Conclusion, I re-evaluate the allegory of Albert Camus's La Peste (1947) and its reflections on Liberation and remembrance. From an analysis of the historical chronicle within La Peste, I propose an expanded, but specific understanding of the Liberation of France as a multitude of liberations, which are experienced, remembered, imagined, represented, and interpreted in the spaces of French and Francophone literature.