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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2024

Invisible Lives, Silent Voices: The Case of Literary Testimonies of the First World War

Résumé

My talk will address issues of visibility and audibility in literary testimonies of the First World War, with a particular focus on the differences in the status, directness and articulateness of women’s versus men’s accounts. The exclusion of female voices from the corpus of war writing, which was initiated as early as 1914 and was perpetuated for many decades, came to be internalised by many of the women—nurses, journalists, secretaries—who were nonetheless directly involved in and integral witnesses of the conflict. This bears direct consequences on their choice of form and on the stability and reliability of the persona through whom their accounts are conveyed. The self-representation of women on the theatre of the First World War is often characterised with the paradigms of liminality, uninhabitability and spectrality. Although they comprise but a small sample of the staggering variety of texts produced from the Front, the testimonies written by Mary Borden, Vera Brittain, Ford Madox Ford, Siegfried Sassoon and May Sinclair tend to demonstrate a striking correlation between the perceived—or imposed—importance of their role and legitimacy in the war and the directness and assuredness of their narratives. I will address in particular the stability of the form and of the enunciative stance and the manner in which both text and persona match or resist pre-set categories of testimonies.
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hal-04514828 , version 1 (24-04-2024)

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Paternité - Pas d'utilisation commerciale - Pas de modification

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  • HAL Id : hal-04514828 , version 1

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Isabelle Brasme. Invisible Lives, Silent Voices: The Case of Literary Testimonies of the First World War. Invisible Lives, Silent Voices - Modernist Studies in Invisibility, Alice Borrego; Héloïse Lecomte; Gero Guttzeit; Esther Peeren, Mar 2024, Online, France. ⟨hal-04514828⟩
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