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Marina Warner’s Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir (2021) is her second work belonging to the genre of life writing, more particularly the memoir. She had already written a biography, The Dragon Empress: The Life and Times of Tz’u-Hsi, Empress Dowager of China, 1835-1980, about a Chinese empress in 1972, but her memoir is more personal, rather focused on her parents’ marriage, life itineraries and travels through Italy, England and Egypt during and after WWII. Interestingly, many characteristics of her memoir fit with another life writing genre, identified by the French theorist Dominique Viart in the eighties as the ‘filiation narrative,’ initially in reference to French fiction of the same period. The filiation narrative focuses on a self-reflexive search for parental images, reconstructing the mother’s or father’s life through the excavation of documentation and archives, as well as speculation. This article will attempt to show how such thematic and structural features of the filiation narrative as ‘archeological’ narration, the use of archival documents and objects to restore a parent’s ‘lost’ life and, most importantly, the metabiographical aspect of the ‘enterprise’ are reflected, in various degrees, in Warner’s memoir, making it waver between fiction and non-fiction. These same features may thus pave the way for the English counterpart of the French ‘récit de filiation’ and build a pertinent generic continuity between both memoir and filiation narrative.

Martine Sonnet's Atelier 62 is built on the silence of the author's father, a proletarianized artisan who never talked about his experience as a smith at Renault in Billancourt. Through the analysis of the representation of work in the text and of its impact on human life, this study aims to present possible interpretations for the silence of the smith. First, it will demonstrate that the different kinds of work are articulated in the text on two opposite symbolic poles, one linked to silence, to the non-transmitted; and the other linked to speech, to the sharing of experience, to transmission. Then, it will discuss what would be underlying this opposition, by suggesting that the silence of the smith can be explained, on the one hand, by the physical and psychological traumas suffered in his process of proletarianization; and, on the other hand, by his separation from the sphere of social (re)production, imposed by this same process. The interpretation of the social phenomena portrayed in the text will be supported by the contributions of Marxist, eco-feminist and care ethic theorists who all converge in the criticism of the capitalist logic and its search for economic growth in spite of human life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper two of Rouaud's texts - L’Invention de l’auteur and La Désincarnation — are mainly being discussed. Our aim is to demonstrate that the story of filiation appears very symptomatic of a new historical situation at the beginning of the twenty-first century, which seems to be written without a “Master” both on the literary and spiritual levels. Thus, there arises the need to accommodate the “ideologies of the end” that appear at the moment when the author enters the literary scene. By trying to establish an impossible dialogue with the Absent, Rouaud voluntarily becomes the archivist of the end of a certain world. We focus on the ways of establishing the link between the search of a father and the observation of the absence of the Father and an attempt to fill in this absence by searchingother literary models.

Copyright of Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper two of Rouaud's texts - L'Invention de l'auteur and La Désincarnation - are mainly being discussed. Our aim is to demonstrate that the story of filiation appears very symptomatic of a new historical situation at the beginning of the twenty-first century, which seems to be written without a "Master" both on the literary and spiritual levels. Thus, there arises the need to accommodate the "ideologies of the end" that appear at the moment when the author enters the literary scene. By trying to establish an impossible dialogue with the Absent, Rouaud voluntarily becomes the archivist of the end of a certain world. We focus on the ways of establishing the link between the search of a father and the observation of the absence of the Father and an attempt to fill in this absence by searching other literary models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes an analysis of several photo projects by visual artist Andrei Nacu, who works with photography, the family album, and the family archive to rework experiences from the past. Simultaneously, it reflects on the interactions between image, history, and memory. The analysis employs the vocabulary of filiation, transmission, and inheritance commonly used in the humanities and the social sciences to understand contemporary ways of mourning related to catastrophes of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reads Dalila Kerchouche’s Mon père, ce harki (My Father, this Harki) as a postcolonial filiation narrative, which blends memoir and biography, the personal and collective, the past and present. Lack of knowledge and a desire to see for herself the camps her parents and older siblings experienced prompts Kerchouche to adopt an investigative posture characterized by in situ exploration in conjunction with interviews and the consultation of archives. This allows the author to achieve a polyphonic account of the past. At the same time, her family serves as the prism through which she confronts the stigma attached to Harkis (Algerian soldiers hired by the French Army) and examines their unjust treatment in France.

In his Réparer le monde. La littérature française face au XXIe siècle, published in 2017, Alexandre Gefen highlights writing practices that have some beneficial impact on the experience of disease. I situate in this perspective Caroline Gutmann's novel Les Papillons Noirs (2018), which is a unique fusion of autopathography (Grisi) with a filiation narrative (Viart). Two dimensions of filiation are under analysis -- the familial and the mythical and literary ones -- which become for the "writing I" a therapeutic means of fighting with cancer, as well as intergenerational traumas liberated in the process of reading/writing from the family "crypt" (Törok). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cuadernos del CILHA is the property of Universidad Nacional de Cuyo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)