French Literature Reviews - 2026
B. Munaro, Destruction and Metamorphoses of the Body in Confinement. Primo Levi, Georges Perec, Samuel Beckett
Comparative and World Literature
Destruction and Metamorphoses of the Body in Confinement. Primo Levi, Georges Perec, Samuel Beckett
Béatrice Munaro
Editions Otrante, 2021
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281 p.
Isbn 979-10-97279-14-1
27 €
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OVERVIEW:
By drawing parallels between camp testimonies and works of fiction, this study examines representations of the body and reflects on how to write about the trauma of the Holocaust and the ordeal of confinement. Identity confusion and dehumanization challenge and destabilize the individual—a profound doubt that imprints itself upon language itself, making way for a language of urgency and disaster.
Can we find the symbols and images needed to convey the shift from the human to the inhuman, and to articulate what seems unimaginable, precisely when words no longer appear to make sense or suffice?
Literature becomes a fertile ground, both elusive and generative, for expressing the body—a destroyed, transformed body, a palimpsest body—and, through and beyond the concentrationary experience, for expressing the human condition and its metamorphoses.
Holding a PhD in General and Comparative Literature, Béatrice Munaro has served as an educational mediator at the Shoah Memorial since 2019.
Confinement and trauma have long occupied a central space in twentieth-century European literature, particularly in works responding to the unprecedented ruptures of the Holocaust and totalitarian violence. Writers across genres have continually confronted the challenge of rendering extreme physical and psychological ordeal into narrative form, examining how the destruction of the individual reverberates through language, identity, and representation.
Readers interested in modern European literature, Holocaust testimony, and the literary representation of extreme experience may find this volume relevant to their inquiries. The study connects concentrationary literature with explorations of identity confusion, bodily transformation, and the human condition through artistic creation, examining representations of the body and reflecting on how to write about the trauma of the Holocaust and the ordeal of confinement.