French Literature Reviews - 2026
A.-M. Parent, Paroles spectrales, lectures hantées: Mediation and Transmission in Concentration Camp Testimony
Literary Theory, Linguistics and Stylistics
Paroles spectrales, lectures hantées : Médiation et transmission dans le témoignage concentrationnaire
Anne-Martine PARENT
Nota Bene, 2019
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350 pages
$28.95
EAN13 : 9782895186410
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Overview:
This essay explores the testimonies of individuals who survived the horrors of the Nazi camps and returned to tell the tale. Yet those who manage to return struggle to define themselves as survivors: they are specters and revenants, haunted by the memory of the dead they left behind.
This book is marked throughout by haunting—first and foremost that of the witnesses, but also that of Anne-Martine Parent. Writing under the sign of haunting inevitably affects the writing process itself, and this is precisely what interests the author here: that elusive element which resists and escapes both writer and reader, yet is transmitted through testimony. The work of analysis and interpretation thus constantly operates in an in-between space, balancing on the threshold of knowledge and non-knowledge, the desire for understanding and the admission of ignorance, intellectual mastery and emotional breakdown. Consequently, the act of reading entails a necessary failure—one without which nothing can be achieved, and without which this work under the sign of haunting cannot be fulfilled. By choosing to let ourselves be haunted by the spectral knowledge of testimony, we too may come into being as witnesses.
Anne-Martine Parent is a permanent researcher at FIGURA, the Center for Research on Text and the Imaginary. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Montreal, she became a professor at the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi (Québec), where she teaches literary theory and 20th- and 21st-century French literature.
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Table of Contents:
Introduction
Part One: Haunted Readings
1. The Scene of Testimony
2. Troubling Transmission
3. Intimate Readings
Part Two: The Witness, Between Life and Death
4. What Is a Witness?
5. The Testimonial Subject: Haunting and Spectrality
Part Three: Spectral Words
6. Testimony: A Suffocated Voice
7. Charlotte Delbo: Failures and Breakdowns of Transmission
8. Jorge Semprún: The Euphoria of Transmission
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Anne-Martine Parent investigates the profound difficulties survivors face when articulating their experiences, examining how returning witnesses often perceive themselves as specters haunted by the dead. The study focuses on the elusive elements that resist complete comprehension, positioning the analytical process within an in-between space that balances intellectual rigor with emotional limits. Drawing on figures such as Charlotte Delbo and Jorge Semprún, the author highlights the paradoxes of a suffocated voice and the inherent failures of transmission that characterize concentration camp literature.
This essay will interest researchers and students of twentieth-century French literature, literary theory, and trauma studies, as well as anyone concerned with the ethics of representation. By framing reading as a necessary confrontation with the limits of knowledge, the book offers valuable perspectives on how testimonial writing endures. It serves as an essential resource for exploring the complex dynamics between memory, art, and historical catastrophe within Francophone critical discourse.