Haunting the nation-state: Eastern Europe in 20th Century Francophone Jewish Literature

My PhD thesis will seek to explore the tension between concepts of national literature and Jewish 'minor' literature (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983) within France.

With nation-states being polities which revolve around characteristics that unify their own people, the idea of a 'national literature' will naturally mirror aspects of shared language and culture.

What happens, then, when Jewish authors within these states decide to imaginatively engage with their origins in another homeland, or depict literary geographies which are indicative of a less homogeneous cultural or ethnic identity?

My analysis will deploy both close reading and wider analysis of notions of cultural nationalism in France, as well as in the ancestral homelands of the authors in this corpus, in order to examine the significance of being a Jewish author with origins in Eastern Europe and their (post)memorial engagement with their own family histories.

My research will propose a non-exhaustive but varied account of the possibilities and subjectivities of Eastern European Jewish identity expression in Francophone literature, and will be driven by three questions: firstly, how do Francophone Jewish authors depict geographies, communities and/or ways of existing which were familiar to their ancestors but no longer exist in the same form?

Secondly, how do the authors in my corpus negotiate their French/Jewish/Eastern European identities through their work, especially in light of the specific French nation-state context?

Finally, what are the postmemorial implications of choosing an autobiographical, auto/semi-fictional or life-writing format for their work, and how does this contribute to wider collective remembrance and notions of national/cultural literatures?