Papers by Marie-Louise Malkmus
Drawing on three twenty-first-century North American and German novels - Jeffrey Eugenides' M... more Drawing on three twenty-first-century North American and German novels - Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex (2002), Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated (2002), and Marcel Beyer's Spione (2000) -, this dissertation examines how lost or concealed family stories, marked by war, dislocation or other traumatic experiences in the grandparents' generation, are re-invented in the life narratives of third-generation descendants. The narrators, attempting to trace the lost or concealed stories of their grandparents, are confronted with a past inaccessible due to the violent historical caesurae. In the face of this experience of loss and its implication for their own sense of identity, the grandsons then forge their ancestral stories, in order to inscribe themselves in a familial continuity. Their biographical projects thus are simultaneously autobiographical, leading to complex forms of intergenerational identification and a conflation of individual, family and collecti...
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Papers by Marie-Louise Malkmus