Digital Commons Network^™

Modiano And Sebald: Walking In Another's Footsteps , Steven Ungar

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article studies Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder (1997) and W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz (2000) in conjunction with a contemporary literature of diaspora grounded in the extended aftermath of World War II. Both texts straddle fiction and testimonial accounts such as memoirs, letters, and video/audio recordings. In addition, both raise questions with which traditional historians seldom contend, even when they group these questions under the category of memory. What understanding of the recent past might these two narratives promote? What do they imply—individually or as a set—concerning the nature and function of the historical subjectivity that literature can convey? Each in its …

Modiano Historien , Richard J. Golsan

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Beginning with the "Trilogy" (La place de l'étoile, Ronde de nuit, and Les boulevards de ceinture) of his first three novels published in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the work of Patrick Modiano has been indissociably linked with the history and memory of the Occupation. Dora Bruder is of course no exception along these lines. What makes Modiano's Occupation novels distinctive is their combination of the "historian's" knowledge of the historical realities of the period and the novelist's or "poet's" talent for powerfully evoking the feel and ambiance of "les années noires." While Modiano's practice as …

Dora Bruder And The Longue Durée , Susan Weiner

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Modiano's methods in Dora Bruder recall the Annales historiographer's rejection of the history of events in favor of the "long duration," but with human history as its object. Modiano's long duration draws out repetitions and variations between his own life and Dora's as he reconstructs and imagines it, between Dora and fictional characters, between Dora's story and the lives of Holocaust victims and survivors known and unknown. Moreover, the author encourages the reader to take part in the uncanny connections the novel makes, through movements of the imagination not unlike Modiano's own. In so doing, we approach Dora and those …

People Who Leave No Trace: Dora Bruder And The French Immigrant Community , Mary Jean Green

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Although the neighborhoods where Dora Bruder once lived are now crowded with more recent immigrants, Modiano seems to have erased the contemporary French immigrant community from his narration. Yet immigrants and their children, like Modiano's own father, are very much at the center of this text. In fact, the story of the bureaucratic subjugation of the Bruder family suggests parallels with issues affecting immigration in the book's narrative present in 1996 and 1997, especially the deportation proceedings instituted against immigrant children who, like Dora Bruder, were born in France. Despite their remarkable absence from the streets of Modiano's Paris, French …

Introduction: Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder, Richard J. Golsan, Lynn A. Higgins

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

After establishing a reputation as a literary enfant terrible in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Patrick Modiano is now firmly ensconced as a Grand Old Man (perhaps the Grand Old Man) of French letters and arguably as France's greatest living novelist…

Origins, Loss, And Recovery In Patrick Modiano's Voyage De Noces And Dora Bruder , Ann L. Murphy

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

By alluding to the writing of his 1990 novel Voyage de noces in the course of the narration of 1997 Dora Bruder, author Patrick Modiano invites an examination of the connections between these two works. This paper demonstrates how Voyage de noces and Dora Bruder, when studied together as a sort of diptych, are informed by what commentators have described as Modiano's simultaneous preoccupations with the expression of absence and loss, on the one hand, and with the use of writing to compensate for these, on the other. Specifically, a formal and thematic relationship between these two texts …

Reviews Of Recent Publications

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Johnson, Roberta. Crossfire: Philosophy and the Novel in Spain 1900-1934 by Nina L. Molinaro

Lucey, Michael. Gide 's Bent: Sexuality, Politics, Writing by Jocelyn Van Tuyl

Morris, Alan. Patrick Modiano by David Herman

Sartiliot, Claudette. Citation and Modernity: Derrida, Joyce, and Brecht by Siegfried Mews

Travels Through Heterotopia: The Textual Realms Of Patrick Modiano's Rue Des Boutiques Obscures And Mikhail Kuraev's Kapitan Dikshtein, Vitaly Chernetsky

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Within contemporary prose, one distinct mode or paradigm that can be discerned is constituted by the texts that daringly tackle the dark, suppressed, erased parts of our history and mentality; however, they approach this task not by way of self-righteous denunciatory investigations, but by provocatively problematizing the most established everyday facts, by depriving the reader of the possibility of even conceiving any firm ground of the stable construct of an origin or a self-identification—historically and culturally. Their irreverent and playful deconstruction of the all-pervasive national cultural mythologies has mounted a powerful challenge to ideological constructs big and small. This article …

Translating From Memory: Patrick Modiano In Postmodern Context, Timothy H. Scherman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In this essay I have attemped to renegotiate the relationship between the work of Patrick Modiano and the conditions of literary production designated by "postmodernism." Contemporary French reviewers and critics have greeted with guarded praise Modiano's efforts to write in a language and about events that belong to another writing. Following their lead, this essay first explores the tension (often lost on American readers) created by the possibility that the historical referent of Modiano's texts—not only Modiano's personal past but the horror of the Occupation—might now exist only as a weightless narrative "effect." As such, it is a part of …