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Sensing A Way Out Of René Char's "Historian's Hovel", Jennifer Pap

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

René Char, like many other twentieth-century writers, faced the dilemma of how to write adequately about historical atrocity, and key moments in his writing about violence display this. In the context of post-World War I disillusionment, rising Fascism, and post-World War II calculations of those who vied for power, he also criticized bad faith iterations of History. However, a number of texts in his Feuillets d’Hypnos ('Leaves of Hypnos,') published in 1946 and written during his participation in the Resistance, assert an alternative history in which aesthetic, ethical, and political experience were linked. With the post-war return to …