Melancholia and Victimhood in Boualem Sansal's Le Village de l'Allemand

Ou Le journal des frères Schiller

Datos Bibliográficos

ID9250992
AutoresBrisley Brisley (autor de correspondencia)
Año2013
Volumen44
Número1
Páginas55
Fecha de publicación2013-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaResearch in African Literatures (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0034-5210 • E-ISSN: 1527-2044
EditorialIndiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2979/reseafrilite.44.1.55
OpenAlexW1993894414
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas17

Algerian author Boualem Sansal’s 2008 novel Le Village de l’Allemand: Ou Le journal des frères Schiller (An Unfinished Business) focuses on the journal entries of two brothers—Rachel and Malrich Schiller—as they respond to the news that their father was a Nazi war criminal. In doing so, the novel engages with two major conceptual models: melancholia and victimhood. Both concepts have emerged as dominant paradigms in recent years, with melancholia in particular being reconceptualized as an ethico-political mode of resistance and agency. By focusing on the emergence of these concepts in Le Village de l’Allemand, however, the author demonstrates how melancholia can lead the grieving subject to conflate victims and perpetrators and to appropriate the victim subject-position. Sansal’s novel thus calls into question the suitability of melancholia as an ethico-political paradigm, signaling the need for new modes of working through the past that attend to the singularity of historical events

Agency (philosophy) · Epistemology · Humanities · Melancholia · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Subject (documents) · African history and culture studies · Comics and Graphic Narratives · Law · North African History and Literature · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology