The time of collective memory

The memory debates that emerged in the wake of the history of collective violence in XXe century can be seen as so many “ memory crises “, Susan Rubin Suleiman tells us. These crises affect collective memory, public space and literature at the same time.

Born in Budapest then trained in the United States, Susan Rubin Suleiman is professor of comparative literature at Harvard University. She published Crises of Memory and the Second World War (2006), translated into French in 2012 under the title Memory crises (Presses Universitaires de Rennes), and co-directed (with Jakob Lother and James Phelan) After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future (2012) and French Global: A New Approach to Literary History (co-edited with Christie McDonald, 2010), about to appear in French translation.

On Hungary, she published with Eva Forgács Contemporary Jewish Writing in Hungary. An Anthology (University of Nebraska Press, 2003), as well as an autobiographical book, Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook (1996, translated into French in 2000: Returns, Budapest JournalBlue Around). Among his other publications: Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature (1994), Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (1990), Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (1983 ; in French, The novel has thesis or fictional authority, PUF1983).

shooting and editing: Ariel Suhamy