Abstract
Are there patterns in an individual life and its contingencies that point to more general truths—or at least, to questions of general interest? In this ego-history, Susan Suleiman traces her itinerary from the 1970s to the present, and from structuralism to the study of memory and history relating to World War II France. She traces the non-linear path that has taken her from her first book, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (1983), to her latest one, The Némirovsky Question: The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in 20th-Century France (2016). Suleiman suggests that intellectual itineraries do not move in a straight line, perhaps especially in the case of people who have experienced geographical and linguistic displacement.
The exercise consists in reflecting on one’s own story as if it were the story of another.
Pierre Nora, ‘Introduction’, Essais d’ego-histoire
…what we do as historians is to write, in highly displaced, usually unconscious, but nonetheless determined ways, our inner, personal obsessions.
Gabrielle Spiegel, Why France?
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Suleiman, S.R. (2018). Reaching Vichy via Budapest: On Zigzags, Waves and Triangles in Intellectual Life. In: Bragança, M., Louwagie, F. (eds) Ego-histories of France and the Second World War. The Holocaust and its Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70860-7_16
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