Traces of War

Colin Davis is a Research Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London

• Acknowledgements Introduction: Don’t Mention the War Section A: Ethics, Trauma and Interpretation Chapter 1. Trauma and Ethics: Telling the Other’s Story Chapter 2. Traumatic Hermeneutics: Reading and Overreading the Pain of Others Section B: Writing the War: Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus Chapter 3. Sartre and Beauvoir: A Very Gentle Occupation? Chapter 4. Camus’s War: L’Etranger and Lettres à un ami allemand Chapter 5. Interpreting, Ethics and Witnessing in La Peste and La Chute Section C: Prisoners of War Give Philosophy Lessons Chapter 6. Life Stories: Ricoeur Chapter 7. Afterlives: Althusser and Levinas Chapter 8. Levinas the Novelist Section D: Surviving, Witnessing and Telling Tales Chapter 9. Testimony/Literature/Fiction: Jorge Semprun Chapter 10. Elie Wiesel: Witnessing, Telling and Knowing Chapter 11. Sarah Kofman and the Time Bomb of Memory Conclusion: Whose War, Which War? Bibliography

'Reading Davis is like having secrets revealed by an expert analyst who, simultaneously, casts doubt on whether secrets can be fully revealed and on the truths that they contain. His readings of Sempru´n and Sarah Kofman at the end are fascinating: the relations between writer and text, and history and story, are handled in such a nuanced way that one gets both a profound picture of their lives and works and a sense that any picture is necessarily fictional and incomplete. This book is ‘traumatic hermeneutics’ at its most stimulating.' Max Silverman, French Studies