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Accepted Paper:

Manipulating the memory of trauma between oral history and autofiction: a case study on Herta Muller's depictions of late communism in Romania  
Adrian Stoicescu (University of Bucharest)

Paper short abstract:

Is it possible to read autofiction as oral history? Is it possible to use autofictions as a strong foothold in what's called collective memory?

Paper long abstract:

Retelling past personal historical events has long been among the preoccupation of both writers and ordinary people, less skilled in the arts of words. Trauma, in different forms, represented/represents maybe one of the most frequent theme of such recollections and when reading or hearing about it one becomes involved in a rather challenging process of digging up for the truth of a kind of memory very often mystified, manipulated, negotiated, adapted or, simply, recalled as it may have happened.

Retracing the steps made by W. Iser or N. Rapport and following the classicized research methods of oral history, this paper will try to look at Herta Müller's autofiction and determine whether such prose weighs the equal value of disclosing some truth about the lived reality partaking so to the collective heritage of memories about the life shaping occurrences. Such undertaking is justifiable on the grounds of the writer's double status as an exile and as an author about it and, more importantly, since the author herself expressly utters that she tells the story of all those forced to live under the ordeals of the regime.

Panel P46
Critical heritage studies and the circuits of power: inclusion and exclusion in the making of heritage
  Session 1