TOPICS: CROSS-CULTURAL TESTIMONIES OF VIOLENCE in Spring 2024 (FR3091B)

THIS COURSE WILL BE TAUGHT IN ENGLISH

How can an event as violent as genocide be represented in all its intricacies? How can one represent the unrepresentable? This antiphrasis is recurrent in critical discourses about the representation of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides. The course will examine these representations and (re)tellings to study how genocide is portrayed, notably to convey a double-bind: the necessity to tell and the impossibility of representing all its complexities. In particular, we will examine texts, plays, graphic narratives, songs, documentary films that deal with three genocides of the twentieth century: the Holocaust, the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the mass killings and the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979 in Cambodia. Intermediality will allow us to consider questions of representation from a broad perspective. The subjective experience of reading and viewing such depictions will also be part of our discussions.