If it is true that we are living, as trauma theorists have been considering for decades, in what Shoshana Felman (1992) called an “age of testimony”, where Life Writing with a traumatic core has become one of the main literary forms, this is happening because of a perceived “crisis of truth” that started even before the digital era. The paradox that shores the fragments of memory work against the ruins of a monolithic notion of historical truth, making trauma memorialization necessary and, by the same token, difficult, does not seem to have an expiry date. The discarding of Fukuyama’s “end of history” paradigm by Eastern European studies, highlighted, among others, by Agnieszka Mrozik and Anja Tippner (2021) in connection to the rise of late-socialism-themed autofiction, also means that the cultural work performed by Life Writing cannot be framed only through the grid of a retrospective relevance. On the contrary, analyzing women’s auto/biographical, autofictional, and diaristic writings from the early twentieth-century to the early twenty-first, and from various areas of transcultural confluence (from the former Habsburg Empire to the former Yugoslavia, as well as Lower Silesia, Transylvania, and other multiethnic areas), as this special issue does, contributes not just to the understanding of the past, but also to that of the present.
Three intertwined notions – agency, persistence, and legacy – circumscribe the issue’s thematic cohesion, while methodologically its main strength lies in the ability to subvert and challenge the epistemic homogeneity in the field of Life Writing and memory studies by not just bringing local examples into dialogue with Western scholarship, but also building on theory coming out of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, which in many cases has not been translated yet, and which is used alongside the Western paradigms of understanding and interpreting cultural work. In favoring this close interaction between Western-imported models and the theoretical models of cultural critics with firsthand experience of the inner dynamics of particular Eastern European fields, we respond to a call for epistemic diversification launched a few years ago by scholars such as Chen-Bar Itzhak (2020), who drew attention to the imbalance between the relative democratization of World Literature and the enduring Western hegemony in literary theory, and called for a “World Republic of Theory” corresponding to the World Republic of Letters.

Témoigner: Lʼécriture comme contrecourant aux forces de lʼhistoire / Witnessing: Writing as Resistance to the Sweep of History

(En)durer: lʼoubli, le silence, les trous de mémoire comme autoprotection / Enduring: Oblivion, Silence, Memory Gaps as Self-Protection

Retenir, Revenir: le récit de vie entre passé et postmémoire / Recovering: Life-Writing between Past and Postmemory

Documents

Comptes rendus / Book Reviews

Contributeurs / Contributors / 305