Jorge Semprún: Memoria cultural y escritura

Grunddaten zu diesem Projekt

Art des Projektes: Projekt durchgeführt außerhalb der Universität Münster
Laufzeit: 01.08.2009 - 31.03.2014

Beschreibung

With Jorge Semprún’s death on 7th June 2011, Europe lost not only one of its most important intellectuals, a witness of the Buchenwald concentration camp, a politician and a recognized author and screenwriter, but also a “memory of the twentieth century”. Embedded in the context of the two European totalitarianisms of the 20th century - Stalinism and Nazism - both his life and work are unique and exemplary for the major European concerns of that period. Memory within testimonial, autobiographical and autofictional conception has been a primary and important area of research as far as the author’s work is concerned: However when considering the studies on “cultural memory”, that is to say, on an ‘uninhabited’ and on normative texts based remembering, Jorge Semprún’s literary creation expands the boundaries of autobiographical or testimonial memory, collective or fictive memory, to include an equally significant distant memory, transmitted thanks to the author’s unique literary culture. Cultural memory leaves obvious traces, not only by means of literary, political and philosophical influences, but also thanks to a both implicit and explicit contemplation of the act of forgetting and remembering within a cultural perception of archive and generation. On the basis of nine major literary and pictorial influences, the project focuses on the intersection between memory, “intertextuality”, “intermediality” and “metatextuality” that constitutes the rich cultural tissue of Jorge Semprún’s work: a Cervantine “literatura desatada” that is both unlimited and coherent in its generic and discursive transgressions. By looking at the influence on the author of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Demons, Paul Nizan’s La conspiration, Federico García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris, Franz Kafka’s letters to Milena Jesenská and Felice Bauer and the selected paintings by Artemisia Gentileschi, Joachim Patinir and Johannes Vermeer, the research will reveal a dynamic mnemonic universe barely considered to date, but that arguably forms the very basis of the author’s writing. The phenomena “literatura desatada” and cultural memory thus present in Jorge Semprún’s work a textual life enriched by the multiple (auto-) referential games which deliver to the reader a vital text not only in an autobiographical, but also in an aesthetic sense of a constantly recreated, reinvented and reinterpreted artistic creation. Awarded with a Fellowship for Prospective Researchers by the Swiss National Science Foundation (period: 01.03.2012-31.12.2012). Further information: https://data.snf.ch/grants/grant/141451

Stichwörter: Jorge Semprún; Spanish Literature; Cultural Memory; Intertextuality; Intermediality; Metatextuality