« A secret at the heart of darkness opening up » : de Little Eden-A Child at War (1978) à Journey to Nowhere (2008), les mots de la guerre ou les batailles du silence dans l'écriture autobiographique d'Eva Figes

• Main Author: Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès 2010-07-01
• Series: Miranda: Revue Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone
• Subjects: autobiography; exile; Shoah; memory; silence; identity
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/1211

Eva Figes is a British writer of German Jewish origin whose autobiographical writing takes the form of a series of attempts to break the silence of an individual and familial story while bringing to light the various facets of exile and of the existential disruption that it entails. From the memories of a childhood spent in the English countryside during the London bombings to the evocation of the Jews spared by the Holocaust, the four texts concerned move through a succession of multiple figures and remnants of war. This paper intends to examine the coherence of these different representations as the autobiographical enunciation unfolds.