Date of Award
Spring 4-29-2014
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Major
International Studies: Latin America and the Caribbean, LACS: Hispanic and Italian Studies
First Advisor
Dr. Anne Lambright
Abstract
What effect does the ubiquity of death in a traumatic experience have on an individual's memory and soul, and how is this manifested in one's written testimony? Through the analysis of their philosophical introspection, the testimonies of Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved, Jorge Semprún's Literature or Life, and Jacobo Timerman's Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number meditate on the atrocities they experienced during Levi and Semprún's incarceration under the Nazi regime in Europe between 1942 and 1945, and Timerman's imprisonment under the regime of Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina between 1976 and 1983. The aporetic condition in recounting these events is their attempt to bear witness to the totality of an event so heavily steeped with the finitude of death. In doing so, these three men deconstruct the phenomenology of the experience during internment to make sense of their existence as free men.
Recommended Citation
McNair, Andrew, "La muerte, la memoria y la filosofía existencial en la literatura testimonial pos-dictatorial de Primo Levi, Jorge Semprún y Jacobo Timerman". Senior Theses, Trinity College, Hartford, CT 2014.
Trinity College Digital Repository, https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/theses/372
Included in
Comparative Literature Commons, Cultural History Commons, Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, European History Commons, European Languages and Societies Commons, French and Francophone Literature Commons, Italian Literature Commons, Jewish Studies Commons, Latin American History Commons, Latin American Languages and Societies Commons, Latin American Literature Commons, Modern Languages Commons, Philosophy of Language Commons, Philosophy of Mind Commons, Political History Commons, Spanish Literature Commons
Comments
Senior Thesis completed at Trinity College for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in International Studies.