Eleftheria Koukoura
The Significance of Titular Choices: The Paratext as a Pillar of Autobiographical Discourse in Greek Jewish Holocaust Egodocuments
2024 | Full access
By focusing on several egodocuments from Greek Jewish Holocaust survivors from Thessaloniki, this thesis argues that hitherto titular and autobiographical conventions do not apply to Holocaust egodocuments. The unprecedented experience of the genocidal persecution of Jews has inevitably established new norms of life writing that have not yet been the subject of a thorough study. Paratext and titular choices in relation to the circulation of the egodocuments in question are inextricably intertwined with the emergence and institutionalization of Holocaust memory in each micro-society and it calls upon theoretical re-evaluation. It’s a new approach to the “autobiographical pact” given the spatiotemporal conditions that favored or hindered the circulation of these narratives for a while, and how the paratext and the critical threshold of the title in particular, are shaping authorial and reading expectations in an ever-evolving dialogical relationship over time. Drawing my remarks from literary theory and autobiographical discourse conventions, it becomes evident that Holocaust egodocuments challenge and exceed handed-down literary standards whilst constituting a substantial corpus of autobiographical narratives of distinctive significance that calls upon a theoretical reassessment. The latter will not only provide new insights into Holocaust-related autobiographical discourse writing in conjunction with its spatiotemporal context, but will also pave a new way for the interpretation and the didactic utilization of this corpus.
Supervisor:
Prof. Shmuel Refael