“A Life is Not a Display Window”. Balancing Voice and Silence in Post-Communist Women’s Life Writing
“A Life is Not a Display Window”. Balancing Voice and Silence in Post-Communist Women’s Life Writing

Summary/Abstract: Against the background of research carried out in recent years in the area of female memoirs, (auto)biographies, diaries (and all the subgenres under the umbrella term of life-writing) and departing from the author’s previous research on female life-writing in 20th century Romania, and in particular on the inflation or “boom” of women’s Post- Communist narratives about their lives in Communism, the current article is interested in the concepts of silence, speechlessness, erasure versus the consciousness of collective legacies and memory transmission. The paper focuses on the selection of memories these women writers voice in their accounts versus the silences and self-censored episodes, tackling the ambivalence between the intention to display the memory of what was hidden, forgotten or untold, in order to give a voice to a silenced category, and the intentional silences, the cracks and lapses which these female authors choose to include in their memoirs as form of coping with trauma and the healing process or, in other cases, as a form of conveniently rewriting the story.

• Details
• Contents