Le langage – patrie immatérielle de Jorge Semprún et reflet d’une identité changeante
The Language: Jorge Semprún’s immaterial homeland and reflection of a changing identity

Author(s): Beatriz Coca Méndez
Subject(s): Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Studies of Literature, French Literature, Philology
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: bilingualism; multilingualism; memoir; self-expression; Jorge Semprún
Summary/Abstract: In Jorge Semprún’s work, the experience of what he has lived through comes from both a personal choice and the vicissitudes of the 20th century history: exile, resistance and deportation. These enforced events have shaped Semprún’s portrait: exile in 1936, deportation to Buchenwald in 1943, secrecy in Spain from 1950 onwards, and the birth for writing in 1964. This journey is indebted to his identity roots: a double French-Spanish cultural affiliation and, especially, his condition as a Holocaust survivor. This characterizes and determines the Semprunian discourse and poetics, since the themes that appear in his narrative are characterized by the setting up of new spaces and, therefore, of new roots that shape the personal mythology of the writer’s memory through linguistic, even multilingual, appropriation.

• Details
• Contents