La construction d’une posture auctoriale entre ethos singulier et modèle collectif d’écriture : l’exemple de témoignages « ordinaires » de rescapés de la Shoah

Abstract

This article proposes to shed light on the relationship between style, ethos and auctoriality from a discourse analysis perspective, through a corpus belonging to the testimonial genre. The corpus constructed for this study is made up of four “ordinary” testimonies borrowed from a larger corpus made up of typescripts or manuscripts of Holocaust survivors deposited at the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (CDJC) of the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris. We will show that their testimonies invite us to question the collective norm of an era insofar as they bring out tensions between practices, collective models of writing and a search for singularity. The incessant adaptation to the socio-discursive expectations that constitute the norms of testimonial discourse is not, however, synonymous with an absence of style if we understand it as the distinctive value of a discourse that conforms to generic and discursive patterns. We will analyze here the “capture” of the Yizher-Biher model, a discursive phenomenon that informs us about the mechanism of construction of a collective ethos. These “memory books” are presented as traces of belonging to a specific community. The discursive analysis makes it possible to reread certain testimonies in the light of a singular-collective discursive pattern and, from an ethical point of view, to re-anchor these testimonies in their cultural roots.

Keywords

• auctoriality
• collective ethos
• discursive model
• singular ethos
• style
• testimony