Récits de mort et souvenir traumatique. Trames et traces lexicales des témoignages sur la Shoah

Abstract

Testimonials of Holocaust survivors are multilayered discursive objects caught between History and memory. We argue that this polarization is embedded in the weft of the narratives in the form of lexical traces that can be untangled quantitatively. To do this, we focus on the most frequent nouns used in a corpus of 16 biographies of survivors from Auschwitz, and use 3 complementary analytical apparatus - correspondence analysis, hierarchical classification and a network-based analysis - to identify the lexical stocks structuring the corpus. Our results confirm the polarization of the narratives between a primary mnemonic content and a secondary historical/collective re-presented one.

Keywords

• death narrative
• discourse analysis
• history
• holocaust
• memory
• textual analysis