Encountering Primo Levi : Reading and Teaching Trauma Narratives (Italian and Italian American Studies)

Chaffin, Cheryl

Palgrave Macmillan（2026/03発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9783032068965

Full Description

This book considers Primo Levi's development as a writer expressed through multiple literary genres and increasing awareness of his readers over the course of his forty-year writing career. The book focuses on memory and trauma, and how narrative acts as a means of telling a story and engaging others in the transmission of that story, thus developing a literary lineage over time that can transcend geographic and cultural limitations. As the witness of catastrophic historical events, Levi's writing offers a space to consider what it means to be a reader of traumatic literature. The process of how books affect and change us is explored through a close reading of Levi's works alongside related writers and the historical contexts in which they lived.

Contents

1. Introduction: Souls Are Moved.- Part One: On Being Taught.- 2. Literary Lineage: What Does It Mean to Leave a Legacy?.- 3. Books as Teachers: Levi's The Search for Roots.- 4. Learning from Others: Plurality in Levi's Storytelling.- Part Two: Writing and War.- 5. Auschwitz as University: Levi's Poetry and Fiction Post-Deportation.- 6. Befriending a Stranger: How to Live with Other Humans.- 7. To Express Reality Again: Levi and Ginzburg Writing After War.- Part Three: Ethical Reading.- 8. An Archaeology of Witness: The Roots and Practice of Witnessing.- 9. Judges: Responding to an Impossible Request.- 10. Translation and Understanding: Drawing Closer to Original Texts.- 11. Conclusion: Reading in the Present.