Perpetrator Fictions and Transcultural Memory

Modes of Remembering in the Contemporary Spanish Novel

“…As stated by Richard Crownshaw there has been a turn towards the figure of the perpetrator in recent historical fiction in Western literature during the last 10 to 15 years (Crownshaw , 75), and although La noche del diablo (Dalmau ) is the only contemporary Spanish example of a consequent perpetrator perspective, it is possible to find voices of perpetrators speaking in their own right in novels like El vano ayer (Rosa ), as well as in Los girasoles ciegos (Méndez ) or El día de mañana (Martínez de Pisón ). Through their particular multiperspectivist enunciation or focalization, these novels represent a dialogic alternative both to the essentializing depiction of the heroes and to the victims‐oriented discourse of the reconciliatory mode.…”

Rooting Memory, Rooting Place

“…As Richard Crownshaw posits, the form of The Known World is a "reminder of the fundamental operation of cultural memory, its construction and reconstruction of the past moment according to the desires that inform the moment of remembrance." 78 Manon Gaudet is a woman wholly distanced from her husband and the plantation on which they live. The novel closely follows the relationship between Manon and her servant Sarah.…”

Introductory Reflections on Perpetrators of Crimes Against Humanity and their Representation in Documentary Film

“…The originality of these narratives lies in the shift in point of view they propose: their protagonists, rather than being the victims of the atrocities, are instead their perpetrators. According to several scholars, there has been a considerable increase in the number of narratives exploring memory from the perpetrator's perspective in recent decades (Crownshaw 2011;Dunnage 2010), even to the point of constituting a genre of their own, as Pettitt suggests (2017), which has been labelled 'perpetrator fiction' (Crownshaw 2011, 75;Eaglestone 2011, 13;Pettitt 2016Pettitt , 1301. Bernhard Schlink's The Reader (Der Vorleser, 1995) 14 and especially Jonathan Littell's novel The Kindly Ones (Les Beinveillantes, 2006; translated into English in 2009) 15 are probably the best-known examples of this trend and the most frequently studied cases.…”

“…As LaCapra suggests, '[t]here is the possibility of perpetrator trauma ' (1999, 723). Several scholars have explored how perpetrator fiction articulates a discourse that humanizes the perpetrators, thereby eliciting a certain degree of sympathy for them (Crownshaw 2011;Leake 2014;McGlothlin 2016;Pettitt 2017). To this end, the fiction creators not only highlight situational factors that could partly justify perpetrators´acts but also attempt to give them back their humanity, conditions that makes the relationship with the perpetrator particularly problematic.…”