History and His-Story in André Malraux's La Corde et les souris

In La Corde et Ies souris Malraux attempts to overcome human transience and mortality by memorializing the ephemeral through the artifice of writing. The rhetoric of the self-portrait takes the form of a historical narrative in which the relationship of history to memory as textual archive affords...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Lawrence D. Kritzman
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: New Prairie Press 1985-09-01
Series:Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Online Access:http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol10/iss1/5
Description
Summary:In La Corde et Ies souris Malraux attempts to overcome human transience and mortality by memorializing the ephemeral through the artifice of writing. The rhetoric of the self-portrait takes the form of a historical narrative in which the relationship of history to memory as textual archive affords the Malrucian subject a "reprieve" by effacing the inherent status of contingency. The text thus becomes a veritable cultural mausoleum that sublates the implicit negation of death and allows the author to become more than a conscience without memory.
ISSN:2334-4415