The aim of Lena Seauve’s current project is to analyze the emotionalization of readers through narratives written from the perpetrator’s perspective. To do so, she examines narrative strategies based on a corpus of contemporary French and Latin American (in particular from the Southern Cone) novels from the turn of the millennium that fictionalize historical cases of politically and ethnically motivated violence from the 20th and 21st centuries. In the session, she will present as an example the novel The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell, which represents the intellectual starting point of the study. Among other things, the debate that the novel triggered at the time of its publication will be explained in depth. From there, the potential for emotionalization of this text will be explored in relation to its narrative perspective.
