Les mémoires de prison postcommunistes roumains et la poétique de la résilience du moi

Abstract

Following the dismantling of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989, survivors of this totalitarian regime wrote down their stories about suffering and injustice. Their memoirs and autobiographical works have become representative of post-communist life writing, promoting debates on trauma, memory, and resistance strategies. However, life writing scholars have not explored the textual strategies employed by writers to construct their ego-resilient Self, namely, their capacity to adjust to challenging circumstances. To instantiate the case, Romanian memoirs and transcribed interviews have been selected for the corpus given the highly repressive nature of the Romanian communist regime. The project pursues the following two research objectives: (a) to examine the textual strategies employed by narrators in their construction of ego-resiliency and (b) to analyse the historical specificities of Romanian communism while expanding knowledge on this totalitarian regime. To this end, the research combines Narrative Inquiry with Personality Psychology.