Une poche interne plus grande que le tout: pour une approche générique du témoignage des camps

Concentration camp testimonies are characterized by a discursive and generic hybridism. On a discursive level, they are related to the question of truth, characteristic of historiography, as well to the question of vraisemblance, belonging to literature. As a narrative genre, testimonies have, firstly, boundaries with autobiography and memoirs, since they respect the so-called pacte autobiographique ; however the reading contract with the public is enlarged with some components typical of testimonial writing which show the genre to be « an internal pocket larger than the whole ». Certain testimonies also share features with the novel : those « fictions of the real » attempt to associate testimony with a pacte romanesque without annihilating the negative reality they are representing.