Name: ELAINE DA SILVA ALVES DE ALMEIDA
Publication date: 06/08/2025
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| FABIOLA SIMAO PADILHA TREFZGER | Presidente |
| LUCIA WATAGHIN | Examinador Externo |
| MARIA MIRTIS CASER | Examinador Interno |
Summary: This research lies at the intersection of memory and fiction, testimony and literary
imagination, focusing on the twelve stories in the section “Passato prossimo” from
Primo Levi's book Lilit ed altri racconti. Amidst critical reception that favors his
testimonial works, the fictional dimension of his production often remains on the
margins. However, it is precisely these stories, constructed in the shadow of the Lager
experience, that open space for a profound reflection on what it means to remember,
to give form and words to that which often could not be said. The motivation for this
investigation thus arises from a paradox: how can fiction become a legitimate and
powerful means of remembering the traumatic past? To what extent does it allow the
return of silenced voices, of anonymous figures who did not survive or who were never
able to testify? Far from opposing testimony, the fictionalization in “Passato prossimo”
reveals itself as a form of listening, reworking, and transmission that is anchored in an
ethical commitment to the memory of others. Through a bibliographic and
interdisciplinary approach that intertwines literature, history, and critical theory, this
research draws on contributions from Walter Benjamin (1994), Giorgio Agamben
(2008), Régine Robin (2016), Márcio Seligmann-Silva (2003, 2010, and 2022), Beatriz
Sarlo (2007), and Jeanne Marie Gagnebin (2018), among others, to reflect on the
ethical implications of representing the unrepresentable. The analysis of the stories is
guided by five thematic axes—life and survival in the Lager, dehumanization and loss
of identity, solidarity and mutual aid, memory and the need to bear witness, language
as a tool for survival—which illuminate the narrative strategies with which Levi
constructs a literary language capable of giving form to absence. What emerges from
this reading is the perception that fiction, far from being a distortion or deviation from
historical truth, becomes a unique way of dealing with the memory of trauma. By
offering a language to what escaped official records, Levi not only restores humanity
to the forgotten figures of history, but proposes a Benjaminian rewriting of memory,
where each rescued fragment defies erasure and resists oblivion. Thus, “Passato
prossimo” asserts itself as a work that, by fictionalizing testimony, fulfills an ethical
duty: to keep alive the memory of those who could not speak and to call us, even today,
to listen.
