Abstract
The expression of one’s own subjectivity, whether in the media or in politics, in academic research or in literature, film, and the visual arts, certainly found a priority grounding as part of the establishment of public memory as an ethical duty in contemporary societies, and in the subsequent valuation of testimony, in its various forms, as a means to account for the experience of traumatic pasts, where memories of World War II and of the Shoah left an indelible mark. It is in the context of this testimonial heritage, in these iterations of the biographical space that the narratives to be analyzed here are inscribed; narratives which tie together the three signifiers that preside over it: childhood, memory, and auto-fiction. They are narratives by some authors –writer, filmmakers- who have suffered the shared fact of having lived their childhood under a dictatorship – the last military dictatorship in Argentina, 1976-1983 – and of having been its direct victims, confronted, in a symptomatic reading, with another singular narratives by children when they were children, recorded by a journalist at the return of democracy and published in a book long time after. While the first ones decided to tackle the narrative development of their traumatic memories by creating a kind of fictional autobiographical works, the voices of “real children” leaved a moving testimony of innocence and fear.
Keywords
Narratives; childhood; memory; autobiography; autofiction