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A few among the French who volunteered to fight alongside the Germans on the eastern front during World War II have written their memoirs. Those texts, like all memoirs, pose problems of authenticity, veracity, and writing: Was the witness 'really' there? If so, is he reliable? What conventions of representation does he use when he 'writes up' his experience? After answering these questions, the article examines how the volunteers justify their decisions to enlist and especially to testify. Finally, the article describes the peculiar 'outcast memory' that unites these texts: the memory of people who were forced out of the French community and refused to make the gestures that could have led to their reintegration, that is, refused to express remorse or admit implication in the crimes of the Third Reich. Quelques-uns des volontaires francais qui ont combattu pour l'Allemagne durant la Deuxieme Guerre mondiale ont ecrit leurs memoires. Ces textes, comine tous les memoires, posent des problemes d'authenticite, de veracite et d'ecriture: Le temoin etait-il << vraiment la >> ? S'il etait la, est-il digne de confiance? Et quelles conventions de representation utilise-t-il pour textualiser ce qu'il a vecu ? Apres avoir repondu a ces questions, l'article examine comment les volontaires justifient leurs decisions de s'engager et plus particulierement de temoigner. Finalement, l'article analyse la << memoire des exclus >> qui unit ces textes: la memoire d'hommes qui ont ete bannis de la communaute francaise et qui ont refuse d'accomplir les gestes qui auraient pu conduire a leur reintegration, c'est-a-dire refuse d'exprimer des remords et de reconnaitre une responsabilite dans les crimes du Troisieme Reich.

History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn. By Elizabeth A. Clark. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. x + 325 pages. History, Theory, Text offers a survey of the debates [...]

The multi-ethnic French national football team is discussed in relation to issues of French national identity. Topics include identity and representativeness, the republican model, and integration as assimilation.

By Dominick LaCapra. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. 235 pages. History and Reading is made of a series of essays, a genre for academic writing that Dominick LaCapra first [...]

Historians and literary theorists, Robert Berkhofer remarks in his preface, have at least two things in common: both 'underestimate the difficulties of representing the past as history'; and both, whether [...]

The last section in each volume of the recent Histoire des femmes en Occident is titled 'Paroles de femmes' ('Words of women'), and it includes a few pages of quotations. [...]

For years, Josie Catalano, the daughter of Camella Teoli, of Lawrence, Massachusetts, combed her mother's hair to cover a scar on her head without knowing the origin of this injury. [...]

In the first paragraph of Downcast Eyes, Martin Jay self-consciously uses no less than twenty-one visual metaphors, some quite obvious ('glance,' 'outlook,' 'blinded'), others concealed in words that only their [...]

Most theorists of history now seem to regard narrative as the only discursive model on which historians rely to make sense of the past. The structure of many works in current historiographic production, however, is not that of a narrative as defined in literary theory. The histories of World War II discussed here, for example, do not all tell a story; several of them take the form of synchronic analyses bearing on some aspects of the conflict. Furthermore, those histories of the war that tell a story follow different models and have widely divergent degrees of narrativity. That is, they resort at various levels of frequency and deliberateness to strategies that narratologists such as Meir Sternberg and Raphaël Baroni view as typical of storytelling. Positing readers who know how the war ended (the Allies won), they do not turn to suspense but seek to arouse curiosity by making counterfactual hypotheses (What if?) that offer alternatives to what actually happened. Furthermore, they attempt to create surprise by proposing "new versions" grounded in recently uncovered evidence and/or thus far unasked questions. As Dorrit Cohn speaks of the "distinction of fiction," it would thus be legitimate to speak in these areas of the "distinction of historiography." Indeed, the classical nineteenth- century extra- heterodiegetic narratives to which histories are frequently compared are unlikely to include counterfactuals, as they are unlikely to offer new, "better" versions of the events that they report. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]