« Autobiographier » l’enfance dans la Grande Région : liminalité, ekphraseis cognitives et images matérielles chez Carla Lucarelli (2020) et Nina del Tragheto & Robert Jung (2014)

Abstract

This article proposes a cognitive-anthropological reading of two autobiographical texts about childhood from the Grande Région, an area of transnational cooperation comprising the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and its neighbouring Belgian (Wallonia), French (Lorraine) and German (Lorraine and Rhineland-Palatinate) lands. We show that in Luxrmbourgish writer Carla Lucarelli’s Enfance, instantanés. À l’aube de la mémoire (2020) and in Notre enfance en Lorraine. Enfants de la guerre et du baby-boom (2014), co-written by Robert Jung and Nina del Tragheto, the regional space acts not only as a matrix for the diegesis, but also constitutes the driving force behind the writing project. Focusing on the reconstruction of a mental experience (Lucarelli) and an era (Jung and del Tragheto) through autobiographical memory, mental imagery and documentary photography, both works were born as responses to questions raised by belonging to a liminal, multilingual and multiethnic space, with porous borders that give rise to reflections on both personal identity, and the narrative and aesthetic mechanisms underlying their depiction.