Abstract:

From the late 1920s to the mid-1940s, France became home for many Armenian intellectuals and writers who survived the genocide. During this period, Paris served as the center of intellectual life for dispersed Armenians, producing an explosion of literary groups, journals, and artistic production. Following WWII, Beirut, Lebanon took over as the nucleus of the diaspora's political, intellectual, and literary activity, and, with its nationalist ideology, presented itself as the connecting thread to the pre-1915 literary tradition. This new cultural center overshadowed the brief but important explosion of Armenian culture in Paris. In contrast to the literature coming out of the Middle East, the literature produced by the young, orphaned generation of Paris narrates neither explicit memory of the massacres and deportations of the past nor nostalgia for a homeland lost. This dissertation examines the work of a group of writers, who gather as Menk [We], and launch their literary movement in 1931. Through close-readings of their prose-writings such as Zareh Orpuni's P'ortse, Hrach' Zartarian's Mer Geank'e, Nigoghos Sarafian's Ishkhanuhin, or Shahan Shahnur's Nahanche Ar ants' Erki, the dissertation argues that trauma of the past Catastrophe is in fact present in their work and can be presented only indexically. By applying Trauma Studies to these texts, the dissertation proposes a theory of indexical representation, which understands catastrophe through the notion of paradox intrinsic to its definition as an event that both defies meaning and begs for confrontation. Moreover, it examines Menk 's literary program as expressed in their critical writings and through contemporary debates within which their transnational literary identity was framed. Menk has been excluded from the modern Armenian literary canon due to its attempts to disrupt any continuous sense of time. It has been regarded as irrelevant to the post-WWII diaspora's cultural narrative, which seeks to historicize, contextualize and narrate the story of dispersion in a coherent, chronological fashion. In opposition to the pressures of this grand cultural narrative and its contingent politics of denial to distort the historical archive of 1915, the dissertation proposes that Menk 's literature serves as an alternative archive of the Catastrophe and its subsequent dispersion.