Sedimentation and innovation as intentional acts that configure Dora Bruder as a testimony novel

Abstract

The present study observes Dora Bruder, by Patrick Modiano, in its condition as testimony literature. Understanding that it is a novel that makes use of both individual and collective memory so that it can configure the truth of what it narrates and assume itself as a testimony with archive value. To do so, theories on the types of witnesses are used, mainly that by Agamben. The conventions that Searle requires to distinguish fiction from the document, as well as his idea that the literary work is exposed by an intentionality, are linked to the way that Iser defines for reception by the ideal-reader, who starts from the genre to arrive at specificities of configuration. Ricoeur’s notions of sedimentation and innovation explain the way in which the novel assumes less conventional modes of configuration, that mimic the real without denying its fictional gender nature. Thus, the novel genre can be innovated in a subgenre such as the testimony novel, serve the fixing of collective memory and have the intentionality that defines it recognized by the ideal- -reader, without falling into categorizations that fail to observe it as literary art to see only the documentary in it.