A linguagem como instrumento de resistência em tempos de exceção no romance: tudo o que tenho levo comigo, de Herta Müller

Abstract

This paper proposes a reflection on language as a tool of resistance and (re)formulation of traumas experienced at times of oppression. Owing to the overlapping subject-memory-history layers, the language starts giving way to the silence that involves the necessity to report events that took place in a certain time, but it is confronted with the impossibility of narrating them as they seem not to be true. To guide our study, we based on the novel The Hunger Angel, by Herta Müller. The question that drives our research applies to how the language has been constructed to narrate traumatic experiences during oppression cycles. In the course of this research, peculiar features of the literature written by Müller will be outlined, thus constructing a discourse in a political and aesthetic way and drawing the attention of the reader to look at the existing history which stands behind another history in a metonymic perspective that – being official – conceals the history of the oppressed.