ABSTRACT
Charlotte Delbo's testimony is more sophisticated than the work of any other writer, bet it has been neglected in French literary studies because of the association of war writing with male authors and the dominance of the Resistance in representations of World War II in France. Delbo deploys an unsettling testimonial style that juxtaposes, and often merges, poetry and prose. This generic instability is not uncommon in Holocaust testimony: which illustrated how Borowski produces an awkward compromise between poetry and literary journalism in his later poems. Whereas Borowski's journalistic style endeavours to react faithfully to diurnal events, however, Delbo's blend of forms results in a more tentative form of representation. Delbo's work often reads against its own aesthetics: in his introduction to Auschwitz and After, Lawrence Langer notes her 'lyrical rendering of atrocity that is alarmingly beautiful'; in a resonant phrase, he describes this process as the 'aesthetics of agitation'.
