Madeleine Dunnigan (QMUL) - 2025-26 Students
m.dunnigan@qmul.ac.uk

Going Nowhere: Empty Clues, Antidetective Writing and Third-Generation Holocaust Trauma

How should third-generation Holocaust survivors engage with the past? How does our trauma manifest? Can fiction provide the answers?

My project responds to the need for a strongly ethical representation of third-generation Holocaust trauma through: a 20,000-word critical study of empty clues in Patrick Modiano’s postmodern antidetective writing, third-generation Holocaust writers, and my own family archive and; a synthesis of these research outcomes into an 80,000-word creative writing component, an antidetective novel.

My critical study will analyse how evidence – telephone numbers, addresses, photographs – in Jewish writer Modiano’s Occupation-steeped mysteries appear to recover lost Holocaust histories but ultimately lead to dead ends, comparing these with novels with more conventional resolutions. Following Modiano’s belief in a novelist’s ‘ethical duty to record the traces’ of those ‘who have vanished’ (2006), I will autoethnographically examine my family archive, arguing that Modiano’s technique better reflects my third generation ‘fragmented’ relationship with the past (Aaron, Berger, 2017), while avoiding the ‘commodification’ of suffering (Bayer, 2010), as well as its weaponisation.

My proposed project’s antidetective novel refuses to resolve what cannot be redeemed and positing narrative irresolution as an act of resistance that liberates survivors and victims.

Principal supervisor: Professor Mark Currie