Variations textuelles et discursives d’un souvenir d’enfance d’Albert Cohen

Connecting literary discourse analysis, rhetoric, and argumentation theory, this study focuses on a “childhood memory” of Albert Cohen that reappears in four autobiographical texts and three interviews. The different occurrences of this episode of the insults uttered on his tenth birthday by an anti-Semitic street vendor are interesting for what is repeated from one occurrence to another, but above all for what varies. Extending the study by Claire Stolz of the story published in La France libre, in 1945, I insist here on the epideictic rhetoric that runs through its resumption in the review Esprit, in September 1945, and on the judicial and deliberative dimension of Ô vous, frères humains (1972), and Carnets 1978. The analysis of racist insults highlights the way in which epideictic blame crosses the perverted use of speech that characterizes the eloquence of the street vendor.