Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History

Testimony examines the nature and function of testimony, witnessing and memory, both in their general relation to the acts of writing and of reading, and in their particular relation to the Holocaust. This book takes in the texts of Dostoevsky, Freud, Mallarme, Camus and de Man, videotaped testimonial life accounts of Holocaust survivors and also the film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann. Testimony defines the uniquely devastating aspect of the Holocaust as a radical crisis of witnessing an unprecendented historical occurrence of …an event eliminating its own witness . Drawing on their personal experience of receiving survivors’ accounts, Felman and Laub present the first theory of testimony : a radically new conception of the relationship between art and culture and the witnessing of historical events. This book should be of interest to undergraduates and academics of literary criticism, literary theory, film theory, psychoanalysis and modern history.