Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History

By Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub

Book Overview

In this unique collection, Yale literary critic Shoshana Felman and psychoanalyst Dori Laub examine the nature and function of memory and the act of witnessing, both in their general relation to the acts of writing and reading, and in their particular relation to the Holocaust. Moving from the literary to the visual, from the artistic to the autobiographical, and from the psychoanalytic to the historical, the book defines for the first time the trauma of the Holocaust as a radical crisis of witnessing "the unprecedented historical occurrence of...an event eliminating its own witness." Through the alternation of a literary and clinical perspective, the authors focus on the henceforth modified relation between knowledge and event, literature and evidence, speech and survival, witnessing and ethics.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0415903920
• ISBN13: 9780415903929
• Release Date: April 1992
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 312 Pages
• Weight: 1.18 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.9" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary

Customer Reviews

naive, furious and paranoid

Compared to most reflections on trauma and the holocaust (especially academic pig-headedness) this one stands out for its furious energy (often synonymous with intelligence), its naivete but also its paranoid intellectual evasiveness: in the end it doesn't know what it wants to say, which may have to do with its often tenuous, or non existent personal relation to its topic. If you like style over substance this is a definite must: Its rage still beats most academic useless blabla.

One of the most important books for our times

Testimony a brilliant and profound book. Analysing stories from the Holocaust, Felman and Laub argue the importance for society of witnessing those who have lived beyond the boundaries of existing cultural systems, and therefore their own capacity for witnessing themselves. A compelling and understated book for anyone interested in the boundaries of our own history and epistemology, and the hazards of venturing beyond them