Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History - Tapa dura

"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.

Shoshana Felman is the Thomas E. Donnelly Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Yale University. Dori Laub is a psychiatrist engaged in the treatment of trauma survivors and is cofounder of the Holocaust Survivors' Film Project and of the Video Archives for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University.