Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testimonial and the Rhetoric of Haunting - Tapa blanda

Breaks new ground in its focus on the very urge to witness, and the power of witnessing to trouble, disturb, reawaken, and to haunt (a guiding metaphor of the book.) Untimely Interventions is striking in its mixture of astute textual readings, nuanced and elegantly expressed exploration of theoretical issues around genre and figuration, and ethical passion." ---Linda Hutcheon, University of Toronto

As atrocity has become characteristic of modern history, testimonial writing has become a major twentieth-century genre. Untimely Interventions relates testimonial writing, or witnessing, to the cultural situation of aftermath, exploring ways in which a culture can be haunted by its own history. Ross Chambers argues that culture produces itself as civilized by denying the forms of collective violence and other traumatic experience that it cannot control. In the context of such denial, personal accounts of collective disaster can function as a form of counter-denial. By investigating a range of writing on AIDS, the First World War, and the Holocaust, Chambers shows how such writing produces a rhetorical effect of haunting, as it seeks to describe the reality of those experiences culture renders unspeakable.