Literature and Testimony

Testimony and witnessing are part of a very complex truth paradigm that is based on the belief in evidence and thus the evident, while at the same time being determined by the circumstantial, the singular and the subjective as conditions for its epistemological value. What is more, testimony works across different discursive realms, combining the juridical with the political, historical, social, ethical, but also with questions about the mediality of witnessing. In the wake of the Holocaust, in particular, trauma studies have further highlighted the function of literature as a way of accessing repressed experiences and enabling witnessing both for the witnesses themselves and in a wider social context. By looking at different theories about the relationship between literature and testimony this course aims at discussing the interrelatedness of such fundamental notions as truth, authenticity and plausibility, the relationship between facticity and fictionality, processes of remembering and memory culture and ways of construing and constructing the past and history, and how these inform and are informed by our understanding of mediality and textuality. The theoretical approaches will be complemented by readings of poetic and narrative texts mostly from postcolonial contexts in which the fictionalisation of testimony serves to question the function of literature in the light of different forms of traumatic historical violence.

Please be aware that this class will be held as a weekly three-hour course, combining the two-hour seminar with the one-hour reading course.