... © 2005 by the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics 2005 This content is made freely available by the publisher. It may not be redistributed or altered. All rights reserved. How Testimony Communicates: An Introduction This special issue on ‘‘How Testimony Communicates...

...Tamar Yacobi In both real-life and fictional testimony, the problems of reliability-judgment multiply when witnesses report events that count as extraordinary. Historians and other judges then suspect the teller of misrepresentation. On such testimonies there accordingly converge the issues...

...Leona Toker Literary testimony combines the pragmatic function of attesting to historical events with the aesthetic function that becomes marked after their function as testimony has become redundant. Whereas the social identity of the target audience addressed impinges upon the shape of the work...

...Geoffrey Hartman Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics 2006 The Humanities of Testimony: An Introduction Geoffrey Hartman English and Comparative Literature, Yale In the year 2005, the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and other death, slave-labor...

... of past events, thus advancing from a rival to a partner of historiography. The question to be asked is no longer merely what has happened? but also how was the event experienced, how is it remembered and passed on to succeeding generations? The new mnemo-historical genre of video testimony is analyzed...

...Tony Kushner It has taken many decades after 1945 for the testimony of Holocaust victims to be taken seriously. This article charts the shift from the marginalization of survivors and the lack of interest in their accounts immediately after the war to more recent developments, whereby they have...

...Robert N. Kraft Videotaped oral testimony of Holocaust survivors documents the extended (disjointed) memories of individuals who suffered through the industrial cruelty of the Third Reich. This testimony is studied cognitively in an effort to understand memory for atrocity and to characterize...

...Patricia Yaeger When we dress Holocaust texts in too much sanctity, we miss how badly they behave. We may also miss the odd ways a testimony's figures of speech invite readers or listeners to misbehave: to try too hard to recover a sacred sense of witnessing. How do ordinary techniques of literary...

...Ernst van Alphen In discussions of second- and third-generation Holocaust literature and testimony, it is an accepted idea that the trauma of Holocaust survivors is often transmitted from the first to the second and later generations. This article analyzes the “problems” of survivors' children...

... and the image,respectively. The article then proceeds to explore the implications of the image, or the imaginary, as the “other” of the TRC narrative. It argues that the distinction between narrative and image in respect to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela's testimony makes possible an understanding of her evasions...

...Karen Alkalay-Gut In October 2001, Lawrence Ferlinghetti declared that from now on, poetry would be classified “as B.S. and A.S.—Before and After September 11.” Despite the exaggeration, it is clear that testimonial and elegiac elements of poetry and spoken or sung text have become more valued...

...Dalia Ofer The essay addresses the issues of health and medicine in the ghettos of eastern Europe, emphasizing the centrality of oral testimonies and memoirs to historical analysis. It opens with some general remarks on Holocaust testimonies and then moves on to a discussion of medicine...

...Marianne Hirsch; Leo Spitzer Focusing on a book of recipes and a miniature artists' book from the Terezín and Vapniarka concentration camps, this essay argues that such material remnants can serve as testimonial objects that carry memory traces from the past and embody the process of its...

... could not be used without both physical access—which reinforces the need for preservation regardless of media—and recognized cataloging standards and vocabulary. The article includes examples of the uses made of testimonies in various disciplines and challenges present and future researchers to expand...

... Against All Odds (New York: Holocaust Library). Unwelcome Narratives: Listening to Suppressed Themes in American Holocaust Testimonies Walter Reich International Affairs, Ethics, and Human Behavior and Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, George Washington University Abstract Western...

...Ulla Savolainen Abstract This article attends to literary testimonies of the Gulag and Soviet terror by an Ingrian Finnish man called Aatami Kuortti from the perspective of cultural memory. By analyzing two testimonies by Kuortti published in Finland in 1934 and 1964, the article focuses on “memory...

...Annette Wieviorka This essay traces transformations in the figure of the witness from the period of the ghettos to the present, focusing on the meaning and contexts of the predominant forms of testimony during the Holocaust and since. Efforts to bear witness in diaries, chronicles, and unpublished...

... testimony about the production and circulation of samizdat in the USSR and in the West. Juxtaposing the theory of gift giving with new critical approaches to book history, textual culture, and bibliography, the article aims to highlight the interest of personal testimony and material texts in a critical...

... testimony about events that the actual author has not witnessed. © 2004 by the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics 2004 Agamben, Giorgio 1989 The Remnants of Auschwitz (New York: Zone). Allen, Donald, ed. 1960 The New American Poetry: 1945–1960 (New York: Grove). Alperovitz...

...Lawrence L. Langer The search for words to convey the deathlife that was Auschwitz turns up in witness testimony, memoir, and fiction, as all three conspire to find a language appropriate to an experience that is utterly alien to most audiences and that is not based on research from written...