... and the difficulties of witnessing. Yet, as opposed to merely marking the limits of what can be witnessed, disgust offers an alternative, affective way of encountering the pain of others that still challenges the more soothing logic of mourning and meaning-making. It has a particular countermemorial capacity...

...-building even as it queers the very concepts of place and belonging. In the narrative, set in 1928, the year of the publication of The Well of Loneliness , the protagonist witnesses an erotic relationship between two girls without wanting to acknowledge what is happening; it examines both the yearning...

... weapon. In contrast to the privileging of bearing witness in post-Holocaust theories of language and suffering, this essay argues that Barker and Djebar ultimately suggest that, in the face of war’s atrocities, not speaking is an equally valuable act. Despite the increasing prohibitions established...

... to “fastidiousness” that characterized her early poetry, to the conscious development of a capacity for witness that became her postwar concern. detail ethics Jean Wahl Pontigny witness In a poetic career marked by a relative reluctance to issue general statements, Marianne Moore’s essay “Feeling...

... in Geoffrey Hill’s elegies. Focusing on volumes published in 1996 (Canaan) and before, and especially on the remarkable elegy “September Song,” I examine Hill’s poetics of elegiac witness as an attempt to give form to the subject’s radical singularity in an age of its abstraction. This argument...

... is implied to be an unreliable witness, to speak lies, to betray herself rather than to be betrayed, to excuse herself rather than seek the truth, and so ultimately to be an agent of deceit rather than an agent for justice. In short, I will argue, Sophie does not testify, she...

.... The ultimate aim of this redemption is to make a case for recovering the dialectic between the Particular and the Universal in Hegel’s conceptualization of the subject of history for the project of bearing witness to the traumatic past. Eisenstein’s vehicles for this agenda include Steven Spielberg’s...

... of J. M. Coetzee’s oeuvre: how does the white South African subject, and by extension the white South African writer, respond to the crimes of apartheid in which he or she is biopolitically implicated? As Curren witnesses the eruptions of violence that occur during South Africa’s 1985–1989...

... (2009 : 168) Hill’s elegies reverse a focus on psychology, exposing the subject to its radical desubjectification, a process in which, however, “the modern subject achieves its nonsubsumable singularity in the capacity to pay witness to suffering and memorialize the dead.” And for Caleb Caldwell (2013...

... characters at the center of the fictions in Joseph Valente’s and Margot Gayle Backus’s study: an inability to put into words something they have witnessed or endured. In the foreword to The Child Sex Scandal , the widely known Irish cultural critic Fintan O’Toole discusses the role of writing in the process...

... painful past has on his present. My argument, in short, rests on the belief that all of A Farewell to Arms must be considered in terms of traumatic aftereffects. Horrified participant and helpless witness, Frederic, along with his 251 Trevor Dodman traumatic exposure to dismemberment, killing...

... locates this pain in history, reading Jewish suffering as the repressed other of hysteria. By drawing attention to Freudianism’s repressed in this way, The White Hotel can be said to work through a Jewish historical pain that, for Gilman, is disavowed in psychoanalysis. In thus bearing witness...

...) Enid’s dreams recall the “pagan dreams” experienced by the caregiving protagonist in “Cortes Island” (145), dreams in which “the safe barrier between the transgressor and the ‘normal’ self is crossed. The dreamer is no longer a passive witness. She is implicated” (Cox 60). Much like Enid...

... is World War II, and its impossible witnessing maps onto its Irish setting: the country that missed the war. Toward the end of his long monologue, Arsene says to Watt, “What we know partakes in no small measure of what has so happily been called the unutterable or ineffable, so that any attempt...

... Defoe’s pseudodocumentary novel A Journal of the Plague Year speaks with the same clinical detachment of one who has nothing to fear. As one of the inhabitants of plague-ridden Lon­ don, of course, he is in mortal danger. But his privileged textual position of a witness grants him immunity. He...

..., massacre, and atrocity, this moment in the twenty-first century presents us with challenges of literacy, epistemology, and ethical response. How can we resist consuming representations of mass and systemic violence as sensation and spectacle, and instead bear witness to the suffering of the disempowered...

... witness, Conrad’s 1911 novel, Under Western Eyes, depicts the underground dealings of administers and challengers of the Russian state as they travel across various geopo- litical, cultural, and linguistic terrains of Europe. Suggesting the central role testimony will play in this text, Conrad...

... and to Bachmann’s writing in general. 5 Simply put, my ultimate intention is an attempt at shedding some light on the spoken darkness I alluded to before. My aim is not, however, to dispel this darkness but rather to try to bear witness, to testify, on its behalf. The motivation for such a reading is, I would...

... to the complexity and contradictions of human experience. These poets can be as ironic toward the past and 260 Review toward monuments and monument-making as their avant-garde peers and predecessors, but they also bear witness to the past in aesthetically plausible and satisfying...

... between the 1963 Warren commission and the 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), a period marked by a gradual scienticization of fact and a dismissal of first-person witness. Af- ter the Warren commission report’s unambiguous indictment of Oswald, no subsequent commission has come...