Witness: Memory, Representation, and the Media in Question

Witness presents a new body of work in the field by an international cast of scholars who engage with a complex set of questions concerning notions of witnessing and attestation in twentieth- and twenty-first century Western culture. Providing insight into this vital yet relatively unexplored concept –and the wide range of media and subject areas to which it lends itself – the volume not only establishes links with existing, currently canonical contributions to witness literature – from Primo Levi through Victor Klemperer to Imre Kertész – but also goes on to provide a set of analyses of exemplary and very recent literary works in that area. Furthermore, Witness extends and changes the previous scholarly tendency to focus strongly on historical evidence and the witness’s vocalization of true remembrance so as to include difficult theoretical and interpretative questions posed by studies today of traumatic experience, amnesia, visual culture, new media, and technology. The book includes contributions from the acclaimed Romanian-German author Herta Müller, Nobel laureate of literature 2009, and Cathy Caruth, the internationally recognized scholar in trauma studies.