Testimony: crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history

In this unique collection, Yale literary critic Shoshana Felman and psychoanalyst Dori Laub examine nature and function of memory and act of witnessing, both in their general relation to acts of writing and reading, and in their particular relation to Holocaust. Moving from literary to visual, from artistic to autobiographical, and from psychoanalytic to historical, book defines for first time trauma of Holocaust as a radical crisis of witnessing the unprecedented historical occurrence of...an event eliminating its own witness. Through alternation of a literary and clinical perspective, authors focus on henceforth modified relation between knowledge and event, literature and evidence, speech and survival, witnessing and ethics.