RL 407-507- Literature and Testimony

This course is based on primary sources, mostly testimonial accounts of personal and historical traumas, and addresses the problem of representing these events in writing. We will discuss how testimonial accounts relate to autobiographical and/or fictional narratives. Is it personal testimony a way of representing historical events from an individual point of view? Or does testimony put itself beyond the limits of representation and of subjectivity? Is this possible? What is a political testimony? Who are the “true” witnesses? The survivors? the “heroic” individual? The “ordinary people”? The disappeared? The writers? How can a literary work bear witness to an historical and personal trauma? What is the “truth” of testimony? Is it the truth of writing or is it something not accessible through writing?
We will explore different approaches to testimony in literature and philosophy including María Zambrano's, Albert Camus', Jacques Derrida's, Primo Levi's, Giorgio Agamben's and the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas.

Readings:

Antonio Gramsci's Letters from Prison (selections); Primo Levi, If this is a Man and The Drowned and the saved; Italo Calvino's Autobiographical Essays (selections), Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and after, Albert Camus' The Plague, Vincenzo Consolo's The Smile of the Unknown Mariner, and María Zambrano's, Delirium and Destiny.