Event date: 24-28 August 2010
Location: ESSE 2010, Turin

Seminar title: “Literature and Testimony”

Organizers: Antony Rowland (Salford) and Stef Craps

This seminar would discuss the increasing recognition amongst critics of a central link between literature and the study of written testimony. James Young proposed in the late 1980s that testimony be analysed as literature, as a form of structured aesthetics. The panel proposes to re-evaluate the critical work done on literature as testimony since the 1990s, but also to point to future directions in the study of testimony. Recent impacts on the study of literature as testimony include the decrease in living survivors of twentieth-century wars and atrocities, the increase in the number of ‘false testimony’ cases (where novelists in particular pose as first-hand witnesses), and the rise of the genre of ‘misery literature’. A discussion of literature and testimony at ESSE-10 would be especially apt and poignant: Turin was home to the writer Primo Levi, whose If This Is a Man comprises the most widely known Holocaust testimony for European readers.