![]() ![]() ![]() Chapter Three, "The Era of the Witness," examines how the survivor's authority as a witness has been consolidated, in recent decades, through films and videotaped testimony archives. Chapter Two, "The Advent of the Witness," is concerned with the figure of the witness as it emerged from the Eichmann trial, which foregrounded victim testimony for its pedagogic and emotional value. Chapter One, "Witnesses to a Drowning World," considers testimonies left by those who did not survive. She describes three successive stages of testimony. In a lucid and accessible translation by Jared Stark, Annette Wieviorka's The Era of the Witness, originally published in French in 1998, examines the conditions under which testimony, and the social figure of the witness, emerged from the shadows of the Holocaust to become a significant force in contemporary culture. When Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub published Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History in 1992, they claimed that the twentieth century was "an era of testimony." Although their book helped to launch the field of trauma studies in the Anglo-American academy, in part by expanding the category of testimony to include literature, how testimony became a significant cultural form and how the Holocaust survivor acquired legitimacy as a bearer of truth remained uncharted territory. ![]()
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