Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History

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

Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History

Literature & Fiction

Shoshana Felman

Dori Laub MD

Literary

Routledge

Writing and Madness: Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, Calif.) )

Writing and Madness is Shoshana Felman's most influential work of literary theory and criticism. Exploring the relations between literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis through brilliant studies of Balzac, Nerval, Flaubert, and James, as well as Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida, this book seeks the specificity of literature in its relation to what culture excludes under the label "madness." Why and how do literary writers reclaim the discourse of the madman, and how does this reclaiming reveal something essential about the relation between literature and power, as well as between literature and knowledge? Every literary text continues to communicate with madness―with what has been excluded, decreed abnormal, unacceptable, or senseless―by dramatizing a dynamically revitalized relation between sense and nonsense, reason and unreason, the readable and the unreadable. This revelation of the irreducibility of the relation between the readable and the unreadable constitutes what the author calls la chose littéraire―the literary thing.

Martha Noel Evans

History & Criticism

Stanford University Press

The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

What is a promise? What are the consequences of the act of promising? In this bold yet subtle meditation, the author contemplates the seductive promise of speech and the seductive promise of love. Imagining an encounter between Molière’s Don Juan and J. L. Austin, between a mythical figure of the French classical theater and a twentieth-century philosopher, she explores the relation between speech and the erotic, using a literary text as the ground for a telling encounter between philosophy, linguistics, and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. In the years since the publication of this book (which the author today calls “the boldest, the most provocative, but also the most playful” she has written), speech act theory has continued to play a central and defining role in the theories of sexuality, gender, performance studies, post-colonial studies, and cultural studies. This book remains topical as readers increasingly discover how multiply relevant the speaking body is. Moving beyond the domain of formal linguistic analysis to address these questions, the author has written a daring and seductive book.

Judith Butler

Stanley Cavell

Shoshana Felman ranks as one of the most influential literary critics of the past five decades. Her work has inspired and shaped such divergent fields as psychoanalytic criticism, deconstruction, speech-act theory and performance studies, feminist and gender studies, trauma studies, and critical legal studies. Shoshana Felman has not only influenced these fields: her work has opened channels of communication between them. In all of her work Felman charts a way for literary critics to address the ways in which texts have real effects in the world and how our quest for meaning is transformed in the encounter with the texts that hold such a promise.The present collection gathers the most exemplary and influential essays from Felman’s oeuvre, including articles previously untranslated into English. The Claims of Literature also includes responses to Felman’s work by leading contemporary theorists, including Stanley Cavell, Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, Cathy Caruth, Juliet Mitchell, Winfried Menninghaus, and Austin Sarat. It concludes with a section on Felman as a teacher, giving transcripts of two of her classes, one at Yale in September 2001, the other at Emory in December 2004.

The Claims of Literature: A Shoshana Felman Reader

Essays & Correspondence

Fordham University Press

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Books by Shoshana Felman