Literary Testimony Research Articles

Zeuxias’ Monetary Deposits at the Sanctuary of Olympia

This bronze plaque, found in 1879, contains two monetary deposits made by an individual named Zeuxias at the sanctuary of Olympia in the second half of the fifth century BC. It constitutes one of the few preserved documents of this type, making it a valuable testimony of banking activities at Panhellenic sanctuaries. Due to the fragmentary status of the text, a comparison with other analogous inscriptions and literary testimonies is here offered, with the aim of casting some light on the reason behind the deposit, and the formulaic language used.

What We Learn From Comparison: Some Epistemological Remarks

This article deals with the comparisons between testimonies and theoretical works on Nazi and Soviet camps carried on within literary studies. Going beyond the debates about potentially antagonistic memories of those two regimes, the comparison contributes to decompartmentalizing research, infusing it with new dynamics and methods as well as the adoption of a renewed approach to the construction of knowledge. Indeed, by conducting textual comparisons rather than basing their research on the study of facts, the researchers in the field of literary studies were able to question narrative strategies and the positions of certain works within their host cultures. Debates on the generic aspects of literary testimonies have thus helped shift the focus from the specificity of the experiences they described to their status and form. The article then compares the two bodies of texts from the point of view of their possible use as historical sources, and analyzes a few examples of narrative strategies.

Né ἰατρίνη né μαῖα: i saperi «speciali» della iatromaea/ἰατρόμαια

Abstract Neither ἰατρίνη nor μαῖα: the «special» knowledge of the iatromaea/ἰατρόμαια Especially in the last thirty years both the ἰατρίναι/medicae and the μαῖαι/obstetrices have received particular attention from scholars both for a more precise framing of these female «professions» within activities that are not exclusively manual but also intellectual, and in order to reconstruct the legal status, the possibilities of social affirmation and the opportunities of economic income of these two specific professional profiles. The subject of analysis here is a figure in its own right, that of the iatromaea/ἰατρόμαια, a term attested by very rare epigraphic mentions in Latin and Greek, absent from the databases of papyrus texts and a veritable hapax in literary testimonies. After reviewing the inscriptions that certify the existence of this word and the hypotheses formulated by moderns regarding its possible meaning, the paper attempts to trace the professional profile of this specialist, identifying, through a comparison with the sources, similarities and differences with the other types of therapists and making an interpretative proposal in conclusion regarding the specific knowledge and skills of the iatromaea/ἰατρόμαια.

The Case for Maghrebography: Accounting for Linguistic Indigeneity in a Multilingual Literary Testimony

The Case for Maghrebography: Accounting for Linguistic Indigeneity in a Multilingual Literary Testimony

Corroded Stagnancy: A Literary Testimony

This piece navigates the long term post-traumatic impacts of an acid attack victim in India.
 In South Asia, the prevalence of reported acid attacks – or the throwing of concentrated acid on another person with the intention to disfigure or kill – remains high, despite strict penal codes against the crime. According to Acid Survivors Trust International, 80% of reported cases globally have been against women. 
 I had the privilege of speaking to a remarkable woman who survived one of these attacks. The physical, psychological, and social elements of this work come from her story.

From “Natural Institution” to Poetic Genre: Literary Testimony and the Issues of Witnessing in Verse

Abstract This article examines the relationship between poetry and testimony in order to outline a viable framework for interpreting testimonial poetry (or “poetry of witness,” in Carolyn Forché’s terms) as a literary genre in its own right. Neglected in favor of other, mimetically oriented modes of witnessing, especially those in narrative fiction and documentary prose, testimonial poetry has not been extensively studied, and when it has, the studies were often based on inadequate notions of testimony that fail to recognize witnessing as a broader social and linguistic practice. Relying on the sociological approach to eyewitness testimony developed by Renaud Dulong (notably in Le témoin oculaire [1998]), this article proposes a new understanding of poetic testimony, based neither on an overly broad notion of witnessing as living through an event or era, nor on a narrow understanding of witnessing as providing a faithful documentary account of a personal experience. Much like its prose counterpart, poetic testimony enacts a quasi-contractual relationship between authors and readers, whereby the former are committed to telling the truth about a directly experienced event of public importance and the latter, in return, are committed to considering seriously their words, approaching them in good faith. This relationship is driven by an underlying ethical imperative whereby the author acts as a moral witness in Avishai Margalit's sense of the term, and the readers assume the role of a moral community sympathetic to their plight. By referencing examples from American, Hungarian, Russian, French, Polish, and South Slavic twentieth-century poetry, the article shows how a “testimonial” reading of a poem, often very strongly favored on intuitive grounds, modifies generic expectations based on traditional poetic genres and explores its interpretative and ethical implications.

Językowy i społeczno-kulturowy obraz życia wsi kujawskiej na przełomie XIX i XX w. na podstawie powieści Franciszka Becińskiego "Wieś na zakręcie drogi"

In the historical sciences for some time there has been a tendency to describe the history of the Polish peasantry through his eyes. Thanks to this approach, not only purely historical accounts gain importance, but also literary testimonies. One of them is the novel by the peasant writer and poet Franciszek Beciński, The Village on the Bend of the Road, presenting a wide, colorful panorama of life in the Kuyavian countryside at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and representing the peasant's point of view. According to the ethnolinguistic concept of profiling, the capacity of the concept of LUD (folk, people) was presented by means of various linguistic, cultural and social oppositions. In Beciński's works, the oppositions of village and manor, folk and church, religiosity and ludic character, women and men are particularly visible. The analysis within the described profiles allows us to draw the conclusion that the history of the Kuyavian village at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries cannot be captured only from the perspective of the violence of the lord over the peasant, and social relations, both within the village itself and between the village and the manor house, were here much more complicated.

Literary Testimony of Istanbul’s Urbanization Experience: Yaşar Kemal

Kentleşme süreci toplumsal değişime ilgi duyan edebiyatçıların da yapıtlarında işlediği bir konudur. Sosyal ve ekonomik yapının değişiminin gözlendiği kent deneyimi özellikle romanlarda karşımıza çıkmaktadır. Modern Türk Edebiyatının önemli yazarlarından biri kabul edilen Yaşar Kemal, yapıtlarında toplumsal değişimi işlerken kentleşme olgusuna çeşitli açılardan yer vermiştir. 1950’li yıllardan sonra Anadolu’dan gelen göçle değişen İstanbul birçok sosyal problemin merkezi haline gelmiştir. Bu dönemde Yaşar Kemal’in İstanbul’da geçen romanlarında kentleşme olgusuna bir sosyal bilimci gibi yaklaştığını söylemek mümkündür. Genel hatlarıyla Yaşar Kemal’in yapıtlarında kentleşme sürecinde ortaya çıkan sosyal problemlerin de ele alındığı görülür. Bunlar arasında göç, gecekondulaşma, yoksulluk, işsizlik ve çevre sorunları önemli bir yer tutar. Bu anlamda Yaşar Kemal’in romanları, röportajları ve denemeleri sosyolojik değerlendirmeyi hak eden içeriğe sahiptir. Bu çalışmada Yaşar Kemal’in yaşamı öncelikli olarak ele alınmıştır. Daha sonra İstanbul’un kentsel deneyimini işlediği Kuşlar da Gitti ve Deniz Küstü romanlarının yanı sıra röportajları incelenmiştir. Özellikle bu romanların yazıldığı dönemlerde İstanbul’da kent sorunları önemli boyutlardadır. Röportajlarına ve romanlarına yansıyan haliyle İstanbul’un yarım yüzyıla yayılan kent deneyimini görmek isteyenler için Yaşar Kemalin yapıtlarının sosyolojik bir değere sahip olduğunu ifade etmek gerekir.

Wschodniogalicyjskie Podkarpacie Juliusza Turczyńskiego – portret „z niedalekiej przeszłości”

The paper presents the images of rural life in Subcarpathian regions of the 19th century Eastern Galicia, recorded in sociocultural, quasi‑chronicle, or memoir prose of Juliusz Turczyński (1833–1913). This gymnasium professor and a well‑known writer connected with Stanisławów achieved his greatest success as the author of novellas and short stories. His socio‑cultural, ethnographic and landscape sketches dedicated toHutsul Land, which record the traditional life ofthe region, disappearing because of modern trends, belong to the most important literary testimonies of life and mentality of the 19th century Carpathian Highlanders. His less popular, but equally interesting dramatized sociological studies, illustrate the situation of Eastern Galician village in the serfdom era that has recently passed. Turczyński’s prose, which is rather conventional and schematic in terms of artistic creation, combines the objective features of a document – the testimony of the mechanisms determining and destroying the life of a simple man – with the elements of didactic morality and parabolic vison of a lively character of the people, prone to fall, but also to convert.

Mythography and Archaeology: The Case of Eulimene

The main aim of the present research work is to provide a new interpretative perspective on Eulimene’s story by combining literary testimonies and archaeological findings. The story is included in Parthenius’s collection entitled Περὶ Ἐρωτικῶν Παθημάτων, dating back to the 1st century BC. This story appears to be an exceptionally fertile example in which a multidisciplinary approach, that combines Philology and Archaeology, can, potentially, illuminate aspects and facts that would otherwise remain unearthed.
 Eulimene’s story deals with eponymous heroes and city founders of Crete. The Cretan cities of Lykastos and Kydonia are attested as early as in Homer and Aptera and Kydonia are also cited in Linear B tablets of Knossos; the name of Eulimene, referring to a Nereid, and the adjective ἄπτερος, applied to some gods, were known to Hesiod and Homer, respectively. Given that Crete was sui generis in terms of its own mythology, it is likely that before Homer there was already a background relating to those Cretan cities.
 Eulimene is known as a Nereid. Hesiod reports it in his Theogony and pottery as early as the 5th c. BC attests it, as well. A different perspective is introduced by a piece of textile and a pyxis, which hint at an association of Eulimene with Crete, particularly with Phaedra and Ariadne.
 There is also a Messenian story, reported by Pausanias, which presents similarities and common patterns. However, the story of Eulimene is rather more complex since the Messenian story was arguably modelled on the predating Cretan version.
 Eulimene’s story in Parthenius’ collection was structured according to the aesthetic standards of the Hellenistic era. However, the story seems to combine various elements, some of which echo Minoan times (the ritual of human sacrifice carried out by the king-priest, a union designed to result in fertility, interrupted in this case) and others which echo archaic times (dissection and forced extraction of the baby). Thus, I find particularly interesting the archaeological finding of the cut-up skull of a young girl, which Andreadaki-Vlazaki brought to light during the excavation at the Mycenaean palace of Kydonia at Chania.

Ein ungebildeter Bischof oder ein unterschätzter Gelehrter? Prämissen, Probleme und Perspektiven einer neuen Edition der Historien des Gregor von Tours

Abstract The Histories of Gregory of Tours are among the most important literary testimonies for the transition period from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages. The verdict on the Latin literature and language of the first centuries of the Frankish Empire has often been very negative. Krusch and Levison, who published today’s still authoritative critical edition of the Histories, also assumed that Gregory’s original text could only have been written in poor Merovingian Latin. This paper presents arguments for a new edition of the Histories from different perspectives. Gregory’s testimonies in which he addresses his own linguistic and grammatical deficiencies or the necessity of writing in a simple language, have to be viewed and evaluated within the larger tradition of statements of this kind in (Late) Antiquity. They should, thus, not be read as evidence for the argument that Gregory’s Histories were written in poor and incorrect Latin. An assumption of this kind, however, has influenced Krusch’s and Levison’s evaluation of the manuscripts of Gregory’s Histories and is thus reflected in their reconstructed text, even though quite a few manuscripts offer a much better text. This approach has repeatedly been criticised by different scholars; my paper joins this criticism. In assessing the various manuscripts of Gregory’s Histories, the editors have to make a decision regarding the presumed quality and state of Gregory’s Latin. My paper, therefore, also offers a case-study of Gregory’s stylistic and rhythmic arrangement of his text. The analysis of the so-called prose rhythm provides important evidence in favour of a positive assessment of Gregory’s level of education and thus of his linguistic and grammatical proficiency. This can also be viewed as an argument for a new and appropriate edition.

A Young Carmelite on Ice Skates. The Early Occasional Poetry of St. Titus Brandsma as a Literary Testimony of His Love of God, Life, and the Family

The recently canonised Dutch Carmelite Titus Brandsma (1881–1942), World War II martyr, mystic, Catholic journalist and historian of spirituality, was also – what is less known – a talented poet. The article recalls his early occasional poetry, written in Dutch and Frisian between 1898 and 1906 for members of his immediate family. Its literary characteristics are presented, demonstrating that this poetry is a valuable testimony to the saint’s views on human life from an eschatological perspective, including topics on the family, marriage, and the relationship between children and parents. This justifies recognising St. Titus Brandsma’s occasional poetry as an expression of his unique poetic theology of the family. The article also includes an English translation of a hitherto untranslated poem by St. Titus Brandsma.

Efekt kompresji. Bartleby, czyli tajemnica inności

Compression Effect. Bartleby, or the Mystery of Otherness The text proposes to read Bartleby, the Scrivener as a case of modern genealogy of Otherness. The aporias in Melville’s intertextual prose loudly reverberate in theology and philosophy – therefore one cannot read Melville’s novella without referencing the Bible but also the writings of Blanchot, Derrida, Levinas, Deleuze. Bartleby owes his popularity to the genius of Melville, who, by commenting on the America of his times, included in his short prosaic works hundreds of ambiguous and internally contradictory tropes. The aporias which we now call Bartleby have been discussed by such contemporary critics as Žižek and Butler, who in the formula “I would prefer not to” see the outline of an emancipatory project in late-modernity capitalism. “Compression Effect” is the literary testimony of the experience of a new community which faces an “excess” of politically and religiously engaged texts with a simultaneous “shortage” of divinity in life institutionalized by modernity.

Introduction

Introduction

Hannah-Rose Murray. Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles.

Interest in the experience of enslaved and formerly enslaved people in the British Isles has increased substantially in recent years, but attention has mostly focused on the period before 1838 and the end of legal slavery in the British Empire. In Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles, Hannah-Rose Murray reveals a later history, telling the stories of dozens of nineteenth-century African American visitors to Britain who came to mobilize support for British campaigns that aimed to persuade the United States to abolish slavery and, later, which raised awareness of the legacies of slavery. These visitors traveled widely throughout the British Isles from the 1830s onward, collectively delivering tens of thousands of public lectures in town halls, churches, and assembly rooms in which they spoke of their personal experience of enslavement and encouraged Britons to lobby their representatives, write to newspapers, and boycott goods produced by slaves. Their talks became media events, widely reported and discussed in the Victorian press. “By sharing their oratorical, visual, and literary testimonies to transatlantic audiences,” argues Murray, “African American activists were soldiers in the fight for liberty” (3).

Care Narratives by Annie Ernaux and Michael Rosen in the Light of the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted both the importance of care and a global crisis in care. Since its beginnings in the US in the 1980s as a feminist theory within virtue ethics, care ethics has emerged from the margins of the domestic sphere in the West to become a species theory and a force for radical societal change. Influenced by Joan Tronto’s work, Alexandre Gefen has integrated the approach into literary studies in France as an interventionist reading strategy, offering therapeutic benefits to the reader as well. In a new intersectional approach, I argue that reading literature through a care ethics model can improve lives. I compare literary testimonies on either side of the patient/carer divide, Annie Ernaux’s pre-Covid-19 care home narrative and Michael Rosen’s Covid-19 patient testimony, which, read together, expand the field of medical humanities to promote a relational reconception of society over individualist neoliberalism.

Bearing Witness to Horror: The Ethics in Révérien Rurangwa’s and Yolande Mukagasana’s Literary Testimonies of the Tutsi Genocide

ABSTRACT: Following the Tutsi genocide in 1994, various types of literary work sprang up around the horror surrounding this event. Literary testimonies are one of these forms of literature. Révérien Rurangwa’s and Yolande Mukagasana’s texts are autobiographical accounts of the harrowing images, the pain, and the sorrow that both authors experienced in very different ways. These pieces and these authors must be seen in order to rehumanize us and them. We have to start looking into their words, into their eyes, as Emmanuel Lévinas would say, to find ethics. Ethics cradles these two works that bear witness to agony and fear. It spreads through the description of the narrators as ends in themselves (Nkrumah) for the reader to see, here the act of bearing witness is an ethical act itself. But can we find the same kind of ethics in these two quite diverse ways of living the genocide? How can these two texts create an ethical dialogue with their readers? Furthermore, how is this dialogue relevant outside of the Rwandan reality in contexts of other geographical spaces?

The Constitution of Sanjak-Montenegrin Bosniak’s History Within Husein Bašić’s Pentalogy “Replacements”

The paper analyzes the novels of symbolic titles: Other Nests, A Gate Without a Key, Bones and Crows, Barren Turkish, White Asians, integrated in the roman-fleuve Replacements (2000). The key starting point of this confessional chronicle’s chronotope are the decisions in Berlin regarding the withdrawal of Turkish troops and the changes of borders in the Balkans. Being led to tragic consequences, Bosniaks, the Islamic Slavic population, were given the burden of “Turkish guilt”. Confronted with stigmatization, Bosniaks experienced persecution, ethnic cleansing, mass and individual murders, and emigration to Turkey. Their name, national and cultural identity, homeland, state, and existence were called into question. Questioning his life as a clerk in the Imperial Archives, Ibrahim Žioc, the narrator, recounts little stories of great significance concerning human life and destiny. He produces panoramic, temporal sections which pose as compensation for the taboo subject of historical discourse regarding the Sanjak- Montenegrin Bosniaks’ destiny. Documenting the violence and the exodus of the people forced to face numerous forms of terror, the narration rhythmically accents wondrous stories, extraordinary portraits, and characters, remarkable examples of human kindliness, compassion, and humorous remarks. Employing his poetic talent, Husein Bašić introduces a lyrical component to the fictional world. The use of sophisticated narrative methods aestheticizes the evil destiny of one nation. The novels represent a literary testimony about a period of historical processes and epochal changes in the Balkans, deeply entrenched within the layered and complex contexts of Bosniak culture and history. With authentic artistic speech, the representation and interpretation of historical dramas and traumas, Bašić constituted the unwritten history of Sanjak-Montenegrin Bosniaks and awakened the identity crushed by existential crises that the wars of the 20th century had brought.

Toirrdelbach Ua Conchobair and the politics of church reform in Connacht

The scholarship on twelfth-century Ireland often repeats that Toirrdelbach Ua Conchobair, king of Connacht and high-king of Ireland with opposition, was a stalwart supporter of Augustinian monastic reform, though not of the Cistercians. By studying the evidence of several disciplines including architectural history, art history and some literary testimony, this essay instead argues that while Toirrdelbach accepted episcopal reform, he opposed monastic reform in Connacht, both Augustinian and Cistercian alike, fearing it would devolve power away from him and the Uí Dubthaig, his hereditary clerics. A possible inauguration ode suggests he travelled as a youth to France and England, where exposure to the European investiture controversy may have influenced his subsequent relationship with reformers. Toirrdelbach’s acquisition at the 1152 synod of Kells of an archdiocese at Tuam for Connacht was not an unqualified success, as the largely Cistercian-controlled synod took pains to reduce his grip on the Connacht church.

Witnessing the Ghost, Letting the Ghost Witness: Exploring the Impediments of Witness Narratives in Holocaust Camp Testimonies through Spectrality and the Metaphor of the Muselmann

Abstract: Within debates surrounding "Levi's Paradox"—the idea that through their survival, survivors are not necessarily the "complete witnesses" of the Holocaust—the Muselmann is frequently posited as able to reconcile this conundrum. Within testimonial literature, these emaciated prisoners were perceived as ghost-like entities who were neither alive nor dead but somehow between life and death. The observed absence left in witness narratives thereby appears to be testimony from inside the experience of these Muselmänner . What is ubiquitously overlooked in such analyses is that the Muselmann primarily functions as a metaphor—rendering the absent dead legible in language. Ignoring this risks instrumentalizing the Muselmann , which threatens to allow the metaphor to become shorthand for something more generic—obfuscating the reality that Muselmänner signify real Holocaust victims. However, all metaphors contain a potential for semantic flexibility. Cannot the Muselmann's ability to pollute rigid dichotomies therefore be approached productively and more ethically when refocalizing him as a ghostly entity in testimonial literature? By examining passages from Primo Levi's If This Is a Man and Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz and After , this article asks: if the Muselmann is viewed as a ghostly or spectral metaphor—a haunting force within the Holocaust's literary corpus—how might this spectral witness be able to draw attention to erasure and historical blind spots? Constituting an ethical and an interpretive undertaking, this refocalization simultaneously allows one to speak with the Muselmann and enables these anonymous victims to manifest themselves anew as haunting forces through literary testimony.