In December 2001, the centennial of the first Nobel Prize was celebrated in Stockholm. To mark the occasion, the Swedish Academy organized a symposium on the theme of OC Witness LiteratureOCO. Talks were given by speakers from Asia, Africa and Europe, including three Nobel laureates in literature: Nadine Gordimer, Kenzaburo Oe and Gao Xingjian.The main objective of the symposium was to examine the concept of witness literature and its relevance to contemporary literature. This concept is relatively new and has not yet been defined clearly by literary criticism and scholarship. The discussion primarily alternated between two aspects of the topic: the particular claim to truth that witness literature puts forward, and the process that leads from catastrophe to creativity and that turns the victim into a writing witness with the power to suspend forgetfulness and denial.This volume, edited by Horace Engdahl, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, brings together all the talks given at the symposium."

A groundbreaking anthology containing the work of poets who have witnessed war, imprisonment, torture, and slavery. A companion volume to Against Forgetting, Poetry of Witness is the first anthology to reveal a tradition that runs through English-language poetry. The 300 poems collected here were composed at an extreme of human endurance—while their authors awaited execution, endured imprisonment, fought on the battlefield, or labored on the brink of breakdown or death. All bear witness to historical events and the irresistibility of their impact. Alongside Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, this volume includes such writers as Anne Askew, tortured and executed for her religious beliefs during the reign of Henry VIII; Phillis Wheatley, abducted by slave traders; Samuel Bamford, present at the Peterloo Massacre in 1819; William Blake, who witnessed the Gordon Riots of 1780; and Samuel Menashe, survivor of the Battle of the Bulge. Poetry of Witness argues that such poets are a perennial feature of human history, and it presents the best of that tradition, proving that their work ranks alongside the greatest in the language.

Newbery Medalist Karen Hesse emerses readers in a small Vermont town in 1924 with this haunting and harrowing tale. Leanora Sutter. Esther Hirsh. Merlin Van Tornhout. Johnny Reeves . . .These characters are among the unforgettable cast inhabiting a small Vermont town in 1924. A town that turns against its own when the Ku Klux Klan moves in. No one is safe, especially the two youngest, twelve-year-old Leanora, an African-American girl, and six-year-old Esther, who is Jewish.In this story of a community on the brink of disaster, told through the haunting and impassioned voices of its inhabitants, Newbery Award winner Karen Hesse takes readers into the hearts and minds of those who bear witness.

This book analyzes Byzantine examples of witness literature, a genre that focuses on eyewitness accounts written by slaves, prisoners, refugees, and other victims of historical atrocity. It focuses on such episodes in three nonfictional texts – John Kaminiates’ Capture of Thessaloniki (904), Eustathios of Thessaloniki’s Capture of Thessaloniki (1186), and Niketas Choniates’ History (ca. 1204–17) – and the three extant twelfth-century Komnenian novels to consider how the authors’ positions as both eyewitness and victim require an interpretive method that distinguishes witness literature from other kinds of writing about the past. Drawing on theoretical developments in the fields of Holocaust and Genocide Studies (such as Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer and Michel Foucault’s biopolitics) and comparisons with modern examples (Elie Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s If This is a Man), Witness Literature emphasizes the affective, subjective, and experiential in medieval Greek historical writing.

In the opinion of the present study, a masterwork of literature is a work that teaches human beings how to live, in a carefully constructed artifact; in venerable terms, a work that constructs a fable (a narrative) whose intellectual function is to convey an idea (what is taught). Every such work is passionately convinced of the seriousness of what is taught; and its passion is strictly disciplined by a narrative divided into parts that are internally coherent, and that appear in an order that cannot be changed. All five of the masterworks analyzed in the present study passionately teach, in splendid artifacts, that Christianity is adequate to the dangers of life, and capable of irradiating the human soul. The indispensable reference of all five is the Christian Bible; the God is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; the aspiration is salvation. The intent of all five—Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (Book One), Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment—is thus ad dei gloriam, the glorification of the God of Christianity.

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.

An up-to-date review of more than 100 years of writings arranged chronogically. As a practical reference book, it will equip Christians to speak confidently to Jehovah's Witnesses.