Collective trauma, the body, and literary forms of witnessing

This dissertation examines the international literature of testimony and the politics of truth-telling in the aftermath of widespread atrocity. In the context of world literature in English, I explore the work of four writers: German-Jewish-American philosopher Hannah Arendt, South African poet and novelist Antjie Krog, Chilean-American playwright and author Ariel Dorfman, and Sri Lankan-Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje. These writers have helped create a body of testimonial literature which we might dubiously call the legacy of authoritarianism---literary testimonials in various genres which struggle to witness a past that would seem too horrific for words.;The first two chapters of my dissertation specifically address literary narratives emerging in and around nationally-organized hearings that follow a political regime's crimes against humanity. Since the Nuremburg trials, many countries have elected to forgo conventional judicial trials in favor of open witnessing and community-rebuilding forums such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, which make "witnessing the event" an event of its own. In exploring these new sites of historical narration across a half century of witnessing, these writers stage truth as a process, one which alternates its focus between the national-juridical body and the individual body. In my third and fourth chapters, I examine how writers like Krog and Ondaatje adapt a variety of aesthetic forms such as tragic theatre, tableau, and pastiche in reaching for adequate ways to bear witness to seemingly unrepresentable events. Each of these writers shifts attention onto the witness-as-character in an effort to understand the individual creation of truth. In so doing, they contest cultural assumptions about witnessing as objective, directing us instead toward an understanding of witnessing that is embodied in the witness's suffering and subjectivity. My project recognizes the textual innovations of these authors as a form of literary ethics producing accountability and acknowledgement---a discursive approach to justice.