Frederik Tygstrup

Ulrik Ekman

Witness is an anthology comprising 40 critical essays from an international cast of researchers who engage with a complex set of questions concerning notions of witnessing and attestation in 20th- and 21st-century Western culture. The contributors provide insightful perspectives on the subject of witnessing and suggest how this vital yet relatively unexplored concept lends itself to a wide range of media and subject areas. The essays critically reconsider existing scholarly tendencies which focus on historical evidence and the witness' vocalization of true remembrance. They do this by establishing important links with canonical texts, images, and voices within a theoretical and interpretive framework where questions of mediation, memorization, and representation are addressed.

Memory, Representation, and the Media in Question

Witness

Devika Sharma

Raymond Williams coined the notion "structure of feeling" in the 1970s to facilitate a historical understanding of "affective elements of consciousness and relationships." Since then, the need to understand emotions, moods and atmospheres as historical and social phenomena has only become more acute in an era of social networking, ubiquitous media and a public sphere permeated by commodities and advertisement culture. Concomitantly, affect studies have become one of the most thriving branches of contemporary humanities and social sciences. This volume explores the significance of the study of affectivity for already thriving fields of cultural analysis such as media studies, memory studies, gender studies and cultural studies at large. The volume is divided into four sections. The first part, Producing Affect, brings together contributions which explore some of the ways in which new media works to produce and intensify affectivity. The essays making up the second part, Affective Pasts, explore the significance of affect to the ways we remember, commemorate and in other ways get hold of things in our recent and not so recent past – or fail to do so. The essays engage the affective production of presence in contexts such as 9/11, the emotional culture of the eighteenth century, and literary auto-fiction. The third part, Affective Thinking, examines various concepts, theories, and forms of thinking not so much to show how the thinking in question may inform the field of affect studies but rather in order to draw attention to the way in which these modes of thinking are themselves already attuned to matters of affect. New social relations and ways of being in a networked world are the common themes of the essays in the final part of the volume, Circulating Affect.

Affectivity and the Study of Culture

Structures of Feeling

This book offers a complex and thought-provoking anthology of critical essays respecting the notion of the witness and phenomena of witnessing in Western culture since the Holocaust. 'Witness' presents a new body of work in the field by an international collective of scholars concerned with resituating witnessing in its specifically contemporary problematic. This volume thus not only establishes links with existing, currently canonical contributions to witness literature -- from Primo Levi through Victor Klemperer to Imre Kertész -- it also goes on to provide a set of analyses of exemplary and very recent literary works in that area. Most significantly, Witness extends and changes the previous scholarly tendency to focus strongly on historical evidence and the witness vocalisation of true remembrance so as to include difficult theoretical and interpretative questions posed by studies today of traumatic experience, amnesia, visual culture, new media, and technology. Amongst others, the book includes contributions from the acclaimed Romanian-German author Herta Müller, and such an internationally recognised scholar in trauma studies as Cathy Caruth.

Frederik Tygstrup

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