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

Shoshan Felman’s Testimony stands as one of those very rare works that come to serve as the foundation of a new academic field and a new way of thinking, allowing questions of justice, history, and artistic works to be thought together in an unprecedented way.

I don't know what the first reviewer is talking about. This is a brilliant and groundbreaking study--especially the Felman chapters, which I regularly teach in my undergraduate and graduate literature classes. In short, I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

I must agree with the reader who says there is more style than substance in this book. This applies particularly to S. Felman's part of the book. D. Laub's articles are straightforward and clear, Felman's essays, however, are intellectually self involved, and convey a nervous kind of circular argumentation. This comes across as a very neurotic writing. But may be it's a sign of the times that trauma becomes a pretext for the somewhat usual textual interpretations of academic authors. May be it's also to be expected that most writers fail somewhat when they try to talk about personal or collective suffering. It is a difficult subject for sure. Read the book for its failures.