An Archaeology of Witness Testifying, Attending, Reading, and Writing

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Cheryl Chaffin

Abstract

Primo Levi’s experience in If This Is a Man included the change of his body through adversity while he remembered and recorded the names and stories of others he met on his journey downward, as he described his plummet into Auschwitz. In post-war decades he witnessed his life and mind in light of Auschwitz and his place in the middle and late Italian and global twentieth century. Writing and reading are linked in the processes of developing witness. Eastern and Western philosophies detail witness as a practice of attention. In the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty witness as perception and attention becomes intrinsic to the body through observation and participation expressed in senses, perceptions, and rational and intuitive intelligences. Witness in reading is engagement and responsibility to another’s world. Reading may germinate a writing practice and production over a reader’s lifetime that, itself, constitutes a space of witness. 

Article Details

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Literatura

How to Cite

An Archaeology of Witness: Testifying, Attending, Reading, and Writing. (2024). VERBEIA. Revista De Estudios Filológicos. Journal of English and Spanish Studies, 10(9), 63-80. https://doi.org/10.57087/Verbeia.2024.4698

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