Citation:
Abstract:
After decades of research writing, literary critics are often moved to write not “about” literature but “the real thing” — poems, fiction, or memoirs. Jacob Lothe of Oslo University, author of four books and editor or coeditor of several collections of collaborative literary research, was moved to collect oral testimony about the Holocaust. In 2006, with Anette Storeide, he published narratives by concentration-camp survivors — Tidsvitner: Fortellinger fra Auschwitz og Sachsenhausen (Time’s Witnesses: Narratives from Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen). This book records the ordeals and survival of eight men who were victims of the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen, as told by themselves. It was followed in 2013 by Lothe’s collection of narratives by ten women who survived concentration-camp incarceration, translated into English as Time’s Witnesses: Women’s Voices from the Holocaust (2017). The title of the present special issue, Literature as Time’s Witness, salutes these two books while responding to a large part of Jakob Lothe’s research interests, including his concern with the ethics of narrative. The articles collected in this issue in his honor do not advocate reading literary works as documents of historical periods but recognize the multifunctionality of literary works and discuss the relationship between the art and the attesting potentialities of fiction and poetry in addition to factographic writing.