THE TESTIMONY IN EUROPE AND LATIN AMERICA: definitions and functions

Abstract

The protocene of testimony could already be found in ancient Greece, but this genre has become more and more important in modern times, during the XXth century, soon after the First World War, due to the accumulation of catastrophes verified in that period. With Jean Norton Cru’s works, shortly after the 1914-1918 war, the testimony gained relevance, due to the fact that the author conceived the event devoid of grandeur or grandiloquence, and due to the fact that the soldiers were marked by fragility, pain, and trauma. Cru conceived the testimony within a historical perspective. With the Nazifascism, the German communism, the socialist and the Hispanic-American dictatorships, the testimony began to be studied in its intersection with fiction. Because of so much barbarism and horror, fiction has been called upon to help to say what was considered unspeakable. Due to the singularities of the events, two major trends of testimony emerged: the Shoah and the testimonio. This presentation aims at recovering some thematic and formal particularities of testimony throughout history, emphasizing the Shoah and the testimonio, highlighting their similarities and differences, as well as presenting works which fit within these tendencies. Beatriz Sarlo, Dori Laub, Jean Norton Cru, Márcio Seligmann-Silva, Shoshana Felman, and Valéria de Marco are some of the authors who underscore the present approach.