Description
Literature as a silent art is nonetheless chiefly concerned with rendering the dynamic emergence of multisensory experiences and interactions of a plurality of voices. In literary witnessing of events such as the Holocaust, this tension between sound and silence, voices and muteness, is even amplified because collective voices reach the magnitude of a multitude, which has been reduced to silence by death. This tension and its possible rendition or overcoming becomes explicit in the work of the Italian writer Primo Levi on several levels. On the one hand, Levi reflects on the polyphonic potential of literature and refines literary devices for actualising it. On the other hand, he progressively focuses on the obsession with voices that prisoners of the camps develop either during their experience of concentration or in their surviving experience after the end of the war. The aim of our seminars/workshop is not only to investigate the density of cultural references that might be beyond the metaphysical component of dialogical voices in Levi - and other European authors of his generation -, but also to deepen the analysis of his work in a transnational and interdisciplinary perspective. In Jewish culture, episodes of possessions and revelations through the voice are not only frequent but even foundational. Besides the dibbuks (malicious possessing spirits believed to be the dislocated soul of a dead person), it is enough to think of Moses’ episode on Mount Sinai, where the divine laws are communicated to the prophet through a vocal epiphany (many Torah commentators speak, in this regard, of “Logophany” or ‘the appearing of a voice’). In the testimonies of those interned in concentration camps the distortion of every moral law experienced in ghettos and camps is often associated, albeit as an opposition, with the prophetic experience. This is an important point that deserves to be explored further. Even in this respect, the re-contextualization of Levi as a man/witness/writer/survivor seems to offer many insights; most of them still wait to be analysed in collaboration with ethno-anthropologists, sound-designers, historians, philosophers and theologians.→ The project will integrate the medical humanities approach to the sources, widening its scope to include visual culture, textual criticism and archival material, which have been somehow neglected by the discipline during the last decade.
| Period | 11 May 2019 → 12 May 2019 |
|---|---|
| Event type | Workshop |
| Location | Durham , United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |