RESEARCH OVERVIEW: Text – Author – Testimony. Reader’s notes – I Looked At The Lips ... Diary from the Warsaw Ghetto Cover Image

Z WARSZTATÓW BADAWCZYCH: Tekst – autor – świadectwo. Na marginesie lektury Patrzyłam na usta ... Dziennik z warszawskiego getta
RESEARCH OVERVIEW: Text – Author – Testimony. Reader’s notes – I Looked At The Lips ... Diary from the Warsaw Ghetto

Author(s): Paweł Wolski
Subject(s): History
Published by: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów & IFiS PAN
Keywords: the ghetto; materiality of the text; the indexicality and the iconic character of the text; personal document literature; New Historicism; narrativism; experience in literature

Summary/Abstract: The review of the book I Looked at the Lips… Diary from the Warsaw Ghetto describes the editorial form of the text, preserving transcription of the writing in the same position as it was written in the original (a line of printed text on the oddnumbered page completely corresponds with the line of the manuscript on the even-numbered page). The reviewer notices that the editorial form of the diary fits in those currents of contemporary humanities, which on the one hand recognize the physical appearance of the text as a crucial element of the content, but on the other hand – they emphasize the ethical dimension of the testimony’s appearance as a unique literary genre, together with a complicated attribution of the text’s authorship. The author of the review also underlines the limitations, which an editor faces when he wishes to preserve the physical appearance of the testimony, which (in a present-day editorial form) must take the form of an index of the testimony’s appearance, not its icon.

  • Issue Year: 2009
  • Issue No: 5
  • Page Range: 357-363
  • Page Count: 7
  • Language: Polish