The book examines the modalities of witnessing in the works of Charles Reznikoff, a Jewish American poet commonly associated with the so-called Objectivist group. It demontrates how the poet alters the contents of archival material to create his own, 'unoriginal' verse called 'recitative.'
The book examines the modalities of witnessing in the works of Charles Reznikoff. Associated with the so-called "Objectivist" group created in New York in the early 1930s, Reznikoff is often called a poet-witness because the material he draws on in his poetry and, to a lesser extent in prose, comes from his observations of urban life and from authentic testimonies he found in archives. Yet, the process of turning eye-witnessed situations and contents of depositions given by other witnesses into literary texts is far from objective. In particular, Reznikoff's use of archival material is informed by subtly camouflaged manipulation. To demonstrate various degrees of this change, the book centers on a comparative juxtaposition of the poet's works with the original documents.
Literature of testimony - Charles Reznikoff - objectivist poetics - modalities of witnessing - literature and archives - uncreative writing - depoliticizing the Holocaust - Walter Benjamin - authorship and appropraition of texts - literature and law - Jewish-American poetry - recitative - criminal history of the USA
Jacek Partyka is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Philology, University of Bialystok, Poland. His research interests center on American late modernist and postmodernist poetry, literary representations of genocide, W. H. Auden's reinvention of himself as a new poet in the US, and the literature of the Jewish diaspora in New York City.
