Jared Stark

Rothberg and Stark present a report from the twentieth anniversary conference of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale. The presentations were made by two dozen scholars on a variety of disciplinary perspectives: discussions of the practical and ethical dimensions of recording testimonies, impact of testifying on the witness, and responsibility of the archive and of the listener to the survivor.

[...]Wobum and Ruby Lee's return to social anonymity casts a shadow on Jamesian pragmatic optimism, pointing instead to the wings where forces beyond Woburn's and Ruby Lee's control - the forces of desire as well as of economic and social structures - remain untouched. [...]suicide must be recognized as a potentially meaningful, relevant act. What separates Kate from her society, in other words, is also what separates her from herself: as she attempts to pursue the consequences of the actuality unveiled by the other's suicide, she increasingly finds herself divided between a set of outward behaviors that conform to social norms - she marries Peyton, raises a son, and watches in passive silence as he negotiates his own ethical relation to society - and a set of covert motivations, justifications, and actions that generate an internal story for her about her own resistance to and impact on her world, that is, about her ability to respond to the "imaginative claims" issued by the suicide. [...]she imagines that by marrying Peyton she does not endorse the system he represents but rather "might expiate and redeem his fault by becoming a refuge from its consequences" (139). [...]Churley, who gambles the money away in Nice, is not so easily disposed of. [...]when Vance travels to Nice to track down the truant Churley, he finds himself returned to the scene of his own suicide attempt, with Churley embodying his suicidal self and Floss Delaney, the woman whose betrayal prompted his youthful despair, again on the scene.