This book analyzes Byzantine examples of witness literature, a genre that focuses on eyewitness accounts written by slaves, prisoners, refugees, and other victims of historical atrocity. It focuses on such episodes in three nonfictional texts John Kaminiates Capture of Thessaloniki (904), Eustathios of Thessalonikis Capture of Thessaloniki (1186), and Niketas Choniates History (ca. 120417) and the three extant twelfth-century Komnenian novels to consider how the authors positions as both eyewitness and victim require an interpretive method that distinguishes witness literature from other kinds of writing about the past. Drawing on theoretical developments in the fields of Holocaust and Genocide Studies (such as Giorgio Agambens homo sacer and Michel Foucaults biopolitics) and comparisons with modern examples (Elie Wiesels Night and Primo Levis If This is a Man), Witness Literature emphasizes the affective, subjective, and experiential in medieval Greek historical writing.
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1 Bearing Witness in Eustathios of Thessaloniki's Capture of Thessaloniki: Holocaust Literature and the Narration of Byzantine Trauma |
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1 | (70) |
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1.1 "The darkening of a great light": Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Byzantium |
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1 | (7) |
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1.2 Defining Witness Literature: Medieval and Modern Problems of Genre |
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8 | (8) |
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1.3 Creating the Camp in The Capture of Thessaloniki: A Biopolitical Approach |
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16 | (32) |
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1.4 Eustathios as Witness: Narrating the Personal in Byzantine Historiography |
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48 | (9) |
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1.5 "Alors, histoire?" Genre and Byzantine Witness Literature Revisited |
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57 | (14) |
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67 | (4) |
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2 Prison Literature and Slave Narratives in Byzantium: John Kaminiates' Capture of Thessaloniki |
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71 | (70) |
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2.1 "I was drawn on by happy memories": Affective Narratology in Kaminiates' Letter |
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71 | (29) |
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2.2 "A narrative technique that seizes upon essential detail": Kaminiates' Principles of Selection |
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100 | (12) |
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2.3 The Subjective "I" witness and Biopolitics in Kaminiates' Principles of Selection |
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112 | (10) |
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2.4 Selektion, Biopolitics, and the Sovereign Decision in the Harbor of Thessaloniki |
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122 | (19) |
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137 | (4) |
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3 The Carceral Imaginary in Byzantium: The Komnenian Novels as Holocaust Fiction |
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141 | (90) |
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3.1 The Shared Worlds of the Komnenian Novels and Byzantine Historiography |
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141 | (25) |
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3.2 The Dialogic Construction of Self in the Slave Narratives of Rhodanthe and Dosikles |
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166 | (9) |
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3.3 Selektion in Rhodanthe and Dosikles |
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175 | (8) |
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3.4 Rhodanthe and the Voice of Female Lament in the Komnenian Novels |
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183 | (12) |
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3.5 Completing the Cycle: Freed Slaves and Family Reunification |
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195 | (6) |
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3.6 Drosilla and Charikles as Slave Narrative |
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201 | (16) |
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3.7 Hysmine and Hysminias: The Symposium and the Slave Ship |
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217 | (14) |
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227 | (4) |
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4 The Refugee as Historian: Niketas Choniates and the Capture of Constantinople |
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231 | (46) |
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4.1 Niketas as Historian and the Campaign of John II Komnenos |
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231 | (11) |
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4.2 The Historian and the Witness: Niketas and Eustathios on the Sack of Thessaloniki |
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242 | (12) |
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4.3 Niketas as Witness and the Sack of Constantinople |
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254 | (11) |
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4.4 Niketas as Novelist and Hero of the Novel |
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265 | (12) |
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275 | (2) |
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5 Pleasure, Pain, Perversity: Reading Byzantine Witness Literature After Auschwitz |
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277 | (15) |
| Bibliography |
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292 | (3) |
| Index |
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295 | |
Adam J. Goldwyn is Associate Professor of English at North Dakota State University. He is the co-editor of Mediterranean Modernism: Intercultural Exchange and Aesthetic Development (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and author of Byzantine Ecocriticism: Women, Nature, and Power in the Medieval Greek Romance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
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