The Pragmatics of Literary Testimony: Authenticity Effects in German Social Autobiographies by Chantelle Warner (review)

Warner offers a dense, unconventional, and thought-provoking re-evaluation of German autobiographical literature from the 1970s to the present. The author’s scholarly ambition might prevent her study, however, from reaching a greater audience. The first hindrance in this regard is the title of her book. Each notion in it presupposes a number of concepts that are not self-evident and need explanation. “Pragmatics,” according to Warner, refers to the “interpretative processes” (10) in the reader’s mind, i.e., expectations and attitudes that readers have before turning the first page of a book. “Testimony” denotes here authors’ reporting on an injustice or a drawback with the intention of making their voices heard; readers, in turn, often approach testimonies with the intention of showing solidarity with authors—if only by buying and reading the testimony. Authors wanting to be heard tend to ‘educate’; readers of testimonies usually have a desire to learn. “Testimony” thus includes both an ethical and a pedagogical aspect. “Effect” indicates the rhetorical tools and linguistic artifices authors use to create specific reactions in readers. The stylistic preferences of authors influence, for example, whether a book is read from an aesthetic or an ethical perspective.

Rather than defining literary techniques and aesthetic concepts, though, Warner’s elaborate study tends toward broadening genre concepts such as that of “autobiography.” Warner understands “autobiographies” as “Bekenntnisliteratur” and “Verstaändigungstexte,” that is, any sort of texts that “share some key formal features and pragmatic effects” (28). Unfortunately, the adjective “social” does not serve to narrow down the field of inquiry but rather stresses the moral underpinnings of autobiographical writings: “The genre of social autobiography is associated with a variety of social issues including the problems of women, workers, homosexuals, immigrants, minorities and even the discussions of national and personal identity connected to Holocaust testimony and the autobiographies of the so-called children of the Second World War […]” (14). As a result, Warner does not focus on autobiographies in a traditional sense but searches for similarities in texts that differ vastly in content, style, and context: Verena Stefan’s Shedding and Peter Handke’s Hopeless Unhappiness are discussed together with Ruth Klüger’s Still Alive; Bernward Vesper’s The Trip is held up against Feridun Zaimoglu’s Leyla and his debut novel Kanak Talk, but also Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments.

Not surprisingly, the complexity of this study is both its strength and its burden. Warner attempts to reconcile formalistic and ethical approaches that have divided scholarship on autobiographies over the past four decades. On the one hand, her analysis of texts that deal with difficult socializations, forced acculturations, and life-altering personal experiences reflects upon historical accounts as well as methodologies in order to comprehend the genre of autobiography. On the other hand, Warner struggles to align the plethora of scholarship that forms her theoretical foundation. The reason for this may possibly be seen in irreconcilable differences between the two ‘schools’ of scholarship on which Warner draws. Her preference for French thinkers (Bourdieu, Barthes, Baudrillard, Derrida, Lyotard, Lejeune) is complemented by an emphasis on Anglo-American scholars (Mead, Taylor, Butler, Eakin, Freeman, Gibson, Hanks, Ryan, Semino, Stockwell, Spencer-Oatey, Fludernik). French philosophy, however, mainly focuses on formal-aesthetic elements of writing and is known for ‘deconstructing’ individuality, while Anglo-American scholars usually highlight minority issues and stress the ethical foundations of the self. Hence, Warner’s conclusions appear to be inconsistent: whereas the formalistic approach shows aesthetic effect and biographical fact, fiction and non-fiction as indistinguishable, an ethically imbued approach to the genre of testimony seeks to ‘legitimize’ autobiographical language (174).

What Warner introduces as a study on formal features of autobiographical writing by connecting “literary pragmatics and cognitive poetics” (11) closes as a vindication of ethical criteria. Testimonies, she summarizes, can be recognized by their “exemplarity” (177), their “honesty and immediacy” (178), as well as by “reprehensibility and accountability” (180)—ethical concepts that are...