Bearing Witness for the Other, According to Levinas: Ian McEwan's Atonement as a Case in Point

In the wake of the publication of Levinas's unpublished works, the time has come to give a more thoughtful account of the fertility of Emmanuel Levinas's thought on literature. In this article, I reflect on the category of "testimony" in an attempt to address the contradiction of bearing witness for the other, and I examine Ian McEwan's novel Atonement as my object of study. Testimony must be linked to responsibility in order to be just, , thereby demonstrating what an ethical theory of literature could be, one that is not "merely" humanistic.