Citation/©: Gündoğdu, Servet, (2019) . Witnessing of Literature Beyond Historicism and Formalism, Milel ve Nihal, 16 (2), 375-391. Abstract: In the historicist literary theory, which designs witnessing in the category of absolute trust and positions literature as a witness to the past, the literary work loses its literariness to become a historical document. Formalist literary theory emphasizes that literary works are linguistic beings rather than historical ones. In this way, it tries to

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... ve the literariness of the work as a witness to the linguistic sign of the work, not by looking at history. However, the limitation of the works with the network of linguistic relations renders them a closed object and makes them unhistorical. In the second half of the twentieth century, a new conception of literary history writing that advocates the role of the reader in the production of meaning rather than text or historical context is proposed. The liberal openness of the reader has achieved in the interpretation of the literary text and the semantic ambiguity of the word witness after the genocide disaster may seem to be related. At this point literary hermeneutics does not see literary works as witnesses of the past and linguistic sign. The literariness of the literary work comes from changing the meaning of the historical context in which it was produced. Literary works that have created a historical effect begin to produce their own history and time. Thus, literary works do not witness to the past or linguistic sign, but to the history which their produce and language itself.