Full Description
Illuminates the power in bearing witness as an ethical orientation toward the world and its people.
In The Witness as Educator, David T. Hansen examines the idea of bearing witness. He shows how it constitutes an ethical orientation that heeds human yearnings for justice, beauty, and meaning. He engages the work of three exemplary witnesses: W. G. Sebald, Aimé Césaire, and Walt Whitman. Sebald powerfully confronts the human costs of the violence of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Césaire evokes a creative Black consciousness in the face of European colonialism and attests to this outlook's joyous and painful development. Whitman's witness to American life, alongside his poignant testimony about caring for wounded soldiers during the American Civil War, speaks to a hope deeper than hope for the prospects of democracy. Hansen shows how these witnesses did not "choose" to write about their respective themes. They had to. The circumstances of their lives and the events of their time summoned them to bear witness. Hansen addresses how their efforts, supplemented by those of other witnesses whose testimony he incorporates, hold considerable educational promise in a world marked by continued misunderstanding and discord and yet also by great possibility.
Contents
Foreword
Rachel Wahl
Preface
1. A Perspective on Bearing Witness
2. W. G. Sebald: Rightful Trespass into the Lives of Others
3. Aimé Césaire: Witnessing Transformation in Self and World
4. Walt Whitman: Democracy, Remembrance, and the Witness
5. Bearing Witness and Education
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Name Index
Subject Index
