The Witness as Educator: Reading W. G. Sebald, Aimé Césaire, and Walt Whitman

Synopsis

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.

Copyright:

2025

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

Book Size:

241 Pages

ISBN-13:

9798855803501

Related ISBNs:

9798855803488, 9798855803495

Publisher:

State University of New York Press

Date of Addition:

08/01/25

Copyrighted By:

State University of New York

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Nonfiction, Literature and Fiction, Education, Language Arts, Law, Legal Issues and Ethics, Philosophy, Sociology

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.

Foreword by:

Rachel Wahl