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Commonplace Witnessing examines how citizens, politicians, and civic institutions have adopted idioms of witnessing in recent decades to serve a variety of social, political, and moral ends. The book encourages us to continue expanding and diversifying our normative assumptions about which historical subjects bear witness and how they do so.
List of contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: Invention: Booker T. Washington's Cotton States
- Exposition Address
- Chapter 2: Authenticity: Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments
- Chapter 3: Regret: George W. Bush's Gorée Island Address
- Chapter 4: Habituation: The National September 11 Memorial
- Chapter 5: Impossibility
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
About the author
Bradford Vivian is Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Pennsylvania State University. His previous books include Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again (Penn State University Press, 2010), and his past honors include a Faculty Fellowship with the Center for Humanities and Information and a National Endowment for the Humanities Stipend.
Summary
Commonplace Witnessing examines how citizens, politicians, and civic institutions have adopted idioms of witnessing in recent decades to serve a variety of social, political, and moral ends. The book encourages us to continue expanding and diversifying our normative assumptions about which historical subjects bear witness and how they do so.
Additional text
Commonplace Witnessing is a valuable and thought- provoking contribution that successfully shifts the focus on witnessing from an individual/ authentic to a public/ rhetorical axis. Vivian's examples are appropriately provocative, and his sharp and detailed readings of these more than adequately support his central claims.
