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

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 summ