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Print Price: $81.50

Format:
Hardback
240 pp.
6.125" x 9.25"

ISBN-13:
9780190611088

Publication date:
July 2017

Imprint: OUP US

Commonplace Witnessing

Rhetorical Invention, Historical Remembrance, and Public Culture

Bradford Vivian

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. Commonplace Witnessing presupposes that witnessing in modern public culture is a broad and inclusive rhetorical act; that many different types of historical subjects now think and speak of themselves as witnesses; and that the rhetoric of witnessing can be mundane, formulaic, or popular instead of rare and refined. This study builds upon previous literary, philosophical, psychoanalytic, and theological studies of its subject matter in order to analyze witnessing, instead, as a commonplace form of communication and as a prevalent mode of influence regarding the putative realities and lessons of historical injustice or tragedy. It thus weighs both the uses and disadvantages of witnessing as an ordinary feature of modern public life.

Readership : Fellow scholars in the humanities and social sciences (primarily in North America and Europe) invested in the study of witnessing, collective memory, and the cultural politics of historical narrative.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Invention: Booker T. Washington's Cotton States Exposition Address
2. Authenticity: Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments
3. Regret: George W. Bush's Gorée Island Address
4. Habituation: The National September 11 Memorial
5. Impossibility
Conclusion
Bibliography

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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.

Making Sense - Margot Northey and Joan McKibbin
Witnessing Witnessing - Thomas Trezise
Reluctant Witnesses - Arlene Stein

Special Features

Argues for the commonplace significance of witnessing as an important social, political, and moral speech act. This position contrasts with longstanding assumptions that a witness (in the postwar usage throughout western public culture) is a relatively rare historical subject endowed with extraordinary experience, and thus authority to speak for the lessons of history.
Questions common forms of public reverence for witnessing and witnesses, or the ready sympathies that often attend acts of witnessing in public culture.
Maintains that witnessing is an act of rhetorical invention-meaning that it depends upon a writer's or speaker's adaptation of familiar tropes, topoi, lines of argument, forms of reasoning, and sympathetic appeals to fit immediate social, political, and moral exigencies.