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. Cés...