Commonplace Witnessing

Rhetorical Invention, Historical Remembrance, and Public Culture

Bradford Vivian

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

Commonplace Witnessing

Rhetorical Invention, Historical Remembrance, and Public Culture

Bradford Vivian

Description

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.

Commonplace Witnessing

Rhetorical Invention, Historical Remembrance, and Public Culture

Bradford Vivian

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

Commonplace Witnessing

Rhetorical Invention, Historical Remembrance, and Public Culture

Bradford Vivian

Author Information

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.

Commonplace Witnessing

Rhetorical Invention, Historical Remembrance, and Public Culture

Bradford Vivian

Reviews and Awards

"This book is a far-reaching exploration of a phenomenon Bradford Vivian has called 'commonplace witnessing;' by emphasizing the rhetorical strategies by which individuals bear witness to the past, over and above the requirement of first-hand or 'authentic' experience, Vivian reveals the ways in which witnessing has emerged as a subjective position that anyone might assume. Moreover, this commonplace witnessing can play a formative role in a more capacious construction of community over shared, difficult histories. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in how the past is mobilized to make claims both civic and political on behalf of the present."-Alison Landberg, Professor of History and Cultural Studies, George Mason University

"An extraordinary book. Vivian confronts the ubiquitous demand to bear witness and does not blink. Weaving subtle historical analysis and incisive reflection, he demonstrates what far too few want to recognize: public witnessing is an inextricably rhetorical act, a gathering of words, tropes, and arguments that invent collective memory and underwrite public culture in liberal democracies. If, as Vivian suggests, we are all called to bear witness, this book sheds crucial light on the constitutive elements of witnessing and the dilemmas that attend the witness' struggle to speak to what may well remain unspeakable. It is a book that needs to be read by all of those who hail remembrance as a cornerstone of ethical life."-Erik Doxtader, Professor of Rhetoric, University of South Carolina and Sr. Research Fellow, Institute for Justice and Reconciliation