Testimony, Witness, Authority (PDF)

What does it mean to listen faithfully to how stories are told through a web of verbal and near-verbal media? How do dynamics of testimony, witness, and authority work to determine the politics and poetics of human experience? This collection of essays addresses fundamental problems that confront creative practitioners, researchers, educators, and graduate and undergraduate students working on questions about expressive communication across the Humanities, Creative Arts, and Social Sciences. It is an international interdisciplinary examination of the interaction between verbal and near-verbal media, their uses, and their users.The leading theme of this volume is an interrogation of texts, both oral and written, that bear witness to experience and which are determined by permutations of subjective consciousness, the dynamics of transmission, cultural knowledge systems and codes, aboriginality, and the limits of verbalisation. The contributing authors are international scholars and artists in the fields of literature, education, creative writing, linguistics, film and documentary, performance studies, sporting culture, politics, and poetics. All offer erudite insights on various formal and informal articulations of experience, their applications, and their broader significance.