ENGL 2P53 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Cognitive Dissonance
13 Jan 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Interest in the transmission of trauma from those eye-witnesses who testify to their second-hand witnesses from writer/performer/artist to their audiences from generation to generation. If we assimilate new information that conforms to what we already know, we haven"t really learned anything. Testimonial teaching fosters the capacity to witness something that may be suprising, cognitively dissonant. Teaching as potentially transformative; learning to access something that does not fit the established frame, to meet the crisis, is the first step in working through the crisis. Felman"s students at once speechless, and yet can"t stop speaking about the testimonies they have witnessed, in pursuit of understanding, not in possession of understanding. What has been transmitted is not knowledge or understanding, but a sense of crisis, disruption, perhaps alienation (from self, from understanding, from certainty, from others) Violent struggle adopted by liberation movements in 1960 after sharpeville. Violence orchestrated by the state on its own people.
