Abstract
In this chapter Hållander offers and develops the account of testimony in relation to the problem of representation within teaching. Drawing on Arendt (Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Penguin Books, 2006) and Agamben (Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books, 2008) in order to highlight how testimonies stand between the past and the present in ways that can have ethical, political and aesthetic dimensions, Hållander argues that testimonies from the past urge us not only to read, to listen and to act on them, but also to guard against making them into means for something else. Hållander draws on Eyvind Johnson’s Return to Ithaca (1952), and specifically Penelope’s weaving a web as a metaphor for teaching to argue that testimonies in education do not stand outside of history and the political but are integral to them. Hence, drawing on Spivak (2004, 2008), Hållander shows how testimonies used within teaching can become forms of re-presentation, redoings, that are multiple and multi-layered.
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Notes
- 1.
Eyvind Johnson (1900–1976) was a Swedish working class author, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature together with Harry Martinsson in 1974.
- 2.
In the ensuing sections of the chapter Agamben discusses this in relation to the potentiality of poetic language, and specifically Hölderlin. Although the sensibility of this poetic language may of course be relevant, but as I have written before, the poetic language is not a zone free from violence.
- 3.
With subaltern Spivak is referring to those who have been removed from the line of social mobility.
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Hållander, M. (2020). “Pull Out the Uneven Thick Threads”: On Penelope’s Web and Re-Presentation as a Way of Teaching. In: The Pedagogical Possibilities of Witnessing and Testimonies. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55525-2_3
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