Michael Bernard-Donals

mfbernarddon@wisc.edu
608-263-2948
Professor of English and Jewish Studies; Department Chair

Degrees and Institutions

PhD, English, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1991.
BA, English, University of Notre Dame, 1985

Research Areas

Rhetorical Theory; Critical Theory, History and Memory.

Selected Publications

Mikhail Bakhtin: Between Phenomenology and Marxism (Cambridge, 1994); The Practice of Theory (Cambridge, 1998); Rhetoric in an Antifoundational World (Yale, 1998); Between Witness and Testimony: the Holocaust and the Limits of Representation (SUNY 2001); Witnessing the Disaster: Essays on Representation and the Holocaust (Wisconsin 2004); An Introduction to Holocaust Studies: History, Memory, and Representation (Prentice Hall 2006); Forgetful Memory: Representation and Remembrance after Auschwitz; and essays and review on rhetoric, the teaching of writing, critical theory, and the Holocaust in various journals.

Personal Statement

My teaching and research have increasingly focused on the relation of memory and ethics: to what extent do events compel us to speak, what is the relation between what we're compelled to say and our obligations to others, and what formal properties of utterance -- testimony, history, poetry -- create what could be called a 'memorial effect' on both speaker and listener? I'm particularly interested in how these questions might be answered in the contemporary context, in which memorial locations seem to exert a kind of memory effect (Auschwitz, ground zero in Manhattan, and other sites of and memorials to atrocity) that both is and is not directly related to the events they presume to 'name.'