Normalizing Narrative Forms of Human Rights: The (Dys)Function of the Public Sphere

Abstract

The discussion of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) forecasts some of this chapter's arguments about the role of the public sphere in normalizing and naturalizing common sense. The dramatic restaging of the discursive process in The Story I Am About to Tell is an extraordinary literary form for the story of incorporation. The Bildungsroman is the more ordinary story form of incorporation for a democratic social order that either is already established (and generally perceived as legitimate) or is coming to birth in a timeframe somewhat longer than that of a new South Africa. Theoretically, the liberal public sphere is a sociocivic story space that connects personal biography and nation-statist historiography. Historically, the affirmative Bildungsroman is the liberal public sphere's most favored novelistic form for plotting human personality development and the acquisition of civil and human dignity as the normative story of modern socialization, liberation, and emancipation.