ABSTRACT
There seems to be a common belief today, among book circle readers, scholars, and presidents alike, that human rights and literature are interrelated phenomena. From different points of view, based on more or less qualified analyses and assumptions, it is widely held that the two areas are based on two mutual cornerstones: the individual experiential human being, and the psychological capacity of empathy – of being able to imagine how it is to be another (cf. Goldberg and Moore; Hunt; Keen; Nussbaum). Just think about classic modern novels, such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), or Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which foreground the personal experiences and feelings of ‘inferior’ characters, such as the female servant or the Negro slave, or any Amnesty International campaign that criticizes human rights abuses globally by telling the stories of individuals – of the 600 days of imprisonment of an Egyptian photojournalist, or of the death sentence of the Sudanese woman whose crime was to marry a Christian.2 The novels, as well as the campaigns, invite their readers to emotionally engage with the personal stories that are being told, as Martha Nussbaum puts it, to ‘recognize the other
as a center of experience’ (Political Emotions 146). Despite the different political, legal, and cultural institutions, discourses, and agencies that structure and validate them, novels and a universalist ethics of human rights thus welcome a similar reaction from its receivers – an empathic response.
