ABSTRACT
What can literary theory reveal about discourses and practices of human rights, and how can human rights frameworks help to make sense of literature? How have human rights concerns shaped the literary marketplace, and how can literature impact human rights concerns? Essays in this volume theorize how both literature and reading literarily can shape understanding of human rights in productive ways. Contributors to Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature provide a shared history of modern literature and rights; theorize how trauma, ethics, subjectivity, and witnessing shape representations of human rights violations and claims in literary texts across a range of genres (including poetry, the novel, graphic narrative, short story, testimonial, and religious fables); and consider a range of civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights and their representations. The authors reflect on the imperial and colonial histories of human rights as well as the cynical mobilization of human rights discourses in the name of war, violence, and repression; at the same time, they take seriously Gayatri Spivak’s exhortation that human rights is something that we "cannot not want," exploring the central function of storytelling at the heart of all human rights claims, discourses, and policies.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |116 pages
Histories, Imaginaries, and Paradoxes of Literature and Human Rights
chapter |22 pages
“Literature,” the “Rights of Man,” and Narratives of Atrocity
chapter |24 pages
Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects
chapter |22 pages
Top-Down, Bottom-Up, Horizontally
chapter |17 pages
Intimations of What Was to Come
part |65 pages
Questions of Narration, Representation, and Evidence
part |61 pages
Rethinking the “Subject” of Human Rights