Synopses & Reviews
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.
Synopsis
Focusing on the intersection of literary studies and human rights, this collection provides the first full-length overview of this emerging interdiscipline by its leading scholars. It provides a history of the field in Holocaust, trauma, and postcolonial studies, an analysis of the central questions that have arisen out of this history, and a look to the possible futures of scholarship in human rights and literature. Essays examine different literary approaches to human rights from the perspectives of genre, narrative, and performativity theories and analyze the impact of contemporary theories of subjectivity on human rights literature. The interdisciplinary approach of this volume will appeal to scholars and students in legal studies, political science, ethical philosophy, language studies, women and gender studies, and cultural studies.