Jul 03 2024
Workshop 3: Literature and Human Rights
The third Workshop will be conducted by Cassandra Falke and Ted Laros on the topic of Literature and Human Rights.
This workshop will focus on literary representations of human rights abuses. Increasingly, scholars “look to literature to gain access to as well as incarnate those facets of selfhood that liberal human rights discourses obscure” (Anker 2) – embodied experience, collective memory, the singularity of the event. Literature seems to offer a freer discursive space in which people can tell a richer tale than the restrictions of legal testimony allow. But literary conventions and book markets impose their own restrictions in terms of both narrative form and who is empowered to write and publish. The workshop will explore contrasts, complementarity and historical intersections between literature and human rights, giving special attention to two works of contemporary fiction as “case studies” for contemporary methods of interdisciplinary work.
