Reading & Composition

What are human rights? How did this concept begin and where? How can literature engage with human rights as a discourse and a practice? In this course we will be reading/viewing texts that deal with the issue of human rights through a variety of genres and media: graphic novels, novels, plays, poems, songs, photographs, and films. We will begin to explore how aesthetics and the manipulation of genre work on us as readers of texts that often deal with traumatic historical events. How do literature, film, and photography manipulate a reader’s empathy? What role have these genres and media played in calling such sentiments into being and normalizing them? The texts we read will come from several geographical regions and historical periods, and one of our tasks will be to critically evaluate distinct, sometimes problematic articulations of human rights as we begin to formulate a more global definition and understanding of them. In addition to literary texts, then, we will also read theoretical essays by scholars from Plato to Lynn Hunt to help us understand how literature contributes to the human rights discussion and vice versa.

Readings may include: Narrative of a Life of Fredrick Douglass, Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje, Death and the Maiden by Ariel Dorfman, Maus (a Graphic Novel) by Art Spiegelman, short stories and/or poems by Julio Cortazar, Sherman Alexie, Americo Paderes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou, and Pablo Neruda, among others.