Title
Human Rights, Inc. : The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law / Joseph R. Slaughter.
ISBN
9780823291762
Published
New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2022]
Copyright
©2008
Language
English
Language Note
In English.
Description
1 online resource (436 p.)
Other Standard Identifiers
10.1515/9780823291762 doi
Summary
In this timely study of the historical, ideological, and formal interdependencies of the novel and human rights, Joseph Slaughter demonstrates that the twentieth-century rise of "world literature" and international human rights law are related phenomena. Slaughter argues that international law shares with the modern novel a particular conception of the human individual. The Bildungsroman, the novel of coming of age, fills out this image, offering a conceptual vocabulary, a humanist social vision, and a narrative grammar for what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and early literary theorists both call "the free and full development of the human personality." Revising our received understanding of the relationship between law and literature, Slaughter suggests that this narrative form has acted as a cultural surrogate for the weak executive authority of international law, naturalizing the assumptions and conditions that make human rights appear commonsensical. As a kind of novelistic correlative to human rights law, the Bildungsroman has thus been doing some of the sociocultural work of enforcement that the law cannot do for itself. This analysis of the cultural work of law and of the social work of literature challenges traditional Eurocentric histories of both international law and the dissemination of the novel. Taking his point of departure in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, Slaughter focuses on recent postcolonial versions of the coming-of-age story to show how the promise of human rights becomes legible in narrative and how the novel and the law are complicit in contemporary projects of globalization: in colonialism, neoimperalism, humanitarianism, and the spread of multinational consumer capitalism. Slaughter raises important practical and ethical questions that we must confront in advocating for human rights and reading world literature-imperatives that, today more than ever, are intertwined.
Access Note
Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics
text file PDF
Source of Description
Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 03. Jan 2023)
Available in Other Form
print 9780823228188
Frontmatter
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preamble
The Legibility of Human Rights
1. Novel Subjects and Enabling Fictions: The Formal Articulation of International Human Rights Law
2. Becoming Plots: Human Rights, the Bildungsroman, and the Novelization of Citizenship
3. Normalizing Narrative Forms of Human Rights: The (Dys)Function of the Public Sphere
4. Compulsory Development: Narrative Self- Sponsorship and the Right to Self-Determination
5. Clefs a` Roman: Reading, Writing, and International Humanitarianism
Codicil
Intimations of a Human Rights International: ''The Rights of Man; or What Are We [Reading] For?''
Notes
Bibliography
Index
