Cirrus@Austlit

This course will examine how literature has helped to create and critique modern concepts of human rights and humanitarianism. It will focus on the ethical and political questions that arise from this discourse in contemporary works of literature from across the globe. This course will investigate what storytelling can hope to accomplish in the wake of mass violence and examine the new kinds of responsibility that these stories create in a globalizing world. It will analyze different visions of the human that enable these visions and explore how human rights and humanitarian practices relate to the history of Western imperialism. Topics will vary from year to year, but may include refugee narratives, truth commission testimony, aid worker memoirs, and fictions of witnessing.