Narrative and Human Rights · English And Comparative Literature
This class focuses on very abstract concepts of the sort of narrative and storytelling around human rights violations.
This was my first real introduction to high-level critical literary analysis. The ideas that Professor Slaughter explained in lecture made me question the assumptions I had entered class with.
A totally new framework of human rights based on literary forms and rhetorical power. Thinking about law as legal fictions and human rights claims as a story totally changed the way I thought about the world. You'll also learn a lot about various different human rights eras, laws, and events with similar rigorousness as an actual international human rights law class.
how narratives contribute to the project of human rights. How they negotiate human rights, reflect human rights discourse. Also, how they might be problematic or counterproductive
Law as a language. Literary analysis from a more comp lit angle. Some decolonial theory. Alternate forms of story telling. Genre. etc,
I have always been interesting in issues of human rights, but have never considered how they might be approached in terms of narrative and literature. This class was wonderful in helping me learn the different genres in which human rights issues might manifest in, the different themes and motifs that might appear, and overall to approach literature in a different, more empathetic, perspective than I was used to.
I learned a lot about how various entities talk about human rights, and how this converged with philosophical and thematic qualities of literature and flims. I think Professor Slaughter definitely succeeded in examining how literary questions of narrative shape (and are shaped by) human rights concerns.
Nothing concrete, but I have noticed a theoretical shift in my thinking that easily ties narrative to reality. Moreover, it was interesting to briefly cover human rights violations I'd never heard of prior, such as the Indonesian genocide and child soldiers in Sierra Leone.
I learned about how the structures of the human rights regime are inherently reliant on narrative, how narrative can influence the creation of human rights, and what it means to tell stories about human rights violations.
This course uses literature as a way to understand society and living, and specifically explains the power of human rights as the power of storytelling forms. It's great. Just take it.