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Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law
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.
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.
- GenresNonfiction
436 pages, Paperback
First published December 17, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 4, 2025
unfortunately he ate so hard that my thesis is now in shambles
April 18, 2021
paradigm-shifting, with consistently insightful & detailed close-readings of texts (not something i take for granted any longer in academic texts, esp those informed by Theory) – opens my mind to thinking further about literature (in its entwinements with law) as something that *makes things happen in the world*, in the mode of the performative; what slaughter talks about as the 'tautology' and 'teleology' dialectic, becoming something that one is already supposed to be in the eyes of the law. such clever parallels drawn between human rights discourses & the genre of the bildungsroman in its many incarnations. i esp loved his interpretations of goethe, mercado, (christopher) hope, and dangarembga. might give it 5 stars on a reread
February 19, 2016
An amazing book full of points that are so scarily true that I grabbed my face while reading it a few times. Essential reading for anyone remotely interested in human rights, law, or ideas of personhood. Basically, if you would like to know what -really- makes you a person, then read. It is not getting 5 stars though because it gets pretty repetitive in the middle. A rendezvous in the introduction would be enough for most interested parties. Slaughter has recently been working on a new and pretty amazing angle on the same issue though, and I would definitely be following his publications on that.
December 28, 2014
Deeply, prohibitively boring. I really just skimmed most of it. If you're fascinated by the topic then you might find some useful stuff here, and I suffered through a lot of it because it's directly related to my research topic, but I just couldn't stand it anymore.
August 16, 2010
Self promotion: See my review in Comparative Literature Studies 46.1
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews