Module Information

In response to a history of human rights abuses in recent centuries, writers from Frederick Douglass to Alexander Solzenhitsyn, Nelson Mandela to Viclav Havel, have spoken out against such acts, and served to draw the world's attention to the abuses of its peoples. This module will explore the role of the literatures of captivity in the struggle for human rights, focussing upon such areas of interest as the literature of slavery and abolition; representations of the Gulag; the Holocaust; Japanese American internment; memoirs of Communism; memoirs of northern Korean labour camps; and African national struggles for independence. The module will consider how imprisoned writers represent the tortured body, how many of these narratives turn to querying the construction of the past and the workings and function of memory in their representation of history, and how these narratives insistently return to themes that illustrate the aesthetic problem of reconciling normalilty with horror, the displacement of consciousness of life by the imminence and pervasiveness of death and torture, and the constant violation of the coherence of the self. Many of these writers raise issues to do with aesthetics: can torture be represented 'aesthetically'? How can physical traumas performed on the body be represented in writing? Can one speak about an 'aesthetics of incarceration'? How do literary aesthetics intersect with gross violations of human rights, and how can the power of the imagination conjure up images when a writer is confronted with the dilema of converting into literature a history too terrible to imagine?