ENGH313

Allows students to analyze how human rights struggles have used literature and film to bolster their claims for social justice. Simultaneously, students may learn to assess the possibilities and limitations of literary and film texts that serve as tools for human rights activism. The end goal is to look closely and critically at cultural production - whether literature or film - and through this close analysis to develop a nuanced argument about a given text's social and political intervention. Introduces students to a range of primary texts including twentieth-century and contemporary fiction and documentary films, novels, memoirs, testimonials, etc. as well as secondary texts that historicize the rise of human right as a universalist concept and comment on the character of past and ongoing struggles for social justice.