What we learn from stories

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I’m interested in thinking about how literature interacts with questions of social justice, social responsibility and the law. I also focus on how literature thinks about resolutions to social problems. I do this by thinking about genres of literature, epics, tragedies and, especially, Bildungsroman.

How literature responds to real problems and works through imaginative solutions is attached to the story form of particular genres. Story forms are conventional. They are centred upon a set of expectations about how stories unfold and proceed as well as what they mean and what they discuss. Because of these conventional forms, readers have a set of expectations and they learn how to think about particular types of problems.

Normalising ideas

It’s not uncommon to think about epics as stories about the founding of nations. With all the horrific violence that such historical events entail, the epic normalises ideas about nations. Epics also convey ideas about what responsibility to a country is and what a government owes to its people.

Historically, tragedy has operated on a different set of problems. It worries about how human frailties and human vanities can end up threatening a particular social order, typically the State.

At the level of literary form, I tend to think about how particular story forms with their generic conventions operate to normalise certain ideas. These ideas might concern what it means to be an individual, an individual’s relation to society, the social good and so on.

I use the term normalising very deliberately to invoke norms and nomos. In this way, I think about how literature relates deeply to questions of law.

Human rights through literature

The Bildungsroman form, the coming of age novel, tells a story in which an individual struggles with society’s constraints and then grows up and becomes a responsible community member. I’ve argued this form normalises particular ideas about what it means to grow up as a responsible citizen within a democratic society. It teaches us how we think about ourselves in relation to society.

It just so happens that this problem, an individual’s responsibility and relationship to society, is at the foundation of human rights. Indeed, these two things are intimately connected.

One of the things that I’ve focused on over the years, especially in my book Human Rights, Inc., is how the Bildungsroman conventionalises fundamental human rights ideas. Of course, these ideas are also represented in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the American Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Social functions of the Bildungsroman

The Bildungsroman emerged in the 18th century in Germany as a kind of counterpart to the French Revolution. It served as a pedagogical way for individuals to enter society as full democratic participants while avoiding the need for revolution.

Nevertheless, I think of the Bildungsroman as a social function more than a literary form. The social function it performs is that it incorporates marginal citizens or those who are not yet citizens. Indeed, I consider the form a genre of demarginalisation.

Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship

Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship follows a young man who was left out of elite society. Goethe develops a plot structure that allows this bourgeois man to make individual choices guided by a kind of oversight society that will enable him to enter the aristocracy’s realms.

It’s true we no longer consider the white male subject as someone who needs to be demarginalised in the spirit of democracy in the 18th century. Yet, a real estate agent, which Wilhelm Meister is, was a marginal subject in relation to governance and power. So, the genre in the 18th century was one in which authors could pursue this issue of the individual’s relationship to a democratic society.

Advancing human rights

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Over the past two centuries, we can see how the Bildungsroman genre has helped normalise ideas surrounding human rights by being a genre of incorporation and demarginalisation. Yet, because it operates in a realm where norms are being established, it occupies a contested space.

Over time, we see the genre being used by social groups to make human rights claims on society. These are claims for inclusion. Indeed, there are specific examples in the 19th century. There are stores of street children and orphans in Dickens. Throughout the Victorian era, other novels focus on how these people, who are effectively not full citizens, are provided with an opportunity to enter society.

A normalising genre

The genre of the Bildungsroman is a normalising genre. Typically, it tells a story of how an individual who has historically been excluded from the privileges and the rights of democratic society might somehow integrate or incorporate into that society.

This normalisation is one reason Bildungsroman is taught in schools around the world to children and adolescents. It serves as a kind of exemplum for good citizenship. Yet, it encapsulates a sense of contest. Again, populations excluded from the democratic project have used this form to claim human rights and inclusion within democratic societies.

Influencing societies

Often, we tend to think about literature in a broad sense. One way in which I understand Bildungsromane is a story form that is making claims for political representation. It does this across societies. For instance, books about young Black men attempting to come of age but being stifled in that possibility seem to impact how society and the law develop significantly.

One way to think about this impact is to consider the dominant society as a readership. Typically, it’s a middle-class readership. Suppose a middle-class readership is reading stories about people who have been historically marginalised. They learn to recognise a desire for inclusion as parallel to their own wishes. This realisation must have a considerable impact on how middle-class society responds to those seeking inclusion.

What inspires Bildungsroman

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I was teaching a course on the Bildungsroman after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. I had started to put together some pieces about European Imperial and American Imperial interventions in other locations. I began to notice that within several years of a military or political invasion in some fashion, other Bildungsromane from that location started to be published.

Within just a couple of years of the invasion of Afghanistan, The Kite Runner was published to immense popular success in the US. The Kite Runner tells the story of a young boy growing up in Kabul, Afghanistan. This boy loves Coca-Cola, watches John Wayne films and wants to participate in a democratic, consumerist society. He manages to get out of Afghanistan, come to the US, study creative writing and write a book about his experience.

Lessons from The Kite Runner

The structure of the story is, on the one hand, an affirmation of the American invasion. Although I disagree with the notion, the story implies we’re doing good when we’re invading a country precisely because we’re producing Bildungsroman.

Naturally, George W. Bush, as President at the time, said that The Kite Runner was one of his favourite novels. Both he and Laura claimed it was their favourite book for about a year. I think there’s no coincidence that it was because the story itself makes a claim for inclusion in precisely the kind of ideals that the Bush administration claimed it was fighting for.

Discover more about

Literature and human rights

Slaughter, J. R. (2008). Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. Fordham University Press.

Slaughter, J. (2008). Humanitarian Reading. In R. A. Wilson & R. D. Brown (Eds.), Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy through Narrative (pp. 88–107). Cambridge University Press.

Slaughter, J. R. (2018). Hijacking Human Rights: Neoliberalism, the New Historiography, and the End of the Third World. Human Rights Quarterly, 40(4), 735–775.

Human rights seen through literature