Call for Essay Proposals for Teaching Literature and Human Rights

Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis invite essay proposals for a volume in the Options for Teaching series entitled Teaching Literature and Human Rights. The volume is intended to offer effective strategies for the teaching of interdisciplinary courses in literature and human rights. The volume's first section, "Issues and Definitions," will address definitions of key terms; the complexities of teaching language and literature courses that take human rights as their framework or courses in human rights that incorporate literary texts; the relation between postcolonial literary studies and the emergence of human rights as the dominant language for pursuing global social justice; and the development of interdisciplinary work in literature and human rights from roots in postcolonial studies, trauma theory, testimonial and witness literatures, and so on. The second section will explore rhetorics of human rights, presenting pedagogies for the development of critical media and human rights literacies, and a third section will be devoted to reading human rights through genres such as the novel, drama, poetry, journalism, and film. A final section, "Classroom Contexts," will examine the risks and rewards of studying literature and human rights together, including issues of spectatorship; the mobilization of empathy or sentimentality or both; active reading strategies; global power relations; and the potential objectification of the textual subjects. The editors are interested in essays grounded in specific syllabi, guiding questions, assignments, and pedagogical strategies and invite contributions from a range of disciplinary and institutional contexts at all levels of postsecondary education. Especially welcome are essays from scholars working in international contexts and from language or law departments. One-page abstracts are invited by 15 December 2009, although the editors strongly encourage potential contributors to contact them well in advance of the deadline. Please address all inquiries, suggestions, and essay proposals to Goldberg (egoldberg@babson.edu) and Schultheis (tanagerlodge@yahoo.com).