Reading Human Rights Literature in Undergraduate Literature Classes: Professorial Desire, Disciplinary Culture, and the Chances of Cultivating Compassion

Abstract

This article opens with survey results indicating that a majority of professors of undergraduate courses hope to encourage their students to take action for social change and goes on to examine the chances of success when professors assign human rights literature as part of that project. Hope for a positive outcome would appear to be bolstered by psychologists’ experimental findings that under certain conditions fictional texts as well as factual ones can persuade readers to act in favor of justice. However, those findings also point to a second and far more common outcome of reading about injustice. If readers’ exigent requirements for action are not met, they will instead engage in cognitive restructuring of their perspectives on the situation, sufferer, suffering, or themselves. For instance, readers may cease to view the suffering as unjust and remediable, or they may come to see others (rather than themselves) as the appropriate agents of change. Considering the magnitude of the task as well as the academic culture in which literature professors have been prepared, how likely is it that those who hope to use human rights literature to encourage students to take social action will realize that desire?

Kimberly Nance (Ph.D. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) directs the Graduate School at Illinois State University and is Professor of Latin American Literature in the Department of Languages, Literatures & Cultures. She served for five years on the Modern Language Association of America Committee on the Teaching of Literature, and her books on this topic include Can Literature Promote Justice? (2006, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt) and Teaching Literature in the Languages (2010, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall). Her current work centers on rhetoric, reception, and questions of social efficacy in contemporary memoirs and novels of displaced children and child soldiers.

Notes

1. Human rights literature is here defined broadly as texts in any genre, whether documentary or fictional, that confront readers with a gap between the actual conditions of a person or group and the conditions that would enable that person or group to exercise fully the rights and freedoms enumerated in the United Nations’ (1948) Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

2. While the specifics of their terminology differ, Eisenberg and her colleagues’ distinctions among empathy, sympathy, and personal distress bear some resemblance to Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts of empathy and exotopy as steps in the process of “answerability,” his term for the witness's ethical response to suffering. For Bakhtin, empathy occurs when the witness attempts to understand as closely as possible what the sufferer is feeling. However, in order to respond ethically the witness must then “return” to his or her own place, since it is only from that position that he or she can offer assistance. According to Bakhtin, “lingering” imaginatively in the place of that suffering other rather than returning to one's own place is an ethical fault (1990: 25–26). For further discussion of ethical development, see Eisenberg (2002), Eisenberg et al. (1988), and Killen and Smetana (2006).

3. Lerner is emphatic in his insistence that defenses are not limited to uncaring people. Even people of good faith engage them when necessary to protect a crucial article of that faith. In fact, people who are more invested in social justice may even be more likely to draw on such defenses when redress seems impossible or the cost too high, because witnessing injustice pains them more. If the circumstances do not satisfy a given reader's preconditions for helping, then cognitive restructurings allow that reader to preserve the belief in justice even when he or she is not going to help. In some sense, then, those cognitive defenses can be seen as helping to maintain the potential for future action. In a similar vein, Lerner finds that readers are more likely to help when they believe that it is no more than any reasonable person would do under the circumstances (1980: 6, 27, 186).

4. Lerner (1980) sets forth a substantially similar set of requirements for witnesses to feel obligated to act.

5. Reading assignments and discussion are not the only influences on the likelihood of social action by students. For instance, many faculty members are beginning to introduce service-learning projects. López-Rivera (2007) offers examples and a brief list of useful readings on this topic. Boyle-Baise and Langford (2004) provide a nuanced look at the promises and potential pitfalls of service-learning in the context of a program expressly intended to promote social justice.

6. Mohanty (1995, 1997) discusses the tendency for literary scholars’ awareness of cultural difference and of their own fallibility to shade into a paralyzing relativism and proposes what he terms “post-positivist realism” as a practical foundation for respectful ethical judgment and action. Surveying academic studies of justice, Amartya Sen (2009) takes note of theorists’ focus on hypothetical issues of what would constitute a perfectly just social arrangement. Sen advocates instead for a comparative perspective, both to evaluate the relative merits of existing institutions and social interactions in promoting justice, and to inform our choices among alternatives.