The Legible Face of Human Rights in Autobiographically Based Fiction

This chapter examines a number of narrative forms, from the traditional restorative Bildungsroman , to nonfiction narratives of suffering in so-called "literatures of captivity" to the more hybrid and potentially problematic form of autobiographically based fictions. From the Bildungsroman to the misery memoir to the accounts of suffering offered by human rights campaign appeals, many forms of life writing may equally be said to make rights legible in complex, coded, and possibly manipulative ways. The chapter suggests that unlike forms of life narrative that name themselves as legitimate and truth-based or as restorative through the status as literature, contemporary narratives of rights violation that draw on both autobiographical facts and the creativity of fiction speak in unique ways. For Paul de Man, the trope of autobiography was "prosopopeia," the rhetorical function of which is to posit "a voice or face by means of language" aimed at "the giving and taking away of faces, with face and deface, figure, figuration and disfiguration."

Aesthetics · Art · Face (sociological concept) · Social science · Sociology · Computer Science · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics