Literary Interventions in Justice: A Symposium

The purpose of this symposium is to explore the ways in which literature, broadly construed include poetry and narrative a variety modes representation, can change world by providing interventions justice. Our approach foregrounds relationship between activity demanded some individual literary works categories work on one hand way those make tangible difference social reality other. We consider three types active engagement: doing philosophy, ideological critique, necessary rather than contingent performance. Kate Kirkpatrick opens with Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation (2013), reading narrator as not only critic colonial postcolonial discourse but also exemplar search for justice when it difficult know what level explanation attribute its absence. Rafe McGregor demonstrates how final season Prime Video’s Man High Castle (2015–19) makes radical break from previous three, exposing misanthropy at core right-wing populism calling fundamentally democratic response left. Finally, Karen Simecek argues that performance has potentially reparative function ethically lonely – vulnerable, oppressed, persecuted society.