Particularizing the Universal: Dave Eggers Writes Human Rights

In this article, I explore the ways in which two literary texts by Eggers interrogate the abstract humanism which underlies universalist rights and explore the reasons for their ineptitude at effecting their promise of universalism when faced with the particularity of individual cultures. Eggers’s writing also engages and challenges the conclusions of cosmopolitan thinkers such as Kwame Anthony Appiah or Jürgen Habermas who have influentially proposed cross-cultural dialogue as a means of overcoming the tension between universalism and particularity. These pieces of literature effectively critique both the restricted reach of the rights regime in relation to their proclaimed universality as well as the most concerted theoretical effort at remedying their seeming incongruity with particular cultures. I argue that Eggers’s novel You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002) and his short story “Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly” lay bare some of the pitfalls which have plagued and continue to plague attempts at universalizing human rights. Interestingly, then, even as interdisciplinary research on literature and human rights has begun to etch out the coalescence of the two, Eggers provides an important example of how literary texts can also critique human rights discourses and explore questions pertaining to their universalist rhetoric

Marketing professionalism: the transatlantic authorship of Edith Wharton

Whereas many female authors of the long nineteenth century have been recovered and revalued in recent years, their relationship to the rise of professional authorship as well as their male peers has remained under analysed. Nevertheless, an understanding of the dynamic between budding American literary aspirations, the harsh commercialism of the developing national publishing scene and the profitable domestic tradition of female authors can shed new light on the development of female authorship in this period. In this article, I embed Wharton in the increasingly commercialised and transatlantic literary marketplace of her age to show how she adopted the masculine language of professionalism to distance herself from the domestic female writers which preceded her and carve out a place for her own high literary aspirations. I begin with a brief examination of her rather privileged socioeconomic background and ambitious literary aspirations before analysing more in depth her developing authorial persona throughout her career, primarily in comparison to two well-known male authors of the day, Henry James and Anthony Trollope. Wharton, I argue purposely adopted the business like attitude and commercial guise specifically avoided by her male counterparts because it guaranteed her the serious critical reception otherwise denied to female authors

Dave Eggers in Gent

Kort verslag van een publiek interview met Dave Eggers en Mimi Lok door prof. Stef Craps en Sean Bex ter gelegenheid van de Amnesty International Leerstoel in maart 2015. De Amnesty International leerstoel, die wordt ingericht door de Universiteit Gent, wordt jaarlijks toegekend aan iemand die een bijzondere bijdrage levert in het domein van de mensenrechten

An Interview with Dave Eggers and Mimi Lok

On 18 March 2015 we had the rare opportunity to publicly interview the celebrated American author Dave Eggers and Mimi Lok, co-founder with Eggers of the socially engaged oral history non-profit Voice of Witness, in front of a student audience at the Vooruit cultural center in Ghent, Belgium. The occasion for their visit was Eggers’s being awarded the 2015 Amnesty International Chair at Ghent University in recognition of his human rights work. The interview aimed to give the audience an overall sense of the various creative and charitable projects in which Eggers and Lok are involved and which have earned them widespread acclaim. This published version of it is an edited and condensed transcript. The interview consists of two parts. The first part deals with Eggers’s literary work, homing in on The Circle in particular. The second part focuses on Voice of Witness and on how this project relates to Eggers’s work as a writer

Beyond identification in human rights culture : voice of witness’s voices from the storm and Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun

In this article, we analyse two testimonial narratives written or published by Dave Eggers, an American author, editor, and publisher whose oeuvre shows a marked interest in harnessing the power of narrative to engage in human rights activism. Both narratives focus on the case of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-American who suffered in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and at the hands of the state through its response to that natural disaster. Our analysis challenges many of the assumptions with regard to affect that dominate the field of human rights and literature, which often takes for granted the intricate and treacherous process that undergirds a reader’s engagement with testimonial narratives. Affective engagement with the reader is a key feature of Eggers’s works, yet we show how it operates in a way that actively shapes the affective tenets of human rights culture in order to allow the reader to engage with the disempowered on more equal terms

Beyond Identification in Human Rights Culture: Voice of Witness’s Voices from the Storm and Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun

© 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. In this article, we analyse two testimonial narratives written or published by Dave Eggers, an American author, editor, and publisher whose oeuvre shows a marked interest in harnessing the power of narrative to engage in human rights activism. Both narratives focus on the case of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-American who suffered in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and at the hands of the state through its response to that natural disaster. Our analysis challenges many of the assumptions with regard to affect that dominate the field of human rights and literature, which often takes for granted the intricate and treacherous process that undergirds a reader’s engagement with testimonial narratives. Affective engagement with the reader is a key feature of Eggers’s works, yet we show how it operates in a way that actively shapes the affective tenets of human rights culture in order to allow the reader to engage with the disempowered on more equal terms.status: publishe