Date: May 16, 2016

Time: 12:45pm-2pm

Location: Radcliffe Humanities Building

The TORCH Network Fiction and Human Rights is hosting a seminar on ”Beyond the Bildungsroman? Creating Free Agents Today‘. Two critically-acclaimed novelists discuss the way selfhood and autonomy are represented in their latest works. Positioning their novels in relation to Joseph Slaughter’s and Stephen Clingman’s ideas about the connections between the Bildungsroman and the discourse of human rights, TORCH director Elleke Boehmer and the London-based Irenosen Okojie will explore the relationship between aesthetics and agency in The Shouting in the Dark (2015) and Butterfly Fish (2015) respectively. How might modifications to the conventional Bildungsroman constitute new paradigms for human rights?

Copies of the novels will be on sale and the authors are happy to sign them.

The event will be chaired by Dr Tessa Roynon. Sandwiches at 12.45 for a 1.00 start.

Fiction and Human Rights

Race and Resistance across Borders in the Long Twentieth Century

Contact name: 

Tessa Roynon–tessa.roynon@rai.ox.ac.uk