Violation of Human Rights in Holocaust/Post-Holocaust Era
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Daniela Carpi
Daniela Carpi is Full Professor of English Literature at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Verona. Her fields of research are Renaissance theatre, critical theory, postmodernism, law and literature, literature and science, literature and visual arts. She collaborates with Ombre Corte in Verona, where she edits a series ``Culture'' devoted to comparative criticism and a section ``Agon'' on law and culture; with De Gruyter in Berlin, where she edits (together with professor Klaus Stierstorfer) a series on ``Law and Literature.'' She has founded the Associazione Italiana di Diritto e Letteratura (AIDEL), which she presides. Among her most recent publications:Bioethics and Biolaw through Literature (De Gruyter: Berlin/ Boston, 2011) andLiminal Discourses. Subliminal Tensions in Law and Literature , ed. with Jeanne Gaakeer (De Gruyter: Berlin/Boston, 2013).
Abstract
The essay diachronically compares some declarations of man's rights such as Tom Paine's Rights of Man, the French Declaration des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen (1789) and, much later and after World War II, the Charter of the United Nations (1945) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) in order to understand how the concept of ``human rights'' has evolved across time. The triumph of human rights is rooted in paradox and in their principles' patent violations during the age of the Holocaust. One of the most horrible consequences of the violation of human rights in that period consisted in the survivors' being doomed to silence for more than twenty years. The survivors' words had to confront the resistance of language to represent what sounded as unrepresentable and the people's refusal to listen: they were deprived even of the right to speak. The problem of authenticity and inauthenticity is called into question, recalling Geoffrey Hartman's Scars of the Spirit. From this perspective, the paper examines John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006), Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments (1996) and William Styron's Sophie's Choice (1982), thus centring its focus on children's rights.
About the author
Daniela Carpi is Full Professor of English Literature at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Verona. Her fields of research are Renaissance theatre, critical theory, postmodernism, law and literature, literature and science, literature and visual arts. She collaborates with Ombre Corte in Verona, where she edits a series ``Culture'' devoted to comparative criticism and a section ``Agon'' on law and culture; with De Gruyter in Berlin, where she edits (together with professor Klaus Stierstorfer) a series on ``Law and Literature.'' She has founded the Associazione Italiana di Diritto e Letteratura (AIDEL), which she presides. Among her most recent publications: Bioethics and Biolaw through Literature (De Gruyter: Berlin/ Boston, 2011) and Liminal Discourses. Subliminal Tensions in Law and Literature, ed. with Jeanne Gaakeer (De Gruyter: Berlin/Boston, 2013).
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
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- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Focus: Law, Literature and (Popular) Culture
- State v. Estate: Jane Austen and the Law of Inheritance
- Women, Property and Identity in Victorian Legal Culture: Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White
- Interrelations Between Law and Culture: Iain M. Banks's The Player of Games
- Working at the Intersection of the Humanities, Law and Technology: Digital Humanities and the ``Two Cultures''
- For a New Semantics of Differences: Cultural Exception and the Law
- True Blood: Multicultural Vampires in Contemporary Society
- Research
- Legal Liturgies: The Aesthetic Foundation of Positive Law
- Modernity, Experience, and the Law in The Education of Henry Adams
- Violation of Human Rights in Holocaust/Post-Holocaust Era
- Defining Legal Vagueness: A Contradiction in Terms?
- Book Review
- Book Review
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Focus: Law, Literature and (Popular) Culture
- State v. Estate: Jane Austen and the Law of Inheritance
- Women, Property and Identity in Victorian Legal Culture: Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White
- Interrelations Between Law and Culture: Iain M. Banks's The Player of Games
- Working at the Intersection of the Humanities, Law and Technology: Digital Humanities and the ``Two Cultures''
- For a New Semantics of Differences: Cultural Exception and the Law
- True Blood: Multicultural Vampires in Contemporary Society
- Research
- Legal Liturgies: The Aesthetic Foundation of Positive Law
- Modernity, Experience, and the Law in The Education of Henry Adams
- Violation of Human Rights in Holocaust/Post-Holocaust Era
- Defining Legal Vagueness: A Contradiction in Terms?
- Book Review
- Book Review
