Literature and Social Justice: Goals of the Program

The Department of English at Lehigh University is currently developing a focus on Literature and Social Justice, the outcome of a multi-year effort to revitalize the traditional period-based approach to literary studies. Like the university as a whole, the department is committed to cultivating graduates who will be engaged citizens and community members, in addition to successful professionals and passionate life-long learners.

This focus on literature and social justice in the English Department comes from a shared sentiment among department faculty that we all have obligations to our fellow human beings, to our students and colleagues, our families and neighbors, and to strangers we will never meet in places we will never go. Whether articulated in medieval Catholic theology or modern Marxist thought, in the paintings of Rembrandt or the poems of Whitman, in the woods of Concord or the sound stages of Hollywood, this ethical and philosophical perspective envisions the world as a place where people are bound to one another in a network of mutual responsibility, where the fundamental rights of all human beings must be recognized.

Our work as scholars, writers, and teachers has meaning beyond the walls of the university. Part of our intellectual mission as a department is, through literature, to explore the nature of injustice, both as a characteristic of many socio-economic regimes and as a painful reality experienced by individuals, and to search for ways to create a more just and equitable society. David Aers has written that “We degrade and kill first in language,” and we recognize that, since language shapes our values even as our values shape our language, literature may serve the aims of domination as easily as the aims of justice. The first defense against the abuse of language that enables injustice must be the skills of interpretation and analysis that literary studies offer.

More than any other discipline, literature is based in a play of imagination that animates abundant possibilities for alternate social arrangements: atypical societies, different norms, other ways of living, utopian intuitions about more equitable, more liberated, and more just forms of social organization. Literature’s diverse inventory of aesthetic forms and strategies can move readers emotionally and recruit us to develop habits of empathy and nuanced thought. Literature can foreground the affective dimension of structures of inequality; its use of language may force readers to re-think moral rhetoric and its relationship to ethical practice; its complexly-realized worlds can embody, and thus make knowable and subject to analysis, vast economic and global structures that resist conceptualization on the basis of individual experience. Literature can lead us, as well, to understand traditional social structures from an informed, critical perspective. Reading literature from different historical periods reveals that dominant—and often limited—conceptions of justice have powerful roots and discursive legacies: using the tools of literary analysis to uncover the constructed nature of such legacies can challenge their supremacy.

The study of literature, mapping the contours of what it means to be human—our aspirations and anxieties, our histories and hopes—is essential to such an inquiry. We know others by the stories they tell, even as we determine who we are by the stories we tell ourselves. The study of literature shows that it is often through aesthetic form that a text conveys its affective or ideological significance. Literature classes challenge students to consider these formal properties of texts so as to uncover how texts resonate with their evolving experiences of self and of the world around them. Exploring this reverberation is itself an important social practice that occurs in a community of readers who are embedded in a network of critical and historical investigations. The literary imagination provides, as Martha Nussbaum writes, “an essential ingredient of an ethical stance that asks us to concern ourselves with the good of other people whose lives are distant from our own,” the necessary first step in determining the roots of injustice; in exposing the conditions and beliefs that perpetuate it; and, finally, in imagining strategies and possibilities for overcoming it.

The literature of different historical epochs is crucial to ethical inquiry, raising questions about the very meaning of justice, the powerful legacies of injustice, and the possibilities for social transformation. The English Department faculty are already deeply engaged in such inquiry. Our courses and our scholarship explore feminism, racism, economic exploitation, queer studies, postcolonial studies, ethics, medical humanities, and peace studies, across historical periods. Our work also demonstrates that these social problems and emancipatory movements—and the assumptions upon which they are founded— accrue different meanings in different times and places. As we remain committed to an historical study of English-language literature, our focus on literature and social justice offers new ways of thinking about what it means to study English literary history. This approach retains the historical and cultural foundation of studies in English, yet it conceptualizes the project of literary study somewhat differently, by focusing on conventional periods as moments of social and literary transformation. As we look to the future, we imagine a department whose work in literature is organized around a series of historical eras defined by social and ethical ferment as well as cultural and literary innovation.