Journal of Human Rights

Titus Levy’s ’10  senior thesis was the lead paper in the Journal of Human Rights (Volume l0, Number 1). The paper, “Human Rights Storytelling and Trauma Narrative in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go,” was written for his Senior Capstone Seminar with Professor James Dawes.
 
The Journal of Human Rights is published by the Department of Political Science at the University of Connecticut at Storrs.

The article examines Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go as a type of Bildungsroman that presents coded models of contemporary human rights issues. It shows how autobiographical storytelling functions within the novel as a form of rights claim that gives voice to the suffering of an oppressed social group. The article demonstrates how the text grapples with the effects of storytelling on individual psychologies, both as a constructive response to atrocity and as a potentially dubious method of overcoming traumatic experience. It also underscores Ishiguro’s sensitivity to the ways that aestheticized forms of traumatic experience are consumed by the general public with a mixture of empathy, indifference, and perversion.