LITERATURE,CHANGE AND FREEDOM

'Human Rights Literature'',the genre at its very heart

stands to give power to turn a victim into a
survivor,all by the virtue of literature.It works when
the author is commited to his responsibility to
combine the literary force with the motivation for
action,thereby making the literature as powerful as
life.It therefore holds a tremendous power to bring
about change,revealing a world to the reader and
thus the reader can no longer see the world in its
passive state.
Literature then at its very core gives the possibility of
change.And with it comes the necessity of
freedom,basic human freedom to read,write,imagine
and ultimately act and as Sartre puts it-''writing is a
certain way of demanding freedom''.
Therefore this proposed paper aims to deal with the
idea of literature and its power to change the
world,how fiction and books shape our imagination
and our reaction to the social and political
environment around us.The very genre of engaged
literature is dealt with,understood with all its
implications and purposes.Mainly referring to two
novels -Harper Lee's 'To Kill A Mockingbird' and Franz
Kafka's 'The Trial',how the imaginary fictional
universe of these novels made an empathetic
powerful relation with the readers.Dealing with the
social reception of these books,the themes and the
universal issues raised through these novels and the

powerful impact they made upon the readers.Also

'The Wall',a short story by Jean Paul Sartre,examining
what story-telling can accomplish in the wake of
mass violence,how an author reacts to his social
conditions,expresses himself in the hopes of
promoting the call for action.Thus it also aims at
understanding the purpose of literature as a medium
of self expression and the importance of freedom in a
reader-writer equation along with their
responsibilities,using Sartre's ideas of freedom and
artistic creation as presented in 'Why
Write?',concluding that freedom is the answer to the
question,why write.