Genre, Critique, and Human Rights

This article begins to examine the turn to genre in works at the intersection of law and literature, broadly understood. It categorizes two examples of this turn, those of Lynn Hunt and Robert Meister respectively, as less and more critical turns to genre. The less critical turns to genre succumb more to the romantic fantasy of the completion of law by literature, whereas the more critical turns succumb less, encouraging or allowing us to experience ‘dissonance in the form one has become.’ The more critical turns to genre allow one to better articulate the critical work of law and literature, including the way we have been disciplined to separate ethics and aesthetics, sense and sensibility. I conclude by suggesting that the focus on genre may lead to a fruitful re-casting of law and literature as literacies and legalities.