Just Literature (JUL)
Just Literature (JUL) explores how literature, from its gradually marginalized position in its traditional sense of written books to its plurification of texts in new media, discloses, challenges and changes our understanding of justice. Literature, from holy texts to banned books, is an institution per se, as is justice, and these two institutions enact each other in complex ways. Justice appears in many forms from divine right to religious doxa and natural law, and from metaphysical imperative to human rights and civil disobedience. Frequently, ideas of justice clash with the ethos of war, with social order and national and international jurisdiction and educational systems and political concerns, as does literature. From Sophocles’ Antigone, via Shakespeare’s plays to current literature from contested places such as Guantánamo Bay detention camp and incumbent contemporary concerns of environment, egality, migration, social inclusion and gender, the imaginative ingenuity of written arts has for millennia proven itself to create an exceptional possibility for exploring the borders of human life, law and justice. Ideals of justice are inextricable from human concerns of ethics and morals. Just Literature (JUL) attends to the imaginative ways in which literature, from conventional fiction to multimodal and digital texts, forever continues the visions of a just human existence.