Description
Notwithstanding the aesthetic turn’s shift towards perceiving objets d’art as representative arenas which host ‘the very location of politics’ (Bleiker, 2001: 510), the position of – and opportunities offered by – the employment of literary works in International Relations has yet to be fully theorised as an interpretive methodology. As scholars and commentators, we are comfortable in deploying our “Orwellian world” metaphors, but never reach for a Behnian[1] reading of Orientalising discourse, or a Steinbeckian approach to restorative justice in post-conflict dialogue – in sum, we have largely neglected to recognise exactly how literary works provide the researcher with a toolkit. In this paper, I theorise a two-fold function of literature as a lens through which to analyse international relations: 1) fiction enables us to inhabit a sphere of existence and experience which may otherwise have been inaccessible to our own positionalities, no least because it systematises the empirical world into a coherent narrative that can be logically comprehended, and therefore enables us to make the world intelligible; and 2) in presenting us with an aestheticised political practice (Edkins, 2013), literature invites deliberation, critique, and transformation of the reader’s own world.
[1] After Aphra Behn, the author of Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave (1688).
