The "Novelistic Wing of Human Rights": James Joyce, Roger Casement, and Hannah Arendt

Abstract

ABSTRACT:In Ulysses, the universalism of Homer's Odyssey is not conceived as an abstract model or formal allegory but is reworked in terms of Irish historical links with the Levant and North Africa, not just the European legacy of classical Greece. In a related manner, the universalism of human rights espoused by the Irish revolutionary Roger Casement to condemn atrocities in the Congo and Putumayo region of the Amazon was considered not in abstract terms but in relation to the ethical memory of Ireland's own "nightmare of history." For Hannah Arendt, such forms of "entailed inheritance" were the basis of human rights, but whereas she looked to rights to curtail oppressors in "civilized" societies, Casement extended rights to the oppressed themselves, decolonizing, like Joyce, the very language of civility.