Burdens of Political Responsibility: Narrative and the Cultivation of Responsiveness - Softcover

Schiff, Jade Larissa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1107614287 ISBN 13: 9781107614284

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2016

Synopsis

How can human beings acknowledge and experience the burdens of political responsibility? Why are we tempted to flee them, and how might we come to affirm them? Jade Larissa Schiff calls this experience of responsibility "the cultivation of responsiveness." In Burdens of Political Responsibility: Narrative and the Cultivation of Responsiveness, she identifies three dispositions that inhibit responsiveness - thoughtlessness, bad faith, and misrecognition - and turns to storytelling in its manifold forms as a practice that might facilitate and frustrate it. Through critical engagements with an unusual cast of characters (from Bourdieu to Sartre) hailing from a variety of disciplines (political theory, phenomenology, sociology, and literary criticism), she argues that how we represent our world and ourselves in the stories we share, and how we receive those stories, can facilitate and frustrate the cultivation of responsiveness.

About this title

Book Description:

Burdens of Political Responsibility addresses our experiences of political responsibility. It explains how and why we try to flee responsibility, and how we might embrace it. The book is politically significant because responsibility is a perennial and urgent issue, and it is a unique contribution to political theory because of its interdisciplinary character and its focus on experience and narrative. The book engages seriously with phenomenology, the philosophy of literature, literary criticism, and sociology.

About the Author:

Jade Larissa Schiff is Assistant Professor of Politics at Oberlin College, Ohio. Her specialty is in twentieth- and twenty-first-century continental political theory, and she works at the intersections of political theory, phenomenology, and literary criticism. Her current research explores experiences of suffering and the ways in which we narrate and respond to those experiences.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1107614287
• ISBN 13: 9781107614284
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 228