Sean Bex

Ghent University | UGhent · Department of Literary Studies

In this article, we analyse two testimonial narratives written or published by Dave Eggers, an American author, editor, and publisher whose oeuvre shows a marked interest in harnessing the power of narrative to engage in human rights activism. Both narratives focus on the case of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-American who suffered in the aftermath...

This article compares Dave Eggers's What Is the What and Invisible Children's Kony 2012, two recent and much-debated instances of human rights advocacy that mobilize subaltern testimonies. They do so in mutually illuminating ways, as they interact quite differently with the neocolonial discourses that come into play as Western activists and audienc...

Whereas many female authors of the long nineteenth century have been recovered and revalued in recent years, their relationship to the rise of professional authorship as well as their male peers has remained under analysed. Nevertheless, an understanding of the dynamic between budding American literary aspirations, the harsh commercialism of the de...

This article examines the ways in which two literary texts by the American author Dave Eggers, his novel You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002)11. EGGERS, Dave. (2002) You Shall Know Our Velocity (San Francisco, CA: McSweeney's).View all references and his short story “Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly,” interrogate the abstract humanism that underlie...

On 18 March 2015 we had the rare opportunity to publicly interview the celebrated American author Dave Eggers and Mimi Lok, co-founder with Eggers of the socially engaged oral history non-profit Voice of Witness, in front of a student audience at the Vooruit cultural center in Ghent, Belgium. The occasion for their visit was Eggers’s being awarded...