Rorty

According to Rorty in "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity," it's impossible to unify responsibility-to-the-social-world and responsibility-to-one's-self-as-"individual" at the level of theory.  In English departments today, though, it's often assumed that texts have political ramifications; so, for example, J. Boone (according to R. Felski) looks for the political subversiveness in modernist works of fiction.  But Rorty himself also reads such works as doing political work: that is, they provide redescriptions that allow us to identify our cruelties and develop empathy for the Other.