Richard Rorty may be political philosopher and not a literary critic. But his love for aesthetics and literature has played well into his idea that philosophy, in the wake of the post-modernist recognition how contingent our culture really is, must surrender to poetry. And by poetry he means all the literature that allows us to find a common new vocabulary to extend our vision of 'us' to those whom we previously saw as 'them'.
In other words - 'redescribed', as Rorty would say - literature promotes solidarity, solidarity being the 'recognition of one another's common humanity'. In other words: literature is a tool of humanization and over-coming de-humanization. Rorty indeed believes that if we all read the right books and learn to see the 'other' as a fellow human being, we will not be cruel towards the other any longer.
Like his idea or not, for this paper it is worthwhile considering. I leave it to my work in my class "Contemporary Liberalism', where I had the pleasure to encounter Mr Rorty's writings this semester, to deconstruct the political sense he tries to make as a somewhat self-centered, self-creating modern left bourgeois-turned-'poet'. But for this final hypertext project in 'American Literary Traditions', it seems very worthwhile indeed to look to literature with Rorty's vocabulary.