This chapter reassesses Sartre’s ideas about engaged literature (littérature engagée) through the lens of Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics to recalibrate our understanding of literature’s relation to the social world. And while this relation has recently garnered much scholarly interest, its aesthetic dimension has not been systematically studied so far. Forwarding an understanding of literature as social practice, this chapter seeks to start filling this gap by zeroing in on how literature, as a particular form of relational art, is disposed to provoke social change. It tracks this disposition (and capacity) along two interrelated trajectories: by considering the author and the literary work as co-actors on a public stage, and by considering the role of aesthetic judgement in constituting that stage.