Literature and Politics

(CMLT/HIST/POLI/REES 491)

Course Description:

In this course we will examine a few of the key ways in which politics and literature (broadly defined) speak with and shape one another. To do so, we will consider recurring themes that have motivated both literature and politics for centuries, from ancient times to the present. These themes include alienation, oppression, understanding, resistance, freedom, forgiveness, and justice. We will look at plays, novels, memoirs, and film in this course, but many of the texts will come from the genre of travel narrative. Although a couple of texts will be drawn from the ancient and early-modern world, the majority of texts will focus on modern political concerns about colonization and progress, human bondage and freedom, and historical memory and contemporary agency. This course aims to help students have a better understanding of long-lasting historical and political problems through the reading of texts and the watching of films that present especially compelling perspectives on those problems.

Selected Key Texts:

Shakespeare’s The Tempest

Equiano’s Interesting Narrative

Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels

Pushkin’s Moor of Peter the Great

Goncharov’s Frigate Pallada

Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album

Prince’s Narrative of the Life and Travels

Nikitenko’s Up from Serfdom

Washington’s Up from Slavery

Cesaire’s A Tempest

Platonov’s Fourteen Little Red Hurts

Lorde’s Notes from a Trip to Russia

Petrushevskaya’s The Time: Night

Butler’s Kindred