B3158 - EAST-CENTRAL EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVES ON POLITICS AND LITERATURE

Learning outcomes

Students are expected to become acquainted with the European travel discourse, utopian and anti-utopian imagination, and fictional anticipations of great political events in Central and Eastern Europe. In addition, students will learn about the nature of human corruption, political virtue and political vice in human choices, political power versus conscience, censorship versus dissent, political persecution versus Aesopian language and other literary devices, etc

Course contents

This course approaches the study of politics – understood as legal and governmental structures but equally as the beliefs and practices that collectively organize public and private life – as thematized through literary objects and narrative examples within Central and East European contexts. Politics and literature intersect where narratives and power are entangled; therefore, the course foregrounds how stories produce political subjectivity against the backdrop of Central and East European history and identity. The course studies political interpretations of literary and philosophical texts, and conversely considers how narrative and aesthetic measures are deployed in politics. Themes may include: the politics of memory in Eastern and Central Europe; political power and conscience, censorship and dissent; the figure of the stranger; the act of writing literature as politicized (committed literature).

Upon completion of the course, students will: ● recognize, analyze, and apply political interpretations of literary texts ● identify how narrative(s) contributes to political structures and identity formation in Central and East European contexts ● distinguish influential ways in which stories and power form and inform one another

Readings/Bibliography

Jean-Paul Sartre, “Why Write?”;

Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political

1984 (dir. Michael Radford, 1984)

William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice 

H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism;

C. Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty.

Kafka, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mousefolk”

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”;

Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles.

Vilnius Wilno Vilna Dialogue between Czeslaw Milosz and Tomas Venclova

Kristina Sabaliauskaite, Vilnius Wilno ענליוו

poems by Paul Celan

Hannah Arendt, "‘What Remains? The Language Remains’: A Conversation with Gunter Gaus”;

Theodor W. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society”;

Everything is Illuminated (dir. Liev Schreiber, 2005)

Leonidas Donskis, “Troubled Identity, or the European Canon and the Dilemmas of Memory”

In the Crosswind (dir. Martti Helde, 2014)

Art Spiegelman, Maus

Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind

Giorgi Markov, “Our Inner Fascism,” and “System and People”

Teaching methods

This course blends lecture with robust class discussion. Practice in close reading of texts will be emphasized.

Assessment methods

Students will complete one response essay, due during the week of coursework. Students will also complete a Research Project in lieu of a traditional written or oral exam. Attendance at class sessions and active participation in the discussion is expected.

Teaching tools

lectures, discussion, films, digital resources, textual resources

Office hours

See the website of Jay Daniel Mininger