25697 - POLITICS AND LITERATURE: AN EAST-CENTRAL EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVE

Conoscenze e abilità da conseguire

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.

Contenuti

This course approaches the study of politics and political life through literary objects and examples. In this course, politics -- both in the specific sense of legal and governmental structures of societal organization and the general sense of beliefs and practices of organizing public and private life – will be examined as themes in literary narratives. Further streams of inquiry include: the influences of political circumstances on literature and literary form, and consideration of the act of writing literature as politicized (i.e. ‘committed literature’). Genres will be studied (e.g. utopian and dystopian literature), topical fields introduced (e.g. colonialist and post-colonialist literature), and the interpretive frameworks of race, gender, and class will receive focus. Course readings are drawn not only from literary texts, but also from political and legal theory, literary theory, and history writing. The course addresses both literature and political-theoretical criticism with the express goal of placing these two traditions in dialogue within Central and East European contexts.

Thematic units include: "Political Art: Committed Literature vs. Propaganda"; "Art, Identity, Collectivity, Central Europe"; "History, Memory, Trauma"; "Literature, Place, Memory: for example, Vilnius/Wilno"; "The Politics of Memory and Forgetting"; "Poetry and Politics"; "Modernism and/in Eastern Europe"; "Literature and the Political Unconscious: Nation, History, Allegory"; "Postmodernism; or, Art and the Construction of the Nation"

Orario di ricevimento

Consulta il sito web di Jay Daniel Mininger