25697 - Politics and Literature: an East-Central European Perspective

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 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"

Readings/Bibliography

Jean-Paul Sartre,What is Literature? and Other Essays

Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political

George Orwell, 1984.

1984 (dir. Michael Radford) (film)

Kafka, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mousefolk”

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

Art Spiegelman, Maus

Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life”

Leonidas Donskis, “I Remember, Therefore I am: Milan Kundera and the Idea of Central Europe”

Donskis, Power and Imagination: Studies in Politics and Literature

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind.

Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated 

Everything is Illuminated (dir. Liev Schreiber) (film)

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

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

Paul Celan, selected poems

Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles.

Frederic Jameson, “On Interpretation” from The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

Teaching methods

This course blends lecture with frequent, robust, active class discussion. Occasional in-class group work will be assigned. Practice in close reading of texts will be emphasized throughout the course formats. Films will mostly be assigned as independent viewing (outside of class), though snippets will be screened in class.

Assessment methods

Student work is assessed by several discrete assignments, including: reading- and viewing-response papers; an interpretive critical essay; a research paper; a presentation; and a mark for satisfactory participation in class discussions and in-class workshops and exercises.

Teaching tools

Teaching tools used in the course include: power-point presentations published for students as supplemental study tools; handouts and readings provided both online and in-class; in-class viewing of short snippets of documentary and narrative films.

Office hours

See the website of Jay Daniel Mininger