Literary Visions of Freedom

Freedom sounds like an abstract political concept until you watch it collide with character, plot, and form on the page — that collision is what this course actually studies, reading novels and essays alongside thinkers like Constant and Berlin to see how literature stages the tension between negative and positive liberty, individual will and collective fate. Expect close reading of a tight syllabus (Wells, Beckett, Coetzee, Winterson in recent runs), regular discussion, a midterm and final, and one critical paper where you produce original argument rather than summary. It pairs naturally with political philosophy and modern fiction electives, and is most rewarding if you treat the novels as arguments, not just plots.