Politics and Literature

Literature here is treated as a political artifact — something that doesn't just depict society but argues with it, and the course traces how successive movements from nineteenth-century realism through modernism, surrealism, existentialism, colonial and postmodern writing have staked out different visions of critique and alternative worlds. You'll read across these paradigms, debate tensions like realism versus modernism in seminar, sit a midterm, and develop a final essay project that takes a position of your own. It pairs well with political theory electives and rewards anyone curious about how aesthetic form carries ideological weight.