Politics and Literature

This course discusses literature as a social product, analyzing ways in which it represents reality, reflects on it, and reacts to it. Focusing on the modern period from the nineteenth century to the present, the course examines political aspects of different literary paradigms from realism to postmodernism. We will inquire into the political potential of these paradigms and their political aspirations, and will ask how these paradigms have functioned as modes of social critique and how they have imagined social and political alternatives.