Course No: 350:514
Index #: 17955
Distribution Requirement: A4, A5, D
Wednesdays - 12:10 PM
MU 207
Politics in the Novel
Kurnick, David / Lawrence, Jeffrey
Critics and scholars have developed sophisticated ways to assess the politics of a novel—to examine what political projects the text supports or promotes (avowedly or surreptitiously or unconsciously). This is a crucial feature of contemporary critical discourse, in which this course will give students a footing. But we will also be exploring the less often considered question of how politics is represented in the novel, especially as such representation interacts with the question of what politics the novel understands itself to promote.
Central questions will be: how do novels represent the awakening to political consciousness? How are projects of collective action—organizing, consciousness raising, dissent, solidarity—depicted and given form? What difference does the existence of social movements make to fiction? What identifiable narrative and characterological patterns help us make sense of the political in the novel? How is political language absorbed into the novel’s discursive texture (if it is)? How has the form’s much-bruited intimacy with the project of bourgeois individualism been confronted or managed by overtly political writers? Does the question of the political challenge or reinforce our literary-historical categories? What aesthetic protocols enable or limit the narration of a political act?
The course will not assume that the political is equivalent to the progressive, and we will work to consider the degree to which patterns of politicization do or do not conform to left-right or liberal-radical divisions. Among the political programs and movements we’ll consider are Chartism, labor organizing and work stoppages, feminism, abolitionism, the Civil Rights movement, Black radicalism, socialist, communist and nationalist agitation and revolution, and trans, queer, and AIDS activism. Authors studied may include Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Elizabeth Gaskell, Émile Zola, Henry James, Nelly Campobello, Mariano Azuela, Tess Gallagher, Ralph Ellison, John Williams, Alice Walker, Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Sarah Schulman, and Georgi Gospodinov. Critics and theorists may include Amanda Anderson, Mikhail Bakhtin, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Lauren Berlant, Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Michaela Bronstein, Michael Denning, Erica Edwards, Barbara Foley, Jean Franco, Carlos Fuentes, Rachel Greenwald Smith, Irving Howe, Fredric Jameson, Gyorgy Lukács, Walter Benn Michaels, Seth Moglen, Ángel Rama, Jacques Rancière, Adolph Reed, Bruce Robbins, Raymond Williams.
Students will be expected to write a 5-7-page midterm essay and a 10-12-page final essay. We will also ask each student to present on the assigned material once during the semester.