ENGL7029 · English

Literature and the Political

Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences

Satisfies the theory requirement for graduate students.What is the difference between Politics and The Political? What does political ontology mean, and how does it condition our interpretation of a literary text? How are the political and the ethical differentiated and related? What is the role of responsibility in ethics and politics? In this course we shall sample a variety of approaches to the political as developed by philosophers and activists to develop a reading protocol for identifying and interpreting the literary text. While concepts such as political contingency, sovereignty, normativity, and universality are crucial for grappling with the diverse manifestations of the political, the question of what constitutes the literary element in a given textual situation in contradistinction to literature and its politics of representation will serve as a focal point for our discussions. Theorists will include Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, Heidegger, John Rawls, Judith Butler, Bernard Williams, Foucault, Derrida, Gayatri Spivak and Nancy Fraser.