Literature and Politics

Literature as a changing historical formation that often represents and is always shaped by the practices of organizing, asserting, and controlling power in society. Sustained focus on writings by Raymond Williams, Leon Trotsky, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Terry Eagleton, and on literary texts read from the perspectives of these six theorists (possibly Shakespeare, Milton, Marvell, Swift, Dickens, Gaskell, the Brontës, Victor Serge, Anna Akhmatova). Enrollment limited to 20.