Literature and Constitutionalism

3.0 credits · Graduate

Literary texts and written constitutions do not appear to have much in common. Yet there is a long tradition that has seen poetic and imaginative invention as crucial to social and political organization, from the mythic figures of Orpheus and Amphion whose verses could tame beasts and build cities, to the role of theater in Athenian democracy, to the epic poems that voice the authority of states and societies. As Percy Shelley wrote in A Defense of Poetry, poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” In this course, we will study works that expressly present themselves as making or constituting the polity to better understand how literature patterns out popular sovereignty and limited authority.