Politics and Literature

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

To know justice, James Baldwin wrote, requires we listen not to the judge but the “testimony” of those “who need the law’s protection most.” What is justice, and how should we define it? This course examines key issues of political and moral justice as explored not through law or philosophy, but literature: in novels, short stories, memoirs, letters, science fiction, and so on. These works will offer students diverse arguments about justice to master and evaluate, arguments that may frame justice as a hierarchical system of governance, as utopian, as an ethical way of life, as meritocratic individualism, as a form of individual resistance or revenge, or as reconciliation. Students will engage in advanced discussion, critique, and writing on political theory that challenges participants to relate issues of justice not simply through readings but as these issues concern politics today. This semester, students will study selections that include Sophocles’ Antigone, Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s Herland, Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, Alexander Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, and short stories by Ursula Le Guin and Philip K. Dick. About the instructor: Nolan Bennett an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Government, having received his doctorate in Government from Cornell University. Prof. Bennett’s research is broadly focused on the history of American political thought and the mutual influence of democratic politics and literature in the United States and elsewhere. His research is particularly focused on the politics of autobiography, incarceration in the United States, and African American political thought.