Fiction as Social Theory: Memory, Domination, and Resistance in the Novel

Harvard FAS

How can novels help us think sociologically about memory, power, and social change? To answer this question, this course treats narrative fiction as a site of social theory. We will read works of fiction that span different times, places, and crises—from early twentieth-century America and the legacy of genocide to the plantation past of U.S. slavery, small-town horror, postcolonial Egypt, and a biotechnological dystopia. Alongside these texts, we will study contemporary sociological theories…