Literature and Revolution

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

At the end of the eighteenth century a series of radical shifts in the way culture and society functioned transformed the world. From the American Revolutionary War to the French Revolution and Haitian Independence, fundamental questions were being asked about what constituted the human self, the responsibilities of humans to one another and the mutual obligations between the people and the governments that ruled them. Today, for better and for worse, we are still living with the legacies of these disputes. At the very heart of the debates lay "literature" - a highly contested domain that was often held up as the very essence of liberty. What exactly was this thing called literature and what role did it play in the fights for freedom? In this class we will read contemporary political texts alongside literary works in order to understand the entanglement of literature and revolution, and to consider the role that literature played in shaping the modern world.Texts to be examined will include works by, among others, William Blake, Edmund Burke, Olaudah Equiano, AlexanderHamilton, Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. The movie version of Linn-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton will frame some of our discussions, raising questions that we can ask of eighteenth-century texts.