Literature and Politics: Political Fables, an Art of Variation

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The course starts from a literary approach to political themes based on reflective value and aesthetics of the works. This approach is supplemented by a reading in terms of moral and political philosophy. The reading method approaches the works from one point from an internal and external point of view, situates them in their historical context, finally measures their scope outside of it. The 2022 course will develop a reflection on the genre of the political fable. After a general introduction (addressing Rabelais, Boccalini, Swift, Voltaire, Orwell, Huxley), two famous collections of fables with a philosophical and ironic scope will be the center of a formal, structural and moral analysis: the 12 books of La Fontaine's Fables and the 33 chapters of Tchouang-tseu as the art of variation. In these various philosophical, satirical and didactic fables, the following double dimensions: politics/morality, lucidity/illusion, wisdom/madness, animal/human, direct/indirect allusion, irony/humor. The art of variation will be defined in different arts and different contexts.