Politics and Literature

Catalog description

Does literature reflect on the use of power, authority, ideology and identity? How does literature affect us and the way we interpret the political world? What makes theatre political? What hopes for changing the world does theatre dramatize? How does the theatre become a productive site for representing, and even enacting, political change? This course explores these questions by reading various literary works including a number of plays from different time periods. The encompassing question this course tries to answer (by analyzing the perspectives of different authors) is: What does it mean to have political freedom?