On Violence

Catalog description

The ethics of violence, its articulation and resistance, violence as a social problem and violence as social necessity: from the epic, to the novel, to contemporary poetry, literature has attempted to reckon with the question of violence. This includes violence in the form of divine retribution, as part of the rhetoric of patriarchy, and as necessary for anticolonial nationalism. Students will consider violence both as a theoretical problem as well an aesthetic one as they consider the work of philosophers and theorists while also considering how literary texts drawn from a diverse geographic and historical corpus have attempted to "write" violence as a problem of artistic representation. Some of the texts we may consider include Euripides' Medea, the epic Mahabharata, Dante's Inferno, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Sorel's Reflections on Violence, Gandhi's Hind Swaraj, Simone Weil's Essay on Force, Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, and the poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Dennis Brutus.