ENG 279 - Literature as Politics

1 course unit

Students in this class will approach narratives, poems, and plays as rhetorical acts and sites of ideological struggle and will address and question widespread arguments that, on the one hand, reduce, literary works to the politics of writers and their times and, on the other hand, claim that as “art,” literary works “transcend” politics. Writers studied are likely to include Shakespeare, Edmund Burke, William Blake, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, W. B. Yeats, W. E. B. DuBois, W. H. Auden, Langston Hughes, George Orwell, Muriel Rukeyser, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, Joan Didion, Mohsin Hamid, etc.
Meets general academic requirement HU and W.