The Political Impact of the Novel

In this essay I outline the case Rorty makes for the novel and underscore its particular strengths. After briefly establishing the relation of Rorty’s turn to the novel to his broader philosophical critique, I examine his claim that moral progress in democratic societies requires not increased rationality but what he calls “sentimental education.” In Rorty’s view, only the latter can sensitize us to those who fall outside of our epistemic and moral communities. Juxtaposing Rorty’s stance to that of Nussbaum and Jane Tompkins, I conclude that the benefit of Rorty’s account is his understanding of the role of non-logical changes in belief for moral progress. What makes the power of novel democratic for Rorty is that it is consistent with rejecting “the idea that anything could have authority over the members of a democratic community save the free, collective decisions of that community.”

AARN: Visual Anthropology & Media Studies (Sub-Topic), 2017

The novel is a dominant genre in world literature. After sparse beginnings in the Seventeenth – century England, novels grew exponentially in production by the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth century became the the primary form of popular entertainment. The book renders critical readings of the Victorian and modern novelists such as, D. H. Lawrence, Virginian Woolf, Charlotte Bronte, George Orwell, Ahdaf Soueif, Nawal El Saadawi, Liana Badr, Rajja Al Sanea, Hanan Al Shaykh, Ala Al-Aswany, Aravind Adiga, Mohsin Hamid and Benyamin Daniel. It spans the spectacular development of the English novel to the world where many crucial issues are discussed such as, globalization, identity politics, Western and Arab feminism, immigration, racism and the impact of 9/11 on world literature.

2013

Literatrure (broadly understood) has, historically, been a conduit for the best and worst of political statements. It has been a way to hide one's arguments in the mouths of others, to outwit censors, to provide cover for the writer, and to challenge or reinforce the status quo. Over the course of the semester, this course will approach political themes – historically rooted – through the reading of literature from attic tragedy to contemporary short stories and poety. Readings will include Sophocles' Antigone, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Georges Bataille's Blue of Noon, Chinua Achibe's Things Fall Apart; poems by Alan Ginsberg, Audre Lorde, and contemporary musicians; and short stories by Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Zoe Wicomb. Each literary work will be paired with either explanatory theoretical texts that deals directly with the literature itself or contemporaneous writings engaging with the same themes as the fictional work. Students will be challenged to write both critically and analytically over the course of the semester. Through the readings the themes we will focus on are the questions of community, the idividual, the state, the subject, reason, faith, eroticism, geography, history, death, and evil. This may seem an overwhelming list, but we will find these themes to be necessarily interrelated in a the literature for the class. Moreover, we will discuss how different constructions around these various themes in the literature relates to and carries the politics of the time and the writing. We will delve into both the exoteric and esoteric possibilities of each work and students will be encouraged to develop their own interpretations, both in writing and in class discussions. Discussions of the various literary texts will be carried out on a weekly basis, instead of a daily basis. All secondary literature will be discussed per the day it is listed as being a discussion topic. We will move, more or less, chronologically through the various writings for the course, as we move from the attic tragedy of Sophocles to the post-Apartheid short stories of Zoe Wicomb. The theoretical readings will not, necessarily, follow this same chronological movement.

2017

Having read 1984 and with reference to current developments in culture, surveillance, media and bio-power, outline your views of the limits and extent of totalitarianism.

The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature & Politics, 2023

The history of literature has long been viewed in its relationship to politics. But while neither literature nor politics are easy to define or demarcate, there has also never been a consensus about what it is that connects them. Different approaches to the 'and' in this Companion's title produce distinct understandings of both literature and politics, and different views on what unites and what separates them. The eighteen essays that make up this volume tell a story of the diverse ways in which literature and politics over the twentieth century coincided, overlapped, and clashed: a story of the and that connects them and which also keeps them apart.

Studia Neophilologica

Politics, 1995

What are the possibilities of connection between politics and literature? How have those possibilities been developed? Why should students of politics turn to literature as a source of political understanding? Connections have traditionally been made in terms of literature as illustration or example for politics or as a form of moral education. Other possibilities are a ‘political sociology of literature’ or literature as a primary source for political studies. Work in the United States suggests further extensions. The case for ‘politics and literature’ is also strengthened by recent developments in political theory such as the interest in ‘identity’ or ‘narrative’.

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 2011

The following remarks come from the deep conviction-echoed by my fellow panelists-that modern Anglophone culture is undergoing a change, the likes of which have not been seen in over a century. We are experiencing a paradigm shift in science, politics, and literature; old worlds, scientific methods, and forms of mediation are consigned to the dustbin as new ways of living, managing, and imagining human life seem to emerge on a daily basis. In years to come, the novels that matter will, I believe, be those seen as having prepared us for an epistemic shift in how we imagine ourselves as human beings. The question we confront as scholars of the novel is thus a straightforward one: what part does the novel play in this change, or does this change spell the end of the novel by rendering obsolete the terms in which novels have resolved the conflicts of modern life? As I have argued elsewhere, the novel provides a means of mediating between individuals (presumably capable of self-government) and a human aggregate made of such individuals; the modern household (also known as the family) has served as an apparatus of and the model for a modern liberal society. As it unfolded in narrative form, this mediating structure provided the telos and resolution of a form that took up the impossible task of patching rifts between private consciousness and the material conditions of embodiment. In casting the family in the form of a magical household, the novel also provided an enticing carrot for readers who anticipate a sense of self-fulfillment through identification with some surrogate individual. In The Secular Age, Charles Taylor understands this enticement as the promise of emotional plenitude called "love" that secular cultures offer in lieu of an afterlife. Certainly aware of their place in a global print market where post colonial novels and world literature have challenged the generic standard of British realism, a number of contemporary British novels have declared the household obsolete as a way of imagining a national community and as the means of reproducing its subjects. What is the future of the novel once the household no longer shapes the future in novels? Does the obsolescence of the traditional family mean the obsolescence of the novel as well? When broken up and dispersed, the operations of the family bear comparison to those of the communitarian ideal that Jean-Luc Nancy described as "the lost community." In looking back through the work of Georges Bataille at a century of failed attempts to create alternative political communities, Nancy concluded that this loss of the "intimacy of communion" is itself "constitutive of community," though one that cannot be acknowledged until we unthink "the nature and structure of individuality" (6). In recent decades, a body of theorypursuing this general objective across cognitive science, new media, literature, and philosophy-has been coalescing around the concept of affect. The impact of this work is evident in changes already wrought on the concepts sustaining the traditional family to which the new notion of affect is decisively hostile. What would we be if not individuals, such theories force us to imagine? How do we form Novel