Politics and Literature

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.

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.

New Literary History, 2014

new literary history 550 fiction and fantasy, end up serving what Rancière calls the police. 2 And on the other hand, if the paradox of politics is that we project (in varying ways) what does not exist yet as a referent-a future, say, or those Rancière calls "a part with no part," or "the people"-then we need to credit fantasy, as it were before a referent. To conceive the political truly is to reject the limits of realist aesthetics and its mimetic illusion. At issue is not the real as such distorted by the fictive or fantastical as such, but forms of fiction or fantasy and what they make visible and what they occlude; at issue in politics, therefore, is judging not (only) the referentiality of fiction or narrative, but their generativity, and so also their implications if enacted. Faced with stunning forms of denial, of inequality, empire, or climate change, it is tempting to tell people to "face reality." The dangers in fantasy and fiction are manifest in so many ways that anxiety about delusion, illusion, self-deception, and disavowal is certainly justified. But there is no politics, and surely no radical politics, without "imagined community," collective identifications, visions of possibility. If politics depends on fantasy in these senses, then the task is not replacing the fictive with the real, but making political judgments about better and worse magic, about the worlds and subjects that different fictions (of the real) occlude or make visible, make impossible or available. 3 My second claim, therefore, is that some works of American literature, since Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" or Melville's Moby Dick, abjure a realistic aesthetic precisely to show, we might say enact, the central genres and fantasies constituting (American) political life, and to dramatize their staggering human cost. Great literary art has thus dramatized not only how American politics is founded on disavowals-of social bonds, history, or of what blackness signifies-but also how such disavowal is one side of "monomaniacal" investment in particular fictions, of personal and political sovereignty, of national unity, progress, or innocence. (Scholars thus argue that certain genres govern American political language, such as jeremiad, romance, and melodrama, as each joins what Leo Marx called the pastoral to what Hofstadter called the paranoid.) 4 Because American politics bespeaks the conventions and expectations of certain genres, I will argue, literary art does not so much repeat as rework them. Indeed, when political rhetoric does not conform to the conventions of realism, but takes on forms of what I call political romance, genres of fabulation-like the ghost story, allegory, tragedy, or farce-are in fact needed to dramatize the investments, disavowals, and specters constitutive of American political life. By fictional representation of the genres of national fantasy, literary artists make visible what is, as a condition

International Journal of Social Science and Economics Invention, 2019

This paper tries to tackle the political aspects in literature during the 19th century, and to reveal the political tendency in the literary work, which means shedding lights on the effect of the environments and the political atmospheres during the 19th century in shaping the aesthetic work. On the other hand, the paper takes a specific literary work during this era and reveals its relation with the political events. In addition, we expostulate the strong relationship between the socioeconomic status of the writer and literature. Meanwhile, the paper relies on the systematic analysis of the political scientist David Histon in explaining the issue in question. We are going to reveal this tendency in the second chapter. Websites

Michael Onyeisi Ejiodu, 2023

Literature emanates from society and is about society. It is about people and their interaction, both at the intra- and the inter-levels. It is a record or reflection of the actions and/or inactions and thoughts of humans. To this effect, the problems and general situations of man are given life outside of the human body, that encasement that gives tangibility to the life force. Politics, on the other hand, has to do with the art of governance and/or the methods and techniques of ascendancy onto the seat of power. Over the generations and most especially in recent times, politics has downgraded man. Man has degenerated on the altar of politics and the art of governance. The implication of this is that crises have engulfed the world. The most frequently heard news and information these days are about war, terrorism, crises, corruption, banditry, kidnapping, and so on. Often, these come as a result of people or groups striving to occupy some positions of authority/governance. The implication of this is that the road to the seat of governance is littered with limbs, heads and body parts, as well as rivers of blood. This paper argues that literature, which is about man and his society, could be employed in fostering the positives in the body polity and the politics in the State, both in the microcosm and macrocosm. This could be done by identifying the vices and values, and then decrying the vices while espousing the positive values. Often, politics tries to bring about the desired harmony, but unfortunately, the generator cannot be the solution, hence a different medium (literature) is sought as an instrument for the ultimate elimination of the crisis. The Chronological Approach is employed for this study, which employs a folklorist play, The Placenta of Death by Sam Ukala as the text for analysis. The focus of this paper is the quest for the solution to the problem posed by the search for political relevance, which since politics cannot proffer we have to seek in literature. Keywords: Literature, Panacea, Politics, Conflict, folkism

2017

This thesis explores the role of literature and practices of literary study in American government. Specifically, it looks at how the President’s Council on Bioethics (PCBE) and the Supreme Court have deliberately embraced the humanities to fulfill their respective responsibilities. I begin by examining the interpretive practices these groups employ, then turn to lists of recommended reading published by the PCBE and Justice Anthony Kennedy. I investigate how their endorsements of texts such as Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, My Antonia, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and To Kill a Mockingbird promote certain constructions of traditional American values that are central to the choices these government organizations make. To close, I draw from the work of Martha Nussbaum to show how the lessons the PCBE and Justice Kennedy take from this fiction translate into executive orders, legislation, and legal opinions that shape public policy in America.

Art in general and fiction in particular have had close affinities with politics throughout history. When there is a close tie between a narrative fiction and political issues then critics may deem it as "committed fiction". Political fiction is at the crossroads of political science and the art of fiction. And more often than not, novelists are involved with politics but not all of them are dubbed as or even consider themselves to be political novelists. In this article I attempt to investigate political fiction as a distinct genre produced (un)consciously by a range of (politically committed) novelists and critics. The authors discussed in this paper demonstrate dissimilar perspectives on freedom and democracy. Also, regarding political fiction and the responsibility of author, we will see how divergent is the attitudes of critics such as

Literature reflects society and society shapes literature. Literature, though it may also be many other things, is social evidence and testimony (Lewis Coser,in http://sociologyindex.com/sociology-and-literature.htm) of the cultural background of the society. Understanding how culture, like that in politics affects our lives. It helps us develop a sociological imagination. It helps us determine how people think and act. Thus, culture is essential for our individual survival and for our communication with other people. (Kendall, 2005) Therefore, in the academic environment, how does literature subjects serve as vehicle in exposing the learners on the socio-political issues of their setting? This study tried to explore the sociopolitical implication of the novel Alamat ng Gubat as a depiction of the Philippine politics and governance. Specifically, it aimed to look into the nature of the novel which reflected the type of society, identify the kind of society presented in the novel, ch...

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.

International journal of Arabic-English studies, 2007

A popular literary argument circulating the literary circuit nowadays concerns the supposedly "apolitical" nature of literature. This view of literature and literary theory is particularly expounded in Western academic circles, which intentionally depoliticize the political, claiming that any "political" reading is propaganda, not scholarship. It will be argued that the "depoliticization" process is itself a political move at its core, as Edward Said explains in much of his work, especially in his book The World, The Text and The Critic. This research will examine when and why literature and literary theory become most significantly "political" or even "apolitical." This entails a close consideration of certain critical views and literatures arising in what has been called "crises cultures," in addition to a reconsideration of traditional apolitical readings of the works of English literary poets, such as