In two weeks, I start teaching. My class this fall is Politics Through Literature, which I’ve taught before but have made some big changes to. There are still seats available in the class. If you’re a student at Brooklyn College or any of the colleges in the CUNY system, or if you’re a student in the New York area (the class meets in person), you should sign up for the class. We meet on Monday and Wednesday mornings, from 9:30 to 10:45.

The course readings are below; the syllabus is here.

I’ve decided to open the semester with a set of readings on sex and sickness—Amia Srinivasan’s essay on teaching pornography and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor—and how our most personal experiences of the body are constructed through art, broadly defined.

We then move to a set of programmatic readings on politics and literature: one from Arendt, one from Sartre, and another from Thomas De Quincey. What distinguishes a political from a literary experience? What do the two activities have in common? How are the literary artist and the political actor engaged in a single enterprise? How not?

From there, we engage a series of ancient and modern literary texts about politics, the city, and the family—Aeschylus, Brecht, and Babel—refracted through one critical essay by Virginia Woolf and another by Walter Benjamin.

The last part of the course takes up the question of love and beauty. Helped along by readings from Plato, Nietzsche, Barbara Fields, Mary Wollstonecraft, and, again, Srinivasan, we conclude the course with Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

Though I’ve taught the course before, as I said, I think this semester may be the most exciting and interesting set of readings we’ve done. If you’re a student in the New York area and need help in signing up for the class, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at [email protected].

Course readings

Part I: Sex and Sickness

Week 1

8.28

Intro to class. No reading.

Week 2 (39 pages)

9.2

Labor Day. No class.

9.4

Amia Srinivasan, “Talking to My Students About Porn,” The Right to Sex (New York: Picador, 2021), pp. 33-71 [CR]

Week 3 (85 pages)

9.9

Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Anchor, 1978), pp. 3-42 [CR]

9.11

Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Anchor, 1978), pp. 43-87 [CR]

Part II: Politics and Literature

Week 4 (55 pages)

9.16

Hannah Arendt, “Freedom and Politics, a Lecture,” Thinking Without a Banister, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2018), pp. 220-244 [CR]

9.18

Thomas De Quincey, “The Literature of Knowledge and the Literature of Power, pp. 1-8 [CR]Jean-Paul Sartre, “Why Write?” “What is Literature?” and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 48-69 [CR]

Part II: Ancients and Moderns

Week 5 (74 pages)

9.23

Aeschylus, Agamemnon, in The Oresteia, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1979), pp. 99-172

9.25

            No additional reading

Week 6 (54 pages)

9.30

Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers, in The Oresteia, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1979), pp. 173-226

10.2

            Erev Rosh Hashanah. No class.

Week 7 (51 pages)

10.7

Aeschylus, The Eumenides, in The Oresteia, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1979), pp. 227-277

10.9

            No additional reading.

Week 8 (48 pages)

10.14

Columbus Day. No class. Monday classes will meet on Tuesday.

10.15

In-class midterm. No reading.

10.16

Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (London: Hogarth Press, 1924), pp. 3-24 [CR]Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in The Storyteller Essays, trans. Tess Lewis (New York: New York Review of Books, 2019), pp. 48-73 [CR]

Week 9 (93 pages)       

10.21

Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children, trans. Eric Bentley (New York: Grove Press, 1951), pp. 19-111

10.23

No additional reading.

Week 10 (tk pages)

10.28

Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories, trans. Boris Drayluk (London: Pushkin Press, 2016), TBA [CR]

10.30

Isaac Babel, Red Cavalry, trans. Boris Drayluk (London: Pushkin Press, 2014), TBA [CR]

Part IV: Beauty, Love, Desire

Week 11 (32 pages)

11.4

Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), pp. 9-12, 25-31 [CR]

11.6

Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), pp. 40-60 [CR]

Week 12 (47 pages)

11.11

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), pp. 25-43 [CR]

11.13

Barbara J. Fields, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America,” in Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (New York: Verso, 2012), pp. 111-148 [CR]

Week 13 (24 pages)

11.18

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in The Feminist Papers, ed. Alice S. Rossi (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1973), pp. 40-51 [CR]

11.20

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in The Feminist Papers, ed. Alice S. Rossi (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1973), pp. 64-71, 79-82 [CR]

Week 14 (50 pages)

11.25

Amia Srinivasan, “The Right to Sex” and “Coda: The Politics of Desire” in The Right to Sex (New York: Picador, 2021), pp. 73-122 [CR]

11.27

            No class.

Week 15 (90 pages)

12.2

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Vintage, 2007), pp. 3-58

12.4

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Vintage, 2007), pp. 61-93

Week 16 (110 pages)

12.9

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Vintage, 2007), pp. 97-163

12.11

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Vintage, 2007), pp. 164-206