First-Year Seminars 110WP - Writers, Politics, and Power

Jean Paul Sartre tells us words are like loaded pistols. They have the power to transform worlds and inspire revolutions. Focusing on the power of language and the ideas they carry, we will look at writers as agents of social and political change. How do governments and society react to their work (censors, the media, readers?) We have two goals: to examine the interaction between aesthetics and politics, and the relationship between writers and governments. We will include some of the greats such as Rousseau, Swift, Orwell, Sartre, Andrei Platonov, Solzhenitsyn, Rushdie and Chinua Achebe.