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.

First-year students only, by placement.