The politics of literature

Writers have always been asked to justify their raison d'être and their usefulness. With a few variations, the question ‘What is the purpose of literature?’ comes up again and again, asked as much by those who are part of the literary world as by people who are far removed from it. The answers to this question are sometimes contradictory; they vary according to time, place and individual—but they often have in common an acceptance of the premise, a willingness to comply with the constraint, an attempt to formulate what literature brings to the social world. These ‘politics of literature’ (i.e., the roles, functions, and values that actors in the literary world attribute to their practice) are the subject of this course.

From the poems of the Commune to post-#MeToo narratives, from Situationist interventions to urban protest writings (graffiti, banners, collages), we will follow an introductory course on the powers associated with literature in the contemporary era, the changing role of the intellectual, the articulation of aesthetic and political radicalism within the avant-garde, the ways in which literary production can discuss the ideology of its time, the debates and forms of engaged literature, and the way in which literature relates to social movements.