Courses

Both the term "politics" and the term "criticism," fundamental as they are to work in the discipline of literary criticism, have gone through significant changes in meaning. When they are combined, whether so as to describe criticism as political or so as to suggest that criticism should or should not be political or in order to define sub-sets like "political criticism" or "cultural politics," the possible meanings thereby generated are multiple and bewildering. For critics-in-training, however, there may be no other issue so sure to clarify, or indeed cut to the heart of, what it means to choose criticism as a vocation. This course undertakes to study some of the most important past stages of intersection between criticism and politics, including classical rhetoric and the art of governing and the overlap and tensions between Romantic imagination and the theory of democracy, as in Raymond Williams's classic Culture and Society (1958), before turning to contemporary instances and controversies.

If politics is defined in relation to the nation-state, for example, in what ways is politics thrown into question in the era of globalization, when politics (like the politics of climate change) arguably spills over the boundaries of the nation-state? Is there a "cosmo-politics," and if so what about the particular brand or brands of criticism thereof?  What was and is the politics assumed by the still relatively recent sub-field of "post-colonial studies," and to what extent is it compatible with its emergent competitor, "world literature"?  What roles has criticism played, and what role should it play, in relation to so-called "identity politics"? What was and is "critique," what relation does it have to politics, and what is the political meaning of so-called "postcritique"?