Spaces available in course this fall

This fall, I am teaching a course, “Politics Through Literature,” which still has spaces available for students to register.

You can register whether you are an undergraduate at Brooklyn College, another college in the CUNY system, or at any college in the New York area. Please reach out to me for information on how to register if you an undergraduate outside the CUNY system. There is no online component; all instruction is in-person.

The course is listed as POLS 3440 and meets on Mondays and Wednesdays from 9:30-10:45.

Below is the course description from the syllabus.

This course takes up some of the most wrenching and destabilizing concerns of politics and art—money, sex, beauty, property, and the family—through great works of literature and political philosophy. Our canon ranges from the ancient Greeks to contemporary Black writers, from the gay graphic novelist Alison Bechdel to the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht.

Along the way, we’ll ask ourselves the following questions:

1. Why and how is art a political concern? Why do members of a polity care so much about what their writers think and write? Does art do anything politically?

2. What is a proper political concern? Do questions of family life, or sexual intercourse and romantic love, belong in the political sphere?

3. How do our everyday experiences and fantasies of beauty and love, and of the body, reflect political categories like race or wealth? And how are race and wealth framed by our experiences and fantasies of beauty, love, and the body?

The goal of the course is threefold. First, that we come away with a greater attunement to, and a heightened awareness of, what we do with art and what art does with us. Second, that we acquire a greater understanding of why it is that the people of a polity, both citizens and politicians, get so rattled by art, by what is read in the classroom and seen on the screen or in a museum. Last, that we see politics itself as a form of art, a stylized performance that, like art, draws from and speaks to, and reconfigures, our most intimate and personal dreams and desires and longings.

Please share this announcement widely.