COMP 249
Love and Revolution Spring 2014
Division I Writing Skills
Cross-listed ENGL 249
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

In this course we will encounter works produced in times of historical crisis and social ferment, which are especially responsive to social currents whose logic they may not fully articulate. The novels, plays, and films about revolution that we will study address not only the political factors behind mass uprisings and governmental overthrows, but also seemingly quite extraneous and unrelated kinds of disturbance in the field of sexuality and gender relations. In these texts a state of political revolution almost irresistibly touches off sexual subversiveness as well, inviting the reader or spectator to interpret just what sexual upheaval has to do with political revolution. We will take up this problem in the setting of several historical revolutions and some literary and cinematic works that represent them: for example, the French Revolution (works such as Beaumarchais’ The Marriage of Figaro, the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, Weiss’s Marat/Sade); the Irish Revolution (Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World); the wave of anarchist terrorism in turn-of-the-century Paris (Jarry’s Ubu the King); the Bolshevik Revolution (Babel’s Red Cavalry); and the Prague Spring (Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being). We will confront such questions as why an author might suggest that revolution can only be sustained through incest and libertinism; why the threat of anarchism is so deeply bound up with exuberant scatological excess, to the point of provoking a riot; why passionate nationalist revolutionaries should be scandalized by the idea of oedipal violence and take refuge in myths of female purity. We will examine historical and social texts as well as artistic ones, learning how literature and history might be read together and inversely: that is, learning to read literature or film as a kind of political event, and to read history literarily, with an eye to its rhetoric and figuration.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 19
Expected: 19
Class#: 3709
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: regular class participation and four papers, totaling about 20 pages
Prerequisites: a 100-level ENGL course, or a score of 5 on the AP English Literature exam, or a score of 6 or 7 on the Higher Level IB English exam
Enrollment Preferences: first- and second-year students and English majors who have yet to take a Gateway course
Distributions: Division I Writing Skills
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
COMP 249 Division I ENGL 249 Division I
Attributes: ENGL 200-level Gateway Courses
ENGL Literary Histories B

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