COMP 279
Love and Revolution Fall 2015
Division I Writing Skills
Cross-listed ENGL 249
This is not the current course catalog

“Love” is here a kind of shorthand for questions of sexuality and gender: why do novels, plays, and films about contemporary political revolutions so often get caught up in seemingly extraneous and unrelated disturbances in the field of sexuality and gender relations? In this course we will study such works, which are especially responsive to social currents whose logic they cannot fully articulate. 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 (Beaumarchais’ The Marriage of Figaro and the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom); the Irish Revolution (plays by Synge, O’Casey, and Yeats); the Bolshevik Revolution (Babel’s Red Cavalry); the Prague Spring (Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being); and the Algerian Revolution (The Battle of Algiers). 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.