ADD CODES ARE ONLY AVAILABLE IN PERSON FROM THE INSTRUCTOR.
IF YOU WANT AN ADD CODE, COME TO CLASS AND SPEAK WITH ME AFTER CLASS.
*please see the course syllabus here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1I1O8JMHp4oK7YDB2f-7wxNVpaVtkau0W?usp=sharing.
English 200: Reading Literary Forms
srping 2024 / Section B
Revolution and Repression: Literary figures of revolutionary subjectivity
Instructor: Gust Burns Office Hours: M/W 9:30-10:30, by appointment
Class Time M-Th 10:30-11:20 Contact: ghburns@uw.edu
Classroom: SMI 407
Office Location: Padelford B 417
Course Description
The late 1960s and 1970s saw a historical surge in radical political organizing across the world. In every instance, the radical politics of the era was met with unprecedented violent state repression. In this course, we will perform a comparative reading of literary figurations and representations of radical politics and state repression—of this era and into the present. Our texts will present the ideas and histories of radical movements, foregrounding the perspectives of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army in the U.S., the radical movements in Italy associated with Operaismo and Autonomia, and insurrectionary movements against the contemporary U.S. police state.
Through our reading of four texts—Assata Shakur’s Assata: An Autobiography, Nanni Balestrini’s We Want Everything and The Unseen, and the anonymously authored The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: a teen epistolary—we will compare and contrast 1) different formal literary strategies and how they are used to articulate revolutionary subjectivity, 2) differing political “conditions” of variously oppressed groups, the qualities of state repression unleashed upon them, and literary strategies for representing both, 3) how different literary genres have been used and adapted to contribute to varying political projects.
As a 200-level literature course that fulfills a W credit, this course will require a lot of reading (four novel-length books plus approximately four required supplementary article-length texts) and a lot of writing. That being said, if you do all this reading and writing, and come to class to participate, you can get a very good grade. While this course is not intended for English majors, it does assume an interest in literature, and your enthusiastic participation in the reading, writing, and thinking that we will do—individually and collectively—is absolutely necessary for a positive experience.