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Politics and Literature
Undergraduate | MAQ-ENGX108 | 2020
Course information for 2020 intake
Champion literature’s role in addressing political and dissident themes. Engage with literary texts that explore gender and ethnicity. Screen TV series like Game of Thrones and The Americans, and see how they contribute to the political discourse.
- Study method
- 100% online
- Assessments
- 100% online
- Entry requirements
- No ATAR needed,
- No prior study
- Duration
- -
HECS-HELP and FEE-HELP available
Politics and Literature
About this subject
At the completion of this subject students will be able to:
- critically engage and respond to a wide range of literary texts
- develop analytical and research skills that can be applied to past and present cultural and literary debates
- communicate historical and theoretical concepts in scholarly written forms
- demonstrate a greater understanding of the way in which literary texts and literary language function to produce political critique
- achieve a greater understanding of the historical and often hierarchical deployment of concepts of gender, class and ethnicity
- engage in informed critical discussion on subject content with peers and tutors, to respond to others' points of views, and to argue a critical position.
- Introduction
- The Poetry of the Monstrous
- The Poetry of Dissent
- Displacement and Survival
- Outsiders and Entitlement
- The Politics of Tyranny
- Revolutionary Poetry
- The Americans
- I Love Dick
- Fictions of Identity and the Politics of Excess
- The Politics of the Fantastic
- Don't Lose Your Head: Game of Thrones
The relationship between politics and literature is never simple. Writers have always addressed political issues: supporting or resisting revolution, analysing the ethics of war or the sophistries of political language, interrogating ideas of power embedded in gender, class, ethnicity, industrialisation and sexuality. Literary language can make available subversive and powerful critiques of dominant political structures and hierarchies just as it can normalise inequality and stifle dissent. Poets and novelists participate in the dissemination of myths, stereotypes and narratives that privilege certain worldviews over others. Covering writing from the Renaissance to the present this subject addresses a series of political issues as they are constructed in literary texts, and looks at the aesthetic forms writers invent and deploy in order to reflect, produce and contain change.
- Essay (30%)
- Essay (40%)
- Online Participation (20%)
- Practical Criticism (10%)
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No entry requirements
Additional requirements
- Other requirements -
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Study load
- 0.125 EFTSL
- This is in the range of 10 to 12 hours of study each week.
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