Politics and Literature

An introduction to a short Substack series

Roman Eisele, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

I have had the opportunity to teach a course on Politics and Literature several times, now at two different universities. It is one of my favorite subjects to teach, and to write on more generally (my first academic publication was on Kurt Vonnegut, for example).  As I put the finishing touches on my course for this summer term, I thought it would be productive to adapt some of my lectures in the course into Substack essays, so a broader audience than just my few students can see what I find so valuable about using fiction to teach politics.  

So, allow me to give an overview: This post will serve as a brief introduction to the series. The next few essays will provide more detailed answers to the question “why use literature for politics?” We will look at the unified purposes of the social sciences and the humanities, the ways literature might be useful for politics, the ways literature HAS been useful for politics, and the general use of literature to develop a “moral imagination.” After this introduction, I’ll present a series of short essays on works of literature, primarily 20^th century works, that I have found useful for exploring political questions with undergraduates. These will include words by Kurt Vonnegut, Graham Greene, James Baldwin, George Orwell, Octavia Butler, and more.   

Why fiction?

The biggest question one faces in teaching a course on literature in a political science department is “why are we reading novels in a political science course?” And it’s a fair question! If my students have taken courses with my colleagues who are more empirically-minded, they might be more used to regression tables and experimental studies than they are to character analysis and being asked how a particular part of a work of fiction makes them feel, or being asked to normatively evaluate the choices of characters, etc.  But I would like to make a brief case for the use of fiction for politics, and then expand in the following posts in this series.

While I am a “political scientist,” whatever that means, my primary training is in political theory. Political theory, in broad strokes, is the study of concepts and categories we use to normatively evaluate political ideas, institutions, and actors. Where my colleagues down the hall typically do rigorous, descriptive analysis, or perhaps make attempts at causal inference if they’re getting fancy, my work deals with “oughts,” “shoulds,” ideals and aspirations about how we can best live together in peace in political community.  

I think it should be clear from the outset that literature gives us a wonderful resource in training ourselves and students to make these kinds of evaluations. You were probably conditioned in your exposure to literature in English classes to answer questions like “is the setting of this novel a sort of place you would want to live”? Or perhaps “What do you think of X character and their choices? Do you agree, disagree?” Etc. Political theory provides us with tools and models of thinking that help us ask and answer questions like these more productively.  

Political theorists sometimes do their work analytically, constructing syllogisms and building arguments based on certain premises taken for granted for the purposes of argument. They will also frequently do their work through the history of political thought, attempting to understand what people in the past have said and thought about normative political questions, and ask whether their arguments are good or bad, strong or weak.  

So why do this work through literature, through fiction? Why turn to 20^th century novels instead of just sticking to Plato or Hume or whoever else? I’d like to offer a few tentative answers that I’ll expound upon in the pending posts:  

• First, literature engages in deep questions about what it means to be human. Particularly in the novel, we often get insight into the psychology of individual characters and their own attempts to understand themselves and the world around them. The wrestling done by characters becomes food for thought for the reader, inviting them into the same sort of self-questioning that is so important for political theorizing.  

• Second, literature invites questions about what it means to live in community. Through the conflicts at the heart of some of the greatest novels, readers are asked to question what the characters owe to others, to their family members, to their communities, and to their friends. Readers get to see characters struggle with betrayal, or practice loyalty, or face temptation, and then ask and answer questions about how to live in social and political worlds the reader may not have experienced.  

• Third, fiction allows us to engage in literary “thought experiments” that test our moral intuitions. Much like a philosophy class might present hard, ethical dilemmas to students in the form of thought experiments, asking them to identify their moral intuitions and to attempt to justify them, literature presents case studies of certain political institutions, certain ideals, certain types of character and asks the reader to make judgments about them all. We can imaginatively transport ourselves to a situation quite outside our own through fiction, and then do the work to apply what we learn in that imaginative exercise to our own lives in political community.  

• Fourth, literature can work to challenge our assumptions and broaden our horizons. As I’ll discuss more in a future post, a common claim is that fiction is valuable or useful for politics when it gives a “voice to the voiceless.” Even if that claim is contestable, it is true that through literature I can encounter types of people, types of communities, and lifestyles far afield of my own, and can thus become more engaged in understanding a broader slice of humanity than I might find in my own embodied life.  

In the next post in this series, I’ll focus on a lecture by Robert Redfield entitled “Social Science among the Humanities” and present a case for a unified view of the purposes of studying social science and the humanities, namely a deeper understanding of what it means to be a human being.