Acts of Literature: The Role of Prose, Poetry and Plays in a Changing World

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As stated in Eleonora Belfiore’s and Oliver Bennett’s The social impact of the arts: An intellectual history (2008) the question of what the function of literature could be or should be produced from Aristotle on many answers that could roughly be grouped under the following overarching concepts: catharsis (emotional, didactical, or intellectual), personal well-being (literature as therapy, play, or experience), education and self-development (basically the humanist’s view of literature as, in Stephen Spender’s words, ‘central medium for the realization of man’s search for significance in life’), moral improvement and civilization (French Enlightenment, Kant, Martha Nussbaum), political instrument (Brecht, social realism, nazi and fascist literature, feminist, postcolonial, and minority literature, often also in the sense of the unmasking of literature as vehicles for accepting hierarchies in society: Orwell, Foucault, Said, the Frankfurt School), social stratification (Weber, Simmel, Bourdieu), and the rejection of any of these functions, of instrumentalising literature (Kant again, l’art pour l’art). Against the backdrop of this theoretical discourse on the functions of literature and the recent merging of the functions of education and moral improvement for the benefit of democracy, the course’s focus is on concrete ‘acts of literature’: cases in which prose (novels and stories as well as literary essays), poetry, or plays played a formative role in societal change or were regarded as the voice of this. In the two weekly group meetings the first will focus on one piece of literature which will be analyzed as an ‘act of literature’ in the context of societal change (Goethe, Toni Morrison, Achebe, Woolf, Orwell, Arthur Miller, Harriet Beecher Stow, Harper Lee, Primo Levi), the second will focus on a particular period of societal change and the literature that played a vital role in this: the aftermath of both World Wars, the Sixties, the ‘roaring nineties’, the early German romantic period (here especially poems, stories, and literary essays are discussed).