ENGL 6535

Literature and the State: Spies, Diplomats, Bureaucrats

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2015-2016.

This class will survey 20th century writers who simultaneously worked in the service of state information networks as spies and civil servants. How might participation in cultural-political institutions of the Cold War have conditioned late modernism both ideologically and formally? We will assess key genres of the period—spy novel, campus novel, structuralist code-work, memoir of state service—and see what writers did when modernist tropes of cross-cultural contact become the mediated province of state offices in the mid-century. This class will examine novels, poems, memoirs, as well as a range of theories of how literature interacts with the bureaucratic state.

When Offered Fall.

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