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German / Slav 251
Fall Semester 2020 Professor David Pikedpike@email.unc.edu Office hours: By appointment
Ideology and Aesthetics: Marxism in LiteratureSynopsis This course offers a discussion of the clash between 20th-century writers and the state in countries where a single political party running the government used an exclusive ideology as justification for interference in cultural and literatary affairs.
Aside from regular class attendance and participation in discussions, each student in the class will be asked to write two papers in the course of the semester. The first, a 6-8 page paper, is due shortly after fall break; the final paper, 12-15 pages, is due at the time of our regularly scheduled final exams. The choice of topic is open - entirely up to each student, though students are encouraged to discuss their choice of topics with me if they have any doubts or reservations about it. There will, in addition, be a final examination that covers additional readings that you will be provided links as we move through the semester. These reading assignments are taken exclusively from developing, current events posing questions, art and ideology, that arguably relate to the subject of this course.
My course policy permits only three excused absences, for whatever reason, before each subsequent absence lowers the grade otherwise earned by one grade point - i.e., an A to a B, a B to a C. There are no automatically excused absences. If you must miss class, you are expected to email me in advance with your reason. These policies adhere closely to university "Academic Procedures," which are outlined in the Undergraduate Bulletin and which you are expected to be familiar with.
Description
We are dealing during this semester when a “phenomenon” that largely belongs to the past: the fascination that many serious intellectuals and cultural figures around the world developed toward “socialism” in general, mostly in its Marxist incarnation, and more particularly with the ostensible realization of Marxism in the “Bolshevik revolution” of 1917. The undeniable fact of this fascination seems on the face of it entirely counterintuitive given that, almost from the very beginning, the Bolsheviks engaged in “murder and mayhem” on, it would seem, an unprecedented scale. This killing existed within the regime from the outset and only worsened with each passing year, reaching every higher levels of violence under Josef Stalin in a succession of waves of mass bloodshed. Before he was “finished,” Stalin vied with the worst mass murderers in history, “competing” head-to-head with his nemesis of the war years, Adolf Hitler. Yet, with occasional exceptions, “serious thinkers,” whether intellectuals in general or artists in particular, did not find themselves generally captivated by the body of “thought” that passed as Nazi or National Socialist ideology. But countless respectable, high regarded members of the intelligentsia around the world, including prominent artists and other cultural figures admired, even adulated, Stalin and his regime and, to all intents and purposes, never ceased in their support of policies he purported to pursue until three years after his death in 1953. Even then, the basic acceptance and veneration of political ideals the Soviet Union claimed to embody – until the USSR ceased to exist in the early 1990’s – continued, if in attenuated form. To this day, we can find, albeit in different expressions than, say, in the thirtites or forties, an unwillingness on the part of intellectuals in various countries to engage the brutality and almost unparalleled bloodshed of seventy years of Soviet history.
Why is this? Can we find comparable examples in other spheres of political life today? This course undertakes to engage these and a wide assortment of related issues, often with an eye to inquiring whether this phenomenon has discernible parallels in other political areas and always with the purpose of asking whether core instincts of intellectuals lend themselves to these kinds of political susceptibilities.
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