This seminar will explore literary expressions of resistance, revulsion, and protest -not only in a political sense (though that too will be considered), but especially in the ways that literature can turn private or local grievance into a much larger opposition to cosmic injustice. Our approach will be both historical and rhetorical. We will trace, first of all, how such writing has developed from the Bible to the 20th century. But we will also ask broader questions about how literature seeks to persuade us in its objections, in its refusal to accept the world as it stands. |