Training in writing expository prose. Instruction in expository writing in conjunction with reading literature. Satisfies the first half of the Reading and Composition requirement.

Abolish the police! Defund ICE! Free them all! The wave of protests across the global north last summer over the brutal killings of Black people by police initiated a profound cultural shift, massively amplifying Black Radical critiques of racial capitalism and the carceral state. In this course, we will study some path-breaking works of this abolitionist political theory, as well as the writings of several early proponents of police and prisons and some foundational theories of ideology and the state. In this light, we will also then revisit some recent debates in literary studies about the politics of literary form and cultural criticism. In his classic study, The Novel and the Police, D. A. Miller detected an intimate collusion between police power and narrative technique in the realist novel. Indeed, the novel emerged as a genre in English literature just as carceral institutions such as prisons and plantations were coming into force, and several early English novelists were involved in the organization of Britain’s first professional police force. However, in recent years, arguments such as Miller’s have been indicted by many critics for relying on a “hermeneutics of suspicion” that approaches every text like an ideological crime scene and over-rates the carceral function of literature. But is the connection between the novel and the police just a red herring? Or are novels, like prisons, obsolete? What can novels tell us about the history of the carceral? Can they help us envision its end? Why is critical reading so consistently figured as police work? What would a consciously abolitionist literary criticism look like? With these questions in mind, informed by our political-theoretical readings, we will read a range of novels, from an early experiment with criminal autobiography to some classic detective stories, to an Afrofuturist dystopia of the broken-windows era and a contemporary trans reimagining of the eighteenth-century origins of policing. As we explore these issues, you will also practice your skills of critical analysis and textual interpretation by writing, workshopping, and revising a series of (very) short papers. In these papers, you will have the freedom to focus more on our political-theoretical or literary-critical readings as best serves your own interests.

Requisites

• Satisfaction of the Entry Level Writing Requirement

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills