Focusing on three political novels from the 19th and 20th Centuries—Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1853), Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)—the course will explore how these novels unmask and critique while also participating in techniques of power and social control that are typical of the modern world.

More specifically, Bleak House will be viewed as a dialogic (“dual”) narrative which, besides the classic omniscient narrator, incorporates a female narrator-protagonist who raises gender issues relating to the Victorian construction of femininity. Besides exploring the social critique that arises from its representation of the British legal system, students will also be asked to evaluate Bleak House as an example of a detective novel, paying particular attention to the ideological work which such fiction typically carries out. The Secret Agent will yield similar readings to Bleak House as a detective novel, while also raising ideological issues relating to the way fiction and journalistic writing represent different forms of political extremism, especially modern terrorism. The Secret Agent will be used to reveal the way the political is habitually psychologized by the genre, yielding melodrama and domestic tragedy, at the cost of social critique. Through Orwell’s topical Nineteen Eighty-Four, students will observe how the political novel typically engages with various contemporary concerns such as the problem of electronic surveillance, the biopolitical control of the citizen, the question of state propaganda, and the relationship between violence and power. We will be asking whether Nineteen Eighty-Four is indeed a prophetic dystopia or a covert critique of the post-war world, particularly as regards its representation of globalization and what has come to be called the New World Order.

Student evaluation will be based on a combination of class presentations, research papers, and a final exam. The course will finally be evaluated using an anonymous student questionnaire.

Instructor: Nic Panagopoulos