AESTHETIC ACTIVISM? in Fall 2020 (CL1099FB8)

What role does literature play in addressing historical and political wrongs? This class will read novels and poems and essays that offer connections and stories obscured by the usual sources of historical information. When, in Beloved, Toni Morrison uses a nineteenth-century newspaper article to imagine the experiences and motives of the formerly-enslaved woman named in it, or when Georges Perec, in W or the Memory of Childhood, integrates photographs of family members lost in the Holocaust into a memoir that flirts with amnesia, both authors make visible the holes in the historical record. Does this kind of surfacing of lives lost or damaged by racism and genocide constitute activism? If so, what does such a project look like now?