About
"Revolution, Violence, and Literature: Restaging the French Revolution"
My dissertation traces the history of the relationship between literature, history and political change as it is articulated in literature itself. I argue that literature, in particular of and about the past, can provide the conditions for critique that many theorists claim have become impossible in late capitalism. I bring together a comparative corpus of literary works that have the French revolutionary episodes of 1789-93 and 1871 as their theme, and revolution, as a relationship to history, as their aim. This includes works from various literary genres (novels, poetry, theater, and cinema), in different languages (French, English, German, and Polish), and ranging from the late 18th to the late 20th century. I look at how my authors represented and dealt with a revolutionary past that was almost immediately made into a myth and the demise of which is most frequently attributed to its moments of violence. The historical layering present in these works motivates my own approach to this corpus. I first historicize my authors’ practices and theories about literature and revolution. Then, I locate in each of them what I call a “literary knowledge” that sheds light on today’s challenges to radical change, defying the postmodern premise about it being, in Fredric Jameson’s words, “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” (Jameson 2003, 76)
Luiza Duarte Caetano is a Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Literature.
