The Novel and Contemporary Forms of Power

This course will examine a strand of novelistic writing from the late twentieth and the early
twenty-first century through the lens of contemporary forms of power which intervene in the
processes of life and death of human beings. A considerable body of theoretical and historical
scholarship has emerged over the past two or three decades on these new forms and the way they
work in diverse geographical, cultural and political locations. We shall in particular draw on
selected readings from Arendt, Foucault, Agamben, and Mbembe to familiarize ourselves with
them.
The course’s aim is to examine a small set of novels from different parts of the world which show
an imaginative engagement with situations that arise under these new regimes of power. These
novels often foreground situations of destitution, devastation, grief or loss. The management and
annihilation of life – and therefore forms of death and dying – form the indispensable backdrop
against which they shape their events, characters, and ways of storytelling. Characters in them
offer some resistance to interpretative readings based on reliable psychological features.
Narration, objects and voices circulate here differently from realist and modernist fiction. In spite
of these commonalities, the novels we consider are marked by differences in culture and in the
specific features assumed by technologies of power. The comparative dimension of the course
thus pertains not only to novels but also to configurations of contemporary power in diverse
locations.
We shall begin by examining the preoccupation with destitution, dying and the crisis of language
and subjectivity in Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, and move on to engage novels from diverse locations
such as South Africa, Turkey, Rwanda, the United States and India to understand how structures
of everyday life or situations of exception are permeated by power relations inflected by race,
religion, gender, caste and technological redefinitions of the human. Through their complex and
close engagements with situations of crisis, these novels persuade us to rethink questions of
subjectivity, agency, fictionality and ethics.
A major objective of the course is to develop ways of reading novels that go beyond their direct
thematic preoccupations and pay close attention to the fictional and textual modes through which
they engage structures of experience which possess political and philosophical importance.
Regular, intensive reading of prescribed novels as well as texts of a conceptual nature is an
essential prerequisite. Those who feel unable to meet this requirement are advised not to enrol
for this course.

Readings:

Novels:

Detailed study:
1. Samuel Beckett, Molloy
2. John Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K.
3. Margaret Attwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
4. Orhan Pamuk, Snow
5. Devanur Mahadeva, Kusumabale
Additional reading:
1. Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
2. Boubacar Boris Diop, Murambi, The Book of Bones
3. Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Theoretical readings (indicative list):

Michel Foucault, Selections from Discipline and Punish, History of Sexuality, vol. 1.
Hannah Arendt, Selections from Origins of Totalitarianism, ‘We Refugees’
Giorgio Agamben, Selections from Homo Sacer, ‘We Refugees’
Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’
D. R. Nagaraj, Selections from Flaming Feet.
Aniket Jaaware, Destitute Literature