DSPO 25A79 - Politics through Cinema and Literature: Representing and Narrating Power

Politics through Cinema and Literature: Representing and Narrating Power’ is an interdisciplinary

seminar that explores how literature and film grapple with the complexities of political power,

authority, resistance, and representation. Drawing from a wide range of historical and geopolitical

contexts, the course examines how writers and filmmakers narrate, aestheticize, and challenge

systems of domination, the dynamics of oppression and liberation, and the moral ambiguities inherent

in political engagement.

Through lectures, screenings of film excerpts, class discussions, and written assignments, students will

acquire interpretative tools to analyze how cultural productions both reflect and shape political

realities.

The course features close readings of literary texts and critical analyses of landmark films, including

Citizen Kane and Casablanca. Students will examine the theatrical staging of power in Shakespeare’s

Henry V and its contrasting cinematic interpretations by Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh; the

construction of the Napoleonic and Lincolnian myths, from Abel Gance to Steven Spielberg; and the

expression of American democratic idealism in Frank Capra’s cinema.

Further topics include the representation of atrocity and memory in works addressing the Holocaust,

McCarthyism, the nuclear era, Watergate, the Vietnam War... Emphasis will be placed on the

aesthetics of authoritarianism and resistance, as well as on portrayals of the Royal and Presidential

figures in British, American and French cinema.

The course will interrogate the subdued complicity of the butler (Anthony Hopkins) in James Ivory’s

The Remains of the Day and explore the differences and similarities between Joseph Conrad’s Heart of

Darkness and its adaptation by Francis Ford Coppola in Apocalypse Now.

Throughout the semester, we will critically engage with propaganda, the narrative construction of

ideology, the tension between personal conscience and collective responsibility, and the ways in which

historical memory is shaped (or suppressed) by literary and cinematic forms.

None

• 1 personal or group presentation, subjects outlined in the syllabus 45 %
• 1 research paper: extensive list of potential topics in the syllabus) 45 %
• Student engagement during the semester (participation in class discussions during and

outside of class, ability to ask questions, and class citizenship etc.) 10 %