COURSE SYLLABUS
Academic year 2020/2021
Course title Ideological Projects of Late Modernity: Cultural Left vs. Right
Year of study III Semester* 2 Prerequisite for enrolment: students must have a passing grade in the courses Modernity and Europeanness and The History of Political Ideas
Topics
1. The political spectrum. Cultural projects and movements in support of political ideologies. (Nancy, Renaut)
2. The New Left. The (post)history of „one-dimensional man” (Marcuse)
3. Art and ideology: the „surrealist left”, the „futurist right” (Breton, Marinetti)
4. Existentialism and Marxism: materialism and revolution (Sartre)
5. The rebel. The condition of the stranger. Nihilism. An implicit political approach (Camus)
6. May ‘68: a new face of modern individualism.
7. The left-wing political imaginary: communism, the „Iberian model” (Saramago)
8. What does socialism (still) mean today? (Habermas)
Selective bibliography
Aronson R. (2020). “Sartre and the American New Left”. In: Betschart A., Werner J. (eds) Sartre and the International Impact of Existentialism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38482-1_2
Breton, A. (1991). Position politique du surréalisme. Le livre de poche.
Bellu, N. (2005). From the Political Left to the Cultural Left [De la stânga politică la stânga culturală]. Paideia.
Camus, A. (1957). Speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1957/camus/25232-albert-camus-banquet-speech-1957/
Camus, A. (2018). The Stranger [Străinul]. Polirom.
Camus, A. (2019) The Rebel [Omul revoltat]. Polirom.
Guerlac, S. (1997). Literary Polemics: Bataille, Sartre, Valery, Breton. Stanford University Press.
Habermas, J. (1990). “What does socialism mean today? The rectifying revolution and the need for new thinking on the left”. In New Left Review, 1990 – newleftreview.org
Ialongo, E. (2016). Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: The Artist and His Politics. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Marcuse, H. (1977). „One-Dimensional Man” [„Omul unidimensional”]. In Philosophical Writings [Scrieri filosofice]. Editura Politică.
Marcuse, H. (2005). The New Left and the 1960s Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume 3. Routledge.
Marinetti, F. T. (2018). Destruction. Forgotten Books.
Nancy, J.L (2020). “Left/Right”. In Parrhesia 33(2020):1-16.
Novello, S. (2010). Albert Camus as Political Thinker. Nihilisms and the Politics of Contempt. Palgrave Macmillan.
Renaut, A. (2003). Qu’est-ce qu’une politique juste ? Essai de philosophie politique appliquée. Politique et Sociétés, 22 (3): 155–178. https://doi.org/10.7202/008855ar
Saramago, J. (1998). A Nobel lecture. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1998/saramago/lecture/
Saramago, J. (2013). The Cave [Peștera]. Polirom.
Saramago, J. (2016). The Double [Omul duplicat]. Polirom.
Saramago, J. (2018). Blindness [Eseu despre orbire]. Polirom.
Sartre, J.P. (1946). “Camus’ The Outsider”, “Cartesian Freedom”, “Materialism and Revolution”. In Literary and Political Essays, 1962.
Sartre, J.P. (1995). Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate. Shocken.