English 627-001
Seminar in Literature and Culture: Civil Disobedience
Instr: McKenzie, Jon
Office: CRT 584; 229-2990
e-mail: jonm@uwm.edu
Office hours:
Course Information: M&W; 3:30-4:45pm; CRT 321
Course Description
This course explores a concise genealogy of civil disobedience, with particular attention to questions of performance, writing, and technology. We begin by briefly considering a seminal text of Renaissance Humanist dissent, Etienne La Boétie¹s ³On Voluntary Servitude,² and its later rereading by revolutionary Romantics. Here we see popular dissent emerging in struggles over political authority and human agency. We then turn to modern civil disobedience. Engaging texts and actions by Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr., we examine how nonviolent resistance becomes mobilized to battle slavery, war, colonialism, and racism.
