This seminar investigates literature as a practice of freedom, taking as its theoretical foundation Richard Rorty's revolutionary claim that human liberation comes not through discovering truth but through redescription. For Rorty, literature's unique power lies in its capacity to provide new vocabularies, metaphors, and narratives that allow us to reimagine ourselves and our possibilities. By showing us that our deepest assumptions about identity, society, and meaning are contingent rather than necessary, literature opens spaces for transformation - both personal and collective. Through intensive engagement with contemporary writers - J.M. Coetzee, W.G. Sebald, Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk, and Miranda July - we will explore how literary redescription works in practice. These writers demonstrate how reimagining the languages we use to narrate experience can fundamentally alter what that experience can become. Their innovations in form and voice reveal writing as a tool for escaping what Rorty calls our "final vocabularies," those inherited descriptions that ordinarily constrain our sense of the possible. We will examine how their work challenges conventional boundaries between fiction and philosophy, self and other, private and public, creating new modes of attention and understanding. The course situates Rorty's pragmatist vision of literature within a broader philosophical conversation about freedom, drawing on Nietzsche's perspectivism, Heidegger's poetics of dwelling, and Arendt's conception of narrative identity. Together, these thinkers help us understand how literary redescription operates as ethical and political practice: not by prescribing how we should live, but by expanding our imaginative resources for conceiving how we might live. Through close reading and creative response, students will engage with literature as a liberating force - one that doesn't reveal hidden truths but creates new possibilities for human flourishing.
3-5 units · Letter or Credit/No Credit
This seminar investigates literature as a practice of freedom, taking as its theoretical foundation Richard Rorty's revolutionary claim that human liberation comes not through discovering truth but through redescription. For Rorty, literature's unique power lies in its capacity to provide new vocabularies, metaphors, and narratives that allow us to reimagine ourselves and our possibilities. By showing us that our deepest assumptions about identity, society, and meaning are contingent rather than necessary, literature opens spaces for transformation - both personal and collective. Through intensive engagement with contemporary writers - J.M. Coetzee, W.G. Sebald, Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk, and Miranda July - we will explore how literary redescription works in practice. These writers demonstrate how reimagining the languages we use to narrate experience can fundamentally alter what that experience can become. Their innovations in form and voice reveal writing as a tool for escaping what Rorty calls our "final vocabularies," those inherited descriptions that ordinarily constrain our sense of the possible. We will examine how their work challenges conventional boundaries between fiction and philosophy, self and other, private and public, creating new modes of attention and understanding. The course situates Rorty's pragmatist vision of literature within a broader philosophical conversation about freedom, drawing on Nietzsche's perspectivism, Heidegger's poetics of dwelling, and Arendt's conception of narrative identity. Together, these thinkers help us understand how literary redescription operates as ethical and political practice: not by prescribing how we should live, but by expanding our imaginative resources for conceiving how we might live. Through close reading and creative response, students will engage with literature as a liberating force - one that doesn't reveal hidden truths but creates new possibilities for human flourishing.
Offered in Spring 2026 at Stanford University.