The course will delve into how the British modern novelists problematize modern biopolitics and d engage in creating a positive relation between life and politics with literary discourses. In his Man without Content, Giorgio Agamben renounces modern aesthetics as over-valorizing the formal principle and downsizing content, as if art in modernity corresponds and contributes to the emptying of zoe, the natural life, in bios, the form of life by biopolitical sovereignty. Yet, his idea of form-of-life (forma-di-vita) suggest that at stake is less form as such than how life drives its form; his later studies of poetry and literature, esp. poems of formal experiment by Italian modernist poets in The End of the Poem, also reflect a positive approach to the constitution of the form of life. On the other hand, challenging the reified and hierarchized power relation, thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Ranciere, Antonio Negri, just to name a few, also take modern artworks as important inspirations. This further specifies the potentiality for modern art to develop a resistant or revolutionary force against the prevailing distribution or territorialization of the modern life by socio-political sovereignty.

This course aims to bring up both philosophical and literary discourses to fulfill initially this promise, with the spotlight cast on works in modern British novelists, including James Joyce, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. The purpose is to biopoliticize their literary works to see how they have noticed the problems about life in modernity as biopolitical ones and how, in response to this devastation, have proposed a positive alternative in art and by art.