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The terms "politics" and "literature" are both "essentially-contestable" concepts. "Politics" can mean political practice, political ideas or the study of politics; "literature" can mean the writing of books, the content of those books or the reading of them. "Politics and literature" is often taken to be synonymous with "political literature," but different usages of "politics" and "literature" will produce other connections. Much of the work in "politics and literature" hitherto has been of a sociological nature. Less interest has been shown in the distinctively political aspects of the possible relationships between the study of politics — political thought in the widest sense — and the content of literature.No methodology has yet been developed, in Literary Studies or Political Science, for the explication and understanding of these connections. The sociology of literature, however, provides terminology that may be useful in establishing such links.

If Westerners harbored any doubts about the role of the Catholic Church in sustaining the Polish national spirit, the recent visit of Pope John Paul II to his native land surely laid them to rest. And yet the Church's historic partner in the enterprise of keeping Polish nationalism alive is still generally overlooked. That partner is Poland's national literature.Polish literature helped sustain the nation through centuries of oppression, and its role in the post-World War II epoch has been no less critical. From the Romantic classics of the nineteenth century to a (for Eastern Europe) remarkably free modern literature, Poland's authors and poets are its unsung heroes in the struggle to preserve an independent national culture.

The literature of contemporary Africa is more than a response to the politics of Africa. It is an aspect of the political debate, of course, but it is also an intrinsically important element in the total African renaissance of our times. True, the earliest beginnings of literature in contemporary Africa are rooted in politics and political protest. (I exclude the African writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for the simple reason that most of them did not see fiction, poetry or drama as possible vehicles for their anti-colonial and antislavery protests.)Négritude, the literary movement of the French African and Antillean deracine, was created as a literary response to European cultural imperialism (defined by Gallicism) Its prophets, Césaire of Martinique, Damas of Guyana, and L. S. Senghor of Sengal, expressed the anguish of their delirious alienation, frustration, protest against European culture, and against that romantic glorification of Africa, the Sartrean imaginary continent.

Carlos Fuentes, Mexico s former ambassador to France and famed novelist, short story writer, and essayist, spent the 197980 academic year teaching at Princeton. While Fuentes was visiting the University of Notre Dame at the invitation of the Spanish Department, Jose Anadbn had the opportunity to ask him several ques tions, as did some of the students.

A curious state of affairs has developed within the academic discipline that bravely calls itself Political Science—the discipline that in a much-quoted phrase has been called "a device, invented by university teachers, for avoiding that dangerous subject politics, without achieving science." A growing and now indeed a predominant proportion of leading American political scientists, the behavioralists, have become determined to achieve science. Yet in the process many of them remain open to the charge of strenuously avoiding that dangerous subject, politics.Consider a recent essay on the behavioral persuasion in politics. The conclusion stresses the purpose of political inquiry: "The Goal is Man." There is to be a commitment to some humane purpose after all. But what kind of man? A democratic kind of man, a just man, or perhaps a power-seeking man? The answer follows: "These are philosophical questions better left to the philosophers."