Leadership Approaches Through Literature

¶ … representation of leadership in literary works is not identical to the representation of leaders. To take one of the most famous examples in English literature, King Lear may be the highest-ranking leader in the Shakespeare tragedy that bears his name, but his actions are neither wise nor principled; Lear's Fool, the court-jester, arguably displays more leadership over the course of the drama. Examining literary representations of leadership in the past two decades, therefore, will not always entail examining stories about powerful or influential people. In outlining a research proposal to examine how leadership issues are illuminated by recently published works, it is crucial to understand that a proper survey will include a mix of works. Some of these works will examine directly the highest leadership roles, like that of a commander-in-chief, while other works will illuminate leadership from the perspective of the ordinary soldiers who follow that lead. This proposal will follow that principle, although in some sense it may seem contradictory to observe that sometimes the best approach to evaluating good leadership might entail looking at followers or at bad leaders.

Research Questions and Research Objectives

The five works under examination have been selected to provide a broad spectrum with points of contrast to each other, so as to approach the question of leadership from different angles. The primary objective in selecting these works is therefore to view leadership from multiple perspectives, and to do so with recent works that have occasioned significant comment in secondary literature (so that a variety of critical perspective on the five authors can be incorporated). The contradictions that are potentially inherent in the study of leadership are summed up in what we might fairly describe as the most influential book about leadership to be published in the early twenty-first century, Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Although this story of a powerful and influential leader (Abraham Lincoln) was famously embraced as a template for leadership by another powerful man (Barack Obama), the central figure in Goodwin's book is one who has never held any significant leadership post before finding himself in command of a whole nation in a time of civil war. But other recent works explore issues of leadership by focusing on the conscience of the individual led by another and struggling to exhibit leadership in his or her own conduct. Therefore, a study of recent literary works about leadership might focus on depictions of lower-ranking characters. The 2006 stage drama Guardians by Peter Morris depicts a female American soldier during the Iraq War -- clearly modeled on Private Lynndie England of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal -- who finds herself pressured to commit immoral and criminal acts in the course of duty. George Saunders's short story "Winky," originally published in The New Yorker in 1997, has already become a staple of college syllabi, and it too examines leadership from the perspective of a follower: in this case, an ordinary person who seeks "life coaching" with heartbreaking results. Adam Thirlwell's 2003 novel Politics presents a novel twist on the relevance to leadership at the highest level, and ordinary personal dramas: the story of a love relationship between two young Londoners, the novel rather daringly offers examples from the lives of high-ranking political leaders like Stalin and Mao to illuminate the choices made on an intimate personal level by a couple whose relationship is falling apart. And finally Jonathan Franzen's 2010 novel Freedom similarly represents a character trying to exhibit leadership while remaining true to his conscience, as he takes a public relations job working for a coal industry billionaire but still hopes to advance environmentalist causes.

This is a selection of five works with a distinguished literary pedigree, all of them nominated for or receiving significant awards. And to some extent, they all involve relevant political issues from the last two decades, some of them directly (like Franzen and Morris who both discuss the Iraq War) and some more indirectly (like Doris Kearns Goodwin, who examines Lincoln's leadership in the Civil War as an implicit contrast to the domineering cocksure style employed in Iraq by the Bush administration with disastrous results). But the way in which they approach the question of leadership is different in each. Leadership is seen ironically in Saunders and Thirlwell: Saunders looks at what happens when a strong leader gives strong instructions to someone in no position to follow them, and Thirlwell looks at aspects of the most famous leaders (good and bad) from the twentieth century to examine what happens to a couple who are dating, a situation that should be a model of leaderless collaboration but which always, of course, involves individuals making individual decisions. As a result, examining who the "leader" is in each of these works will require different approaches. Abraham Lincoln is presented in full portrait by Goodwin, while the leadership guru in Saunders's short story is seen in the first half, but the action of the story focuses on the follower who takes the guru's advice; in the first, the comments on leadership are explicit, but in the second the comments are implicit, as we are asked to understand and judge leadership by its results, and how it affects the people who are being led.

Literature Review

These five works have been selected in part because, although they are recent works, there is a significant body of secondary literature on each -- in the form of reviews and also journal articles -- which can help us to illuminate how critics or scholars have responded to the works, and their implicit biases. For example, Guardians, Morris's play about the Abu Ghraib scandal in the Iraq War, has occasioned critical comment by an expert in the play's subject, the NYU legal scholar Karen Greenberg, whose essay on the play makes it clear that she understands the play as primarily an indictment of the leadership that oversaw the scandal, even though the play itself represents the scandal from the perspective of a low-ranking scapegoat: this leads to what Greenberg calls a "split screen syndrome" where America's leadership reflects the contradictory idea that "the nation is both vulnerable and powerful, both victim and victimizer, both aggressor and defendant" (Greenberg 2006, 40). Meanwhile a 2012 journal article by the academic critic Katarzyna Beilin revisits Guardians and the Abu Ghraib scandal to understand how it confronts the narrative of "bad apples" in a good barrel, i.e., the idea that the scandal represents the rogue actions of low-ranked individuals and not a more general problem with leadership (Beilin 2012, 427). These are scholarly approaches to this particular work, but there are also a wealth of newspaper reviews of the play in productions from the past decade, in locations that range from New York City, Seattle, and Chicago to London and New Zealand. As a result, even though this is a work that may not be widely known to the general public (despite the stage production in NYC in 2006 with two television celebrities), it is a work that has prompted a secondary literature that can be reviewed for insight and commentary on the subject of leadership which will be approached in this study. This sort of literature review will be conducted for all five works: I give examples for just one of them in this proposal, as an indication of what kind of scholarship and criticism exists when approaching a creative work.

Research Methodology