What is power, where is it rooted, and how is it sustained and perpetuated? One possible answer comes to us via the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who posited that “in modern bio-politics, sovereign is he who decides on the value or non-value of life as-such”. In this course, we will analyze literary texts where the concepts of power and sovereignty create a complex and intricate web of meaning. Power in these texts is either exclusively “owned” by a mysterious group of bureaucrats (The Palace of Dreams), secured in a totalitarian state (Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea), dispersed after a civil war (Girl at War), or contested within the realm of law and criminality (The Day of the Owl). We will closely examine the relationship between power and life, with a focus on Agamben’s Theory of the State of Exception, defined as a situation in which people are often stripped of political rights and authority seems to rise above any other rule.