Explores literary form and language in a wide range of cultures, introducing students to the global English literary tradition, comprising multiple lineages. Introduces students to poetry, narrative, drama, orality, media, digitality, and/or other genres drawn from diverse traditions, each locally historicized and contextualized.
Additional Information:听Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
鈥淸A] genealogy of world literature leads to Orientalism鈥�. So writes Aamir Mufti in his recent book Forget English! (2016). Taking Mufti鈥檚 cue, this course seeks to trace the constitution of the category of 鈥渨orld literature鈥� back to what Raymond Schwab characterizes as Europe鈥檚 鈥淥riental Renaissance鈥� of the 18th and 19th centuries. Via a series of close readings, we explore how it was in the Orientalist philologist Sir William Jones鈥檚 English-language translations of Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit poetry and drama that the literary and cultural heritage of the 鈥淥rient鈥� was rendered legible for European audiences of the time. How, we then ask, does contemporary world literature register and engage this history? Looking into a range of critical, theoretical, and literary articulations of this problematic, and focusing especially on the novel as the 鈥渇irst truly planetary form鈥�, we develop a critical, decolonized methodology for reading 鈥渓iterature鈥� in its global contexts. We put this approach into practice through a concluding analysis of Ahdaf Soueif鈥檚 novel The Map of Love.
Course assignments include: regular contributions to class discussions; a presentation; a midterm essay (2,000 words); a final essay (4-5,000 words); and three contributions to a class blog.
Taught by Karim Mattar.
The Novel and the Intimacies of Empire
It should be noted that the novel always includes in itself the activity of coming to know another鈥檚 world, a coming to knowledge whose process is represented in the novel.鈥� So wrote Bakhtin in 鈥淒iscourse in the Novel.鈥� This class explores the novel as a form shaped by imperialism. The modern novel emerged amidst the expansion of the British empire, and from its inception through today has marked what scholar Lisa Lowe refers to as the intimacies of continents鈥攊ntimacies of settler, cultural, and economic imperialisms. We will consider the novel as a site of intersection: not only of voices but also of ways of knowing and navigating the world. Authors may include Aphra Behn, Zora Neale Hurston, Carmen Boullosa, Amitav Ghosh, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk.
Taught by Maria Windell.