ENG 383LEC - Studies in World Literature

Courses in literature primarily from outside the United States and Britain. All texts in English or in English translation. A: Transnational Literature The study of literature from geographically and culturally diverse places that undermines the usual classification of literary texts in terms of national and regional literatures B: Literature in Translation Major texts in English translation, viewed in light of cultural and aesthetic cross-currents. C: Arab Literature Studies in literature by Arab writers in English translation, including focus on topics like Arab women writers, the Arab novel, and Palestinian literature. D: World Jewish Literature Study of Jewish writing, which has been written in all the languages Jews have spoken, including Yiddish, Ladino, Russian, German, Serbian, Hungarian, Polish, Hebrew, French, English, Portuguese, and Spanish. All literature taught in English translation. E: African Literature Studies in literature from Africa in English and English translation, including focus on topics like African women writers, the African novel, and African drama. For example: 383 A: Prof. C. Mardorossian, Transplantation, Displacement, and Identity This course focuses on narratives that emerged in response to a condition of exile, migrancy, and rootlessness that they paradoxically embrace and celebrate. The authors we will read emphasize the mixing of races, cultures, and languages across widely separate geographical and historical spaces. Throughout the semester, we will explore the alternative and regenerative forms of identity and self-understanding that are made possible by the experience of transplantation and displacement. Special attention will be paid to the ways in which writers depict their characters relation to their urban, rural, and physical environment. We will try and determine whether there is such a thing as a migrant aesthetics whose parameters we can identify in the fiction we read. We will read novels and short fiction by contemporary diaspora writers from India, Bangladesh, the Caribbean (Antigua, Cuba, Martinique), South Africa, England, and Iran. How do these works help us redefine the relationship between individuals and their environments? How do generational differences affect the literary production of these diaspora communities? What happens to diasporic literature when it is produced by writers who have not experienced their parents history of migration? What is the difference between diasporic, migrant, and exile literature? For example 383B: Prof. W. Hakala, Afghanistan in the Travelers Eye Afghanistan has long attracted the attention of people from afar. From ancient quests for the Water of [Eternal] Life to more recent expeditions seeking to exploit its vast underground mineral deposits, the Afghanistan carried in the travelers imagination often conflicts with the Afghanistan that is actually encountered. This course is intended to serve not just as an introduction to the motivations and experiences of travelers to Afghanistan, but also to the forms of knowledge that are produced in the wake of such travels. For example 383H: H. Young, Contemporary African Literature This class will introduce students to a wide array of contemporary African literature. We will examine the legacy of colonialism and slavery, reading about how Africans have navigated the forces of global capital that still wrack the continent today. Moving away from stereotypes of Africans as primitive, we will examine complex cultural, linguistic and political histories that engender literary portraits of sophisticated peoples dealing with the vicissitudes of daily living. We will read, amongst other things about ghosts, prophets, child soldiers and bees.

Credits: 3

Grading
Graded (GRD)