Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Explores how texts resonate in other cultural contexts, influence foreign traditions, and become works of world literature. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

World Literature & the Boundaries of the Passions.
Literature has long explored what it is to move from place to place along with one’s social & political settings, but what of the interior movement of our feelings?  Beginning from Euripides ancient dramatization of the boundaries between public virtues & private passions, we will learn to see how the issues of global literature take on new metaphors of “reality” in being transferred from place to place.    

Following our introduction to the ethics of the body in world literature, we move to Hemingway’s ironic account of bohemians coming apart at a Spanish fiesta; Eileen Chang’s stories of being caught between Shanghai and Hong Kong; Duras’s searing exploration of love across cultural and racial lines; and Ghassan Kanafani’s tale of what it is to have borders rather than a country.  Each of these texts opens up a different way of conceiving how one’s cultural outlook is never going to remain stable when an individual point of view is forced into the open.  

We end with a question: if ‘language is the main instrument of man’s refusal to accept the world as it is,’ how might crossing the boundaries of the self be a way of rebelling against one’s own ideas of difference?

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

• Introductory understanding of World Literature as a field practice
• Basic comprehension of terms and concepts of literary criticism
• Ability to cognize and compare literary texts as social discourses
• Starting ability to extend comparisons across different cultural media 

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: