Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Explores how texts travel beyond their cultures of origin, influence other cultural contexts and ideas, and become works of world literature. Introduces the concepts of cross-cultural literary criticism and translation. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

Literature has long investigated what it is to move from place to place along with one’s social & political settings, but what of the movement of our feelings?  Beginning from Euripides dramatization of the threatening boundaries between public virtues & private passions, we will learn to see how the issues of WORLD LITERATURE take on new metaphors of “reality” in being transferred from place to place.     Following our classical introduction to the ethics of the body, we move to Claire de Duras’s century-old novella of cultivation & hypocrisy in revolutionary France; Eileen Chang’s Shanghai & Hong Kong stories; Marguerite Duras’s exploration of love across racial lines; & Aosh Irani’s startling tale of amity & revenge.  Each of these texts contemplates how cultural outlooks change when they are forced into the open.  As the course explores, just as ‘language is the main instrument of man’s refusal to accept the world as it is,’ how might crossing boundaries be a way of rebelling against 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: