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:

FICTION has long investigated what it is to change one’s social and political location, but what of the movement of our feelings?  Beginning with Euripides’ ancient dramatization of the threatening boundaries between public virtue and private passion, this introductory course investigates how notions of the self in WORLD LITERATURE acquire new metaphors as they travel from place to place.  Focusing upon the ethics of the body as much as literature’s ability to express what goes on in the mind, we read Oyono’s classic novel of race and colonial hypocrisy in Africa, Nella Larsen’s narrative of racial “passing” in America, and Duras’s searing exploration of love across ethnic lines.  We also review the supernatural connectivities of Mati Diop’s award-winning Senegalese film Atlantique. 

Each of our course texts contemplates how personal and national outlooks change when they are forced into the open, and each explores the same question: if ‘language is the main instrument of man’s refusal to accept the world as it is,’ how might crossing cultural boundaries be a way of rebelling against difference?  Or as the actress from the screen version of Passing, Ruth Negga, tells it: “It’s through trying on different masks that we discover ourselves.”

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
• Ability to undertake comparisons across different cultural media

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

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