This course introduces students to the concept and practice of world literature. It seeks to understand world literature not as a collection of national literary canons created in different linguistic and cultural locations, but as a field of knowledge about literature as a cross-cultural and translingual system of production and circulation. We will read a selection of seminal statements on world literature and discuss the historical formation of world literature: its methodology and scope, its politics and limitations, in close relation to forms and forces of globalization.

 

Topics to be discussed include:

• Possible definitions of world literature
• The (im)possibility of a world literary canon
• How literature circulates across borders, including ideas of influence, plagiarism and translation
• Bilingual writing, linguistic power dynamics, and the relationship between major/minor languages
• Intercultural and interlinguistic encounters in world literature
• Global, multinational and delocalized fictions

 

This course aims to introduce students to a variety of topics in world literature, including concepts of “crossing,” “intersectionality” and “transference.” The course ranges from classics of German-speaking literature (Goethe first pronounced the idea of Weltliteratur in 1827) to Nigerian, Dominican, Irish, Australian and Korean works of various genres. They will learn to consider literature as a global phenomenon and cross-cultural product and will develop a multicultural and cross-cultural appreciation of literary motifs and genres. Students will develop an analytical framework and a critical language for their study of works of world literature, and will learn to analyze texts thematically, comparatively and through close reading.

 

3 hours a week. The first two hours will be a combination of lectures, group discussions and pair work. The final hour will be a tutorial, during which students will have the opportunity to discuss the set texts in more depth and practice their skills in close reading and literary analysis. More information on the make-up of these sessions will be available on Moodle before the course begins.

 

Assessment (100% coursework):

• Participation (includes attendance, in-class discussions, and pre-class preparation exercises): 20%
• Mid-term paper: 30%
• End-term essay (1800 - 2000 words): 50%

 

Primary:

Franz Kafka, “A Report to an Academy” (1917)
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958)
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
Seamus Heaney, selected poems from Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975)
Olga Tokarczuk, Primeval and Other Times (1996)
Han Kang, The Vegetarian (2007)
John Marsden/Shaun Tan, The Rabbits (1998)

Critical:

Excerpts from World Literature: A Reader (Routledge, 2012)

David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (2003)
John Pizer, The Idea of World Literature (2006)
Joel Nickels, World Literature and the Geographies of Resistance (2018)
Joe Cleary, Modernism, Empire and World Literature (2021)