ENGL 521: Survey of World Literature II
Professor: Dr. Licia Hendriks
Location: Citadel
Time: Monday 5:00 – 7:45
As the rampant globalization of contemporary culture has made the twenty-first-century world seem more homogenized than ever, this retrospective study of pivotal authors and works that were transformative in the nations within which they were written offers a means of appreciating how literature operates to familiarize the exotic, demystify the foreign, and promote a cosmopolitan aesthetic.
Privileging the voices of the marginalized and minoritized, the course will intentionally center oft-neglected regions of the world and elevate the voices of women and people of color. Beginning with the 18th-century Chinese novel of manners The Story of the Stone, the syllabus will cover material up through more contemporary texts like Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck (2009).
We will investigate the development of the written expressive tradition, which invokes issues of individual and collective representation and the burden of cultural responsibility. In the process of reading and discussing poetry and prose emerging from Africa, Asia, Continental Europe, and South America, we will come to appreciate both the diversity and universality of the human experience across time and circumstance. We will situate the various narrative situations in a developing cultural context, and talk about the ways inter- and intracultural tensions become visible as characters position themselves vis-à-vis others in terms of historical legacy and social evolution. Among other things, we’ll think about issues of the human experience, language, and identity: how to assess the efforts to resist culturally prescribed prejudices with attention to historical perspective, how to comprehend the impact of the colonial enterprise, how the process of translation affects meaning, how the trend towards writing in English impacts national literatures, and how the presumption of a preoccupation with ethnicity/nationality is complicated by class, gender, and sexuality issues. Through reading, writing, and discussion, students will develop an enhanced capacity to understand and respect the views and concerns of others, especially regarding gender, ethnicity, and religion.
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