ENGL 6425

World Literature: The Case of the 19th Century

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2016-2017.

In this course, we will read recent theorists of world literature, including Damrosch, Spivak, Moretti, Friedman, Dimock, Walkowitz, Hayot, Apter, and Mufti, and we will trace a genealogy of the term back to Goethe and Marx. We will think about how important the British Empire and English literature and language have been to processes of globalization, and we will focus on a number of nineteenth-century Anglophone translations and theories of translation. We will train a skeptical eye on the Eurocentric and national categories that currently organize literary study. What texts might be included in global canon of nineteenth-century world literature? How do poetry and prose circulate differently? What political power attaches to literacy and to literature? How do oral traditions travel? And do new geographies require new chronologies?

When Offered Fall.

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