ENGL 365 Contemporary Literature
Topics may vary semester to semester.
The Refugee
This seminar will explore how refugees have portrayed themselves and have been portrayed in literature, memoir, testimony, film, and art. Our goal will be to appraise whether and how aesthetic attempts to capture the condition of refugees respond to and at times revise political discourses about those in exile. Among others, we will engage with the work of Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben, Edward Said, Gloria Anzaldua, W.G. Sebald, Mahmoud Darwish, Caryl Phillips, Ghassan Kanafani, and Viet Nguyen.
Major Requirement Met: Group III/ IV
The Global Novel
This course will focus on literature and theory produced in the aftermath of the British Empire. By 1914 the British Empire had colonized almost 25% of the world, bringing diverse cultural traditions under the encyclopedic gaze of Western modernity. If part of the aim of the colonial apparatus was to collect knowledge of the world in ways that bodies, cultures, and landscapes could be understood and ordered by the West, contemporary societies are now negotiating their own means of self-representation in the often-violent space of postcolonial rupture. Throughout the term, we will work with texts and visual images produced out of, and in response to, the history of the colonial encounter. Drawing on a broad range of literary, filmic, and theoretical materials we will develop strategies for understanding the production and consumption of postcolonial representation, in both local and global contexts. As consumers of these cultural products within the space of the Western academy, we will be attentive to the function of the stereotype as we consider representations of gender and sexuality, violence and terrorism, class structures, and migration.
Major Requirement Met: Group III
Prerequisite
One 100- or 200-level English course, or junior or senior standing