Listed in: English, as ENGL-494
Anna J. Abramson (Section 01)
What does it mean to talk about literature as “global”? How do writers engage the idea of the globe politically, aesthetically, and environmentally?
This is a class about problems of scale and scope. We will consider how contemporary writers represent phenomena that cross national borders: particular attention will be paid to climate change, migration and immigration, the idea of the “global city,” war and terrorism, and the living legacies of colonialism, slavery, and diaspora. What are the formal and ethical challenges of thinking on a global scale? When thinking globally, how can we preserve awareness of local and historical differences? What are literary theorists saying about these questions today? Our readings will pair late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century fiction with critical and theoretical work drawn from ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and so-called new global modernisms. This class will also emphasize the process and skills involved in upper-level literary analysis and research: we will experiment with a range of strategies for note-taking, making sense of dense texts, framing research questions, and finding openings and opportunities to engage in ongoing critical debates and conversations.
Possible authors include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole, Mohsin Hamid, Jamaica Kincaid, Arundhati Roy, and W. G. Sebald.
While this class will default to an online (mostly synchronous) format, there will be on-campus opportunities, including but not limited to office hours; it is also possible that on-campus group meetings might become more possible and frequent as the semester progresses or if the class turns out to be composed entirely of on-campus learners. But students should be clear that the online format is the default we will begin with.
Open to juniors and seniors. Limited to 18 students. Spring semester. Professor Abramson.
Section 01
Tu 01:30 PM - 04:15 PM CHAP 201