“[A] genealogy of world literature leads to Orientalism”. So writes Aamir Mufti in his recent book Forget English! (2016). Taking Mufti’s cue, this course seeks to trace the constitution of the category of “world literature” back to what Raymond Schwab characterizes as Europe’s “Oriental Renaissance” of the 18th and 19th centuries. Via a series of close readings, we explore how it was in the Orientalist philologist Sir William Jones’s English-language translations of Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit poetry and drama that the literary and cultural heritage of the “Orient” was rendered legible for European audiences of the time. How, we then ask, does contemporary world literature register and engage this history? Looking into a range of critical, theoretical, and literary articulations of this problematic, and focusing especially on the novel as the “first truly planetary form”, we develop a critical, decolonized methodology for reading “literature” in its global contexts. We put this approach into practice through a concluding analysis of Ahdaf Soueif’s novel The Map of Love.
Course assignments include: regular contributions to class discussions; a presentation; a midterm essay (2,000 words); a final essay (4-5,000 words); and three contributions to a class blog.
Taught by Karim Mattar.