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MA in Global Literature and Culture, University of York

Core Module, Autumn Term, 2017

Debating Global Literary Culture, 1800−Present

Convenor: Dr Ben Holgate

All students on the MA in Global Literature and Culture embark on the core module. In this

module students gain a strong grounding in the key theoretical developments and debates that

have shaped our understanding of ‘global’ literature. Debating Global Literary Culture,

1800−Present interrogates the key tools of postcolonial studies, mapping their continued

usage and probing their relation to the contemporary global dispensation. The module helps

students to navigate canonical texts and debates in postcolonial studies as well as recent

debates about world literature, and to respond to texts in these areas in a critically informed

fashion. Students are expected to raise questions about the processes and legacies of empire,

especially in relation to literary history. They are invited to link these issues to widespread

and well-known theoretical concerns with identity politics, equality claims, and human rights.

If postcolonial studies worked to ensure the resistant force of populations working against

empire was recognized as globally significant, this module will help tie such recognition to

contemporary debates about political resistance to capitalism, patriarchy, heteronormativity,

ableist/normalcy discourse, ecological degradation and disaster, and the circulation of literary

and cultural texts in English. Across the module, key theoretical texts and literary examples

are connected to cultural texts more broadly and political debates. Students can follow up on

debates in class in small, peer-led discussion groups, through the suggested set of linked

films, and via the wide range of related talks the Department of English and partner

departments offer. This will be a challenging, theoretically investigative and lively module

ensuring that students get off to a global start to the MA. Students from MAs other than

Global Literature and Culture are also very welcome to choose this module as an option.

2017 Module Structure: In Brief

Week 2: Establishing Postcolonial Theory (Holgate)

Week 3: ‘Am I not a Man and a Brother?’: Abolitionist discourse and the ‘Negro Question’

(Watt)

Week 4: Irishness, Coloniality and the Creation of Authenticity (Campbell)

Week 5: Islam, Identity and Politics Before & After the Rushdie Affair (Holgate)

Week 6: Reading Week

Week 7: Establishing World Literature Theory (Holgate)

Week 8: Playwrights and Human Rights (Morin)

Week 9: Topographies of Latin American Poetry: The Strange Case of Gabriela Mistral and

Octavio Paz (Asciuto)

Week 10: Nordic Cool: The Question of Aesthetics (Kingston-Reese)

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2017 Module Structure: In Detail

Week 2: Establishing Postcolonial Theory (Ben Holgate)

How did ‘postcolonial theory’ as it came to be known in the 1980s – an offshoot of what had

already, and equally problematically, come to be known as ‘poststructuralism’ – turn into the

variegated field that would more accurately be described today as ‘postcolonial studies’?

How has this intellectual movement changed and developed since its inception, and what

pressures, internal and external to it, have precipitated its development? Where does it seem

to be going? What are the current debates about its limitations and shortcomings? In our first

class, we will explore these questions and try to identify the key contexts, histories, and

theories of postcolonial studies, with a view to understanding the critical formations, past and

present, that inform our own practices.

Required Reading

1. All students research definitions of key historical terms for brief discussion: mercantilism;

colonialism; neocolonialism; imperialism.

2. All students read:

i) On the field of postcolonial studies: Young, Robert J. C., Postcolonialism: An Historical

Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. Chapter 1: “Colonialism and the Politics

of Postcolonial Critique” (1−11) and Chapter 5: “Postcolonialism” (57−69)

ii) On the ‘Third World’ origins of poststructuralism: Young, Chapter 27: “Foucault in

Tunisia” (395−410) and Chapter 28: “Subjectivity and History: Derrida in Algeria”

(411−426)

iii) On subaltern studies: Guha, Ranajit, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds. Selected

Subaltern Studies. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography” (3-32).

iv) On critiques of postcolonial theory: Bernard, Anna, Ziad Elmarsafy and Stuart Murray,

eds. What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say. London and New York: Routledge, 2015.

Introduction: “What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say” and Chapter 14: “Inherit the World:

World-Literature, Rising Asia and the World-Ecology”

3. Students select for brief presentation (max. 5 minutes) and discussion one of the texts

within the formations or force-fields of postcolonial theory above. Presentations should be

descriptive rather than analytical at this stage.

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Secondary Readings Within Each sub-field

(i) The field of postcolonial studies: Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing

the Margins. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Introduction.

(ii) ‘Third World’ origins of poststructuralism: Jameson, Fredric. The Ideologies of Theory,

Essays 1971-1986: Volume 2, Syntax of History. London: Routledge, 1988. “Periodizing the

Sixties” (178-208).

(iii) Subaltern studies: In Selected Subaltern Studies, Ranajit Guha, “Preface” (35-36) and

“On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India” (37-44).

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical

Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Introduction and Chapter 3:

“Translating Life-Worlds into Labor and History”.

Quayson, Ato. Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? Malden, MA: Polity Press,

2000. Chapter 2: “Postcolonial Historiography and the Problem of Local Knowledge”

In Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Young, Chapter 24: “India III: Hybridity and

Subaltern Agency” (337-359)

(iv) Critiques of postcolonial theory: Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory. London and New York,

Verso, 1992. Introduction: “Literature among the Signs of Our Time” (1-42)

McClintock, Anne. “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-colonialism’.” In

Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory. Edited by Patrick Williams and Laura

Chrisman. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

Parry, Benita. Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique. London and New York:

Routledge, 2004. Chapter 2: “Problems in current theories of colonial discourse”

Further Secondary Reading

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back. 2nd edn. London

and New York: Routledge, 2002.

Attwell, David, Anna Bernard and Ziad Elmarsafy, eds. Debating Orientalism. Basingstoke,

Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial & Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors. 2nd edn. Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2005.

Bhabha, Homi K., ed. Nation and Narration. London and New York: Routledge, 1990.

---. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

Huggan, Graham, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2013.

Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals,

Environment. London: Routledge, 2010.

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Lazarus, Neil, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2004.

---. The Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978.

---. Culture & Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus, 1993.

Young, Robert J.C. White Mythologies. 2nd edn. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.

Week 3: ‘Am I not a Man and a Brother?’: Abolitionist discourse and the ‘Negro

Question’ (Jim Watt)

In this seminar we will begin with a discussion of the complex and fascinating poem

‘Slavery’, written by the Tory evangelical Hannah More in 1788, as the campaign to abolish

the Atlantic slave trade began to gain momentum. We will then go on to consider what

happens to the abolitionist rhetoric of ‘brotherhood’ after the emancipation of slaves in

Britain’s sugar colonies in 1834, looking in particular at Thomas Carlyle’s 1849 ‘Occasional

Discourse on the Negro Question’, and John Stuart Mill’s rejoinder ‘The Negro Question’ of

1850. With reference to this material, we will think about ideologies of empire and discourses

of race in the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth centuries, and also consider some

competing accounts of the abolitionist movement in recent histories of the British Empire.

Required Reading

Hannah More, 'The Black Slave Trade' (1788), in The Poetry of Slavery: An Anglo-American

Anthology 1764-1865, ed. Marcus Wood (Oxford UP, 2003), pp.99-110

Thomas Carlyle, 'Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question' (1849) and John Stuart Mill,

'The Negro Question' (1850), both available via Empire Online section III: The Visible

Empire

Charles Dickens, 'The Noble Savage', in Selected Journalism 1850-1870, ed. David Pascoe

(Penguin, 1997), pp.560-565 and 645-646

---- 'Telescopic Philanthropy', in Bleak House, ed. Norman Page (Penguin, 1985), pp.82-94

and 954

Recommended Reading

Brown, Christopher Leslie. Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. Chapel Hill,

NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Julie M. Dugger, ‘Black Ireland’s Race: Thomas Carlyle and the Young Ireland Movement’,

Victorian Studies 48:3 (2006).

Gikandi, Simon. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. New

York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1997.

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David Theo Goldberg, ‘Liberalism’s Limits: Carlyle and Mill on “the Negro Question”’,

Nineteenth-Century Contexts 22 (2000).

P. Groenewegen, ‘Thomas Carlyle, the Dismal Science, and the Contemporary Political

Economy of Slavery’, History of Economics Review (2001).

Hall, Catherine. White, Male, and Middle-Class: Explorations in Feminism and History.

London: Polity, 1992.

-------- Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination 1830-1867.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Saree Makdisi, Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

Grace Moore, Dickens and Empire: Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism in the Works

of Charles Dickens. Ashgate, 2004.

Wood, Marcus. Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Week 4: Irishness, Coloniality and the Creation of Authenticity (Matt Campbell)

This seminar will consider some of the political, cultural and linguistic concerns shaping the

construction of a national literature in colonial Ireland, paying attention to the movement

known as the Irish Revival. Between (broadly) 1880 and 1910, small groups of Irish writers

tried to create ‘authentic’ representations of Irishness by drawing on ancient Celtic myths and

popular folklore. Our readings will lead us to pay particular attention to the question of

translation, which is central to their endeavour. We will examine a range of texts in English

which are characterised by an innovative approach to translation and to English syntax, and

we will discuss the debates about language, nationhood and culture which shaped their

emergence.

Primary texts will be available as handouts due to their short length. I will email you to let

you know when they are available for collection and where you can collect them from.

Required Reading (reading them in this order may be helpful)

Douglas Hyde, ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland’ (1892).

Declan Kiberd, ‘Love Songs of Connacht’ (from Irish Classics).

Excerpts from Douglas Hyde, Love Songs of Connacht (1893).

Terence Brown, ‘Cultural Nationalism 1880-1930’ (from The Field Day Anthology of Irish

Writing Vol. 2).

J.M. Synge, Riders to the Sea (1904).

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Secondary Reading

Sinéad Garrigan Mattar, Science, Primitivism, and the Irish Revival (see the introduction and

the chapter entitled ‘The Rise of Celtology’)

Declan Kiberd, Synge and the Irish Language, 2nd ed.

George Watson, Irish Identity and the Literary Revival, 2nd ed.

Week 5: Islam, Identity and Politics Before & After the Rushdie Affair (Ben Holgate)

In discussions of postcolonial or diasporic literature, questions of faith and religious identity

have tended to be subsumed under such categories as ethnicity, nationality, and ‘race’. Yet

some critics suggest that the relative neglect that postcolonial theory has shown to religion

may be partly due to its unwitting valorisation of ‘a secular, Euro-American stance’ (Amin,

2005: 17). A character in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator argues that ‘Even Fanon […] had

no insight into the religious feelings of the North Africans he wrote about’. In this session,

we will attempt to redress the critical imbalance, while guarding against the urge to

overcompensate and privilege religion at the expense of other components of identity. Using

insights drawn from anthropological, religious studies, and sociological research we consider

the important and dynamic role of religion, specifically Islam, in contributing towards

cultural identity and literary practices.

We think about Salman Rushdie’s controversial novel The Satanic Verses (1988) and the

intellectual heat generated in what became known as the Rushdie affair. After that, we

explore the politics surrounding and representations of Islam from the 1990s to the present,

which particularly emphasize the issue of ‘fundamentalism’. Finally, we consider nuanced

texts produced by Muslims in the years following the 2001 Burnley, Oldham and Bradford

riots in the UK, the World Trade Center attack in the United States later that year, and the

onset of the so-called ‘war on terror’ by a US-led Western coalition in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Within this we revisit Rushdie’s post-9/11 portrayal of Islam and geopolitics in Shalimar the

Clown (2005).

Required Reading

Ansari, Humayan. ‘The Infidel Within’: Muslims in Britain Since 1800. London: Hurst, 2004.

Chapter 1: “Is There a British Muslim Identity?”

Chambers, Claire. British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers.

Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2011. Introduction

Modood, Tariq. “Remaking Multiculturalism after 7/7.” Open Democracy 29.7 (2005), n.pag.

Online. Available: https://www.surrey.ac.uk/cronem/files/Tariq-Modood-article.pdf

(Accessed 29 July 2017).

Mondal, Anshuman A. Islam and Controversy: The Politics of Free Speech After Rushdie.

Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Chapter 1: “From Blasphemy to

Offensiveness.”

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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Terror: A Speech After 9-11.” boundary 2 31:2 (Summer

2004): 81−111.

Secondary Reading

Berendse, Gerrit-Jan, and Mark Williams, eds. Terror and Text: Representing Political

Violence in Literature and the Visual Arts. Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2002. Introductionm

(9-33)

Chambers, Claire. Britain Through Muslim Eyes: Literary Representations, 1780−1988.

Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Chambers, Claire, and Caroline Herbert, eds. Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the

Diaspora: Secularism, Religion, Representations. Abingdon: Routledge, 2015.

Erickson, John. Islam and Postcolonial Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1998.

Heath, Jennifer. The Veil: Women Writers on its History, Lore, and Politics. Berkeley, CA:

University of California Press, 2008.

Inayatullah, Sohail, and Gail Boxwell, eds. Islam, Postmodernism and Other Futures: A

Ziauddin Sardar Reader. London: Pluto, 2003.

Kabir, Nahid Afrose. Young British Muslims. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012.

Kureishi, Hanif. The Word and the Bomb. London: Faber and Faber, 2005.

Lewis, Philip. Islamic Britain: Religion, Politics and Identity Among British Muslims.

London: I.B. Tauris, 1994.

Malak, Amin. Muslim Narratives and the Discourse of English. Albany: State University of

New York Press, 2005.

Mernissi, Fatima. Women and Islam: An Historical and Theological Enquiry. Oxford:

Blackwell, 1991.

Mondal, Anshuman A. Young British Muslim Voices. Abingdon: Greenwood World, 2008.

Pei-chen Liao. ‘Post’-9/11 Asian Diasporic Fiction: Uncanny Terror. Basingstoke,

Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Chapter 1: “The Uncanny Violence of Strangers:

Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown” (23-52)

Poole, Elizabeth. Reporting Islam: Media Representations of British Muslims. London: I.B.

Tauris, 2002.

Ramadan, Tariq. Western Muslims and the Future of Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2004.

Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. London: Viking, 1988.

----. Shalimar the Clown. London: Jonathan Cape, 2005.

---. Joseph Anton: A Memoir. London: Jonathan Cape, 2012.

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Said, Edward W. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See

the Rest of the World. London: Vintage, 1997.

Scott, Joan Wallach. The Politics of the Veil. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,

2007.

Shamsie, Kamila. Offence: The Muslim Case. London: Seagull, 2009.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York and London:

Routledge, 1993. Chapter 11: “Reading The Satanic Verses” (217-241)

Stadtler, Florian. “Terror, globalization and the individual in Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the

Clown.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 45.2 (June 2009): 191-199.

Tarlo, Emma. Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith. Oxford: Berg, 2010.

Waines, David. An Introduction to Islam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

***Week 6: Reading Week***

Week 7: Establishing World Literature Theory (Ben Holgate)

This session explores historical and contemporary theories on world literature, beginning

with Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur and continuing to present-day concerns regarding

globalisation, imbalances with the production and circulation of texts, the digital age, and

translation. A key aim is to investigate world literature from perspectives outside the Anglo-

American academic and publishing spheres, thereby helping students to interrogate their own

reception of ideas in relation to literatures and cultures from around the world. The class will

investigate how and why various terms have been devised to think about literature on an

international plane and beyond a nationalist context, such as “world literature”, “global

literature”, “transnational literature”, “the world republic of letters”, and “world-literary

system”. Students will gain an appreciation of various methodologies – like “deep time”,

“distant reading” and “untranslatability” – that attempt to address the relational

interconnectivity of literatures from different geographical regions, cultures, languages,

literary traditions, and historical periods. We also discuss how issues like environmentalism,

human rights, and migration have emerged within world literature discourse.

Required Reading

Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London and

New York: Verso, 2013. Introduction and Chapter 1: “Untranslatables:

A World-System”

Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M.B. DeBevoise.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Chapter 1: ‘Principles of a World

History of Literature’

Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University

Press, 2003. Introduction

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Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. London and New York: Verso, 2013. Chapters

“Conjectures on Word Literature” (43-62), “More Conjectures” (107-119) and “The

Novel: History and Theory” (159-178)

Mufti, Aamir R. Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 2016. Prologue and Chapter 1: “Where in the World is

World Literature?”

Pizer, John. “Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: origins and relevance of Weltliteratur.” In The

Routledge Companion to World Literature. Edited by Theo D’haen, David Damrosch

and Djelal Kadir, 3-11. London and New York: Routledge, 2011.

Secondary Reading

Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton and Oxford:

Princeton University Press, 2006.

Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Edited by

Randal Johnson. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1993.

Connell, Liam, and Nickey Marsh, eds. Literature and Globalization: A Reader. London and

New York: Routledge, 2011.

Damrosch, David. “Toward a History of World Literature.” New Literary History 39.3

(2008): 481-495.

---. How to Read World Literature. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

D’haen, Theo, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir, eds. The Routledge Companion to World

Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2011.

Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Introduction.

English, James F. The Economy of Prestige. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

2005.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (von). “On World Literature (1827)”. In World Literature: A

Reader. Edited by Theo D’haen, César Domínguez and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen,

9-15. London and New York: Routledge, 2013.

Graham, James, Michael Niblett and Sharae Deckard. “Postcolonial Studies and World

Literature.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48.4 (2012): 465-471.

Gupta, Suman Globalization and Literature. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009.

Heise, Ursula. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the

Global. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History. London and

New York: Verso, 2005.

Palumbo-Liu, David. The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age.

Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012.

Pizer, John. The Idea of World Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,

2006.

Prendergast, Christopher. “The World Republic of Letters.” In Debating World Literature.

Edited by Christopher Prendergast, 1-25. London and New York: Verso, 2004.

Seyhan, Azade. Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

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Slaughter, Joseph. Human Rights, Inc: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International

Law. Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2007.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham and London:

Duke University Press, 2004.

WReC (Warwick Research Collective). Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a

New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2015.

Week 8: Playwrights and Human Rights (Emilie Morin)

In this seminar, we will consider some facets of the rich history of political theatre, and we

will pay particular attention to the global rise of a political theatre concerned with human

rights after the 1970s. We will focus on two case studies: Arthur Miller’s short play I Think

about You a Great Deal (An Expression of Solidarity with Václav Havel) (1983) and Seven

Jewish Children by Caryl Churchill (2009). We will reflect on what these texts tell us about

the kinds of political affirmations available to writers, and about the ways in which theatre

can attempt to further the remit of public debate about human rights and social justice. We

will also discuss the political debates to which these plays respond, and the public

controversies that they have ignited (in this regard, will pay particular attention to Seven

Jewish Children). The seminar will be framed by a consideration of the theoretical reflections

that have surrounded the relation between human rights and contemporary liberal thought, via

Jacques Rancière’s re-examination of Hannah Arendt’s work and Luc Boltanski’s

conceptualisation of ‘distant suffering’.

All the primary reading and all the suggested secondary reading is available online, via the

VLE Reading List/the library website.

Required Reading

In preparation for this seminar, please look for information about Václav Havel (ideally,

before you read Miller’s play), and please search for press articles on Seven Jewish Children

from 2009 (ideally, after you have read Churchill’s play). We will have a discussion of the

controversy surrounding Seven Jewish Children based on your research.

Arthur Miller, I Think about You a Great Deal (An Expression of Solidarity with Václav

Havel). Available from Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture 2

(1983): 23-4.

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/crossc/ANW0935.1983.001/33:3?rgn=volume;view=ima

ge;q1=2++1983 [linked to VLE Reading List]

Churchill, Caryl. Seven Jewish Children. Available from http://www.map-uk.org/fundraise-

for-us/7-jewish-children [Linked to VLE Reading List]

Rancière, Jacques. ‘Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’ South Atlantic Quarterly 103,

no. 2&3 (2004), 297−310.

Boltanski, Luc. ‘Taking Sides.’ In Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, 20-34.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

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Secondary Reading

To complement your reading of Miller’s play, you may want to consult work on post-

Communism and the postcolonial; see, for example, Cristina Sandru, ‘Postcolonial

Postcommunism?’ In What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say, eds. Anna Bernard, Ziad

Elmarsafy and Stuart Murray, 156-176. London and New York: Routledge, 2015.

Becker, Florian Nikolas, Paola Hernández and Brenda Werth, eds. Imagining Human Rights

in Twenty-First Century Theater: Global Perspectives. Basingstoke, Hampshire:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Bernard, Anna. ‘Taking sides: Palestinian Advocacy and Metropolitan Theatre.’ Journal of

Postcolonial Writing 50, no. 2 (2014): 163-17.

Boltanski, Luc. Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics. Translated by Graham D.

Burchell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Clements, Rachel. ‘Framing War, Staging Precarity: Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children

and the Spectres of Vulnerability.’ Contemporary Theatre Review 23, no. 3 (2013):

357-367.

Felton-Dansky, Miriam. ‘Clamorous Voices: Seven Jewish Children and Its Proliferating

Publics.’ TDR The Drama Review 55, no. 3 (2011): 156-164.

Luckhurst, Mary, and Emilie Morin, eds. Theatre and Human Rights after 1945: Things

Unspeakable. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Meister, Robert. After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights. New York: Columbia University

Press, 1992.

Moyn, Samuel. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2011.

Rae, Paul. Theatre and Human Rights. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Schlueter, June. ‘Miller in the 80s’, in the Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller, Edition

Christopher Bixby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 152-67.

Žižek, Slavoj. ‘Against Human Rights.’ New Left Review 34 (2005), 115−31.

Week 9: Topographies of Latin American Poetry: The Strange Case of Gabriela Mistral

and Octavio Paz (Nicoletta Asciuto)

When Octavio Paz (1914-1998) met Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) shortly after the end of

World War II, the great Chilean poetess asked him to send her some of his poems. Paz obeyed,

as any young poet would to his senior. Mistral’s comments on Paz’s poems followed shortly

after: ‘I like your poems, though they are not at all what I feel. You could well be a European

poet; for my taste, you are not telluric enough.’ Young Paz interpreted ‘telluric’ as having his

‘roots sunk deep into native American soil’ (Paz, Convergences, 221): he simply was not

American enough for Mistral.

Indeed, Mistral is renowned for her poetry of the earth: a total celebration of Chile, of its

landscapes, of its indomitable nature; Paz’s is rather one that absorbs other cultures, styles, and

languages, a writing which is always wrestling with the idea of either being or facing the other.

Interestingly, though, both Mistral and Paz were diplomats for a considerable part of their lives,

and are still seen today to represent Latin America internationally, as they were both recipients

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of the Nobel Prize (Mistral in 1945, Paz in 1990). In this seminar, we will ponder issues of

national identity, as well as transnationalism, cross-cultural exchanges, and translation.

Required Reading

Please read the following poems by Gabriela Mistral, in translation:

from Madwomen: The Locas Mujeres Poems of Gabriela Mistral, trans. Randall Couch

(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008) [AVAILABLE VIA LIBRARY

WEBSITE] —

‘The Other’ (pp. 30-33)

‘The Woman Unburdened’ (pp. 46-49);

from A Gabriela Mistral Reader, trans. Maria Giachetti, ed. Marjorie Agosin (New York:

White Pine Press, 1997) —

‘Chilean Earth’ (pp. 56-58)

‘The Little Box from Olinalá’ (pp. 66-68)

‘Caribbean Sea’ (pp. 98-99)

‘The Foreign Woman’ (p. 100)

‘My Mother’ (pp. 128-132)

Poem of Chile (pp. 137-142)

Please read the following poems by Octavio Paz, in translation:

from The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz 1957-1987 (Manchester: Carcanet, 1988):

‘Return’ (pp. 362-371)

‘Nomadic Gardens’ (pp. 400-403)

‘Basho An’ (pp. 486-489)

‘Example’ (pp. 488-489)

‘Place’ (pp. 582-583)

‘Pillars’ (pp. 608-613)

‘Central Park’ (pp. 578-581)

Topoems (pp. 333-339)

‘Interruptions from the West I, II, III, IV’ and ‘Himachal Pradesh I, II, III’ (pp. 220-

228)

Mike Crang, ‘Self and Other: Writing Home, Marking Territory, and Writing Space’,

Cultural Geography (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 59-80.

Néstor García Canclini, ‘Latin American Contradictions: Modernism without

modernization?’, in Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity,

trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 41-65. [LIBRARY WEBSITE]

Octavio Paz, ‘The Sons of La Malinche’, The Labyrinth of Solitude, trans. Lysander Kemp,

Yara Milos, and Rachel Phillips Belash (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 65-88.

Octavio Paz, ‘Latin-American Poetry’, in Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature, trans.

Helen Lane (London: Bloomsbury, 1987), pp. 201-216.

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Sten Pultz Moslund, ‘The Presencing of Place in Literature: Toward an Embodied

Topopoetic Mode of Reading’, in Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and

Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Robert T. Tally (Basingstoke,

Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 29-43. [LIBRARY WEBSITE]

Secondary Reading

Nick Caistor, Octavio Paz (London: Reaktion, 2007).

David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

2003).

Sheila Hones, Literary Geographies: Narrative Space in the Let the Great World Spin

(Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

John Kraniauskas, ‘Hybridity in a Transnational Frame: Latin-Americanist and Postcolonial

Perspectives on Cultural Studies’, in Nepantla: Views from South, vol. 1 no. 1 (2000),

pp. 111-137.

Neil Larsen, Determinations: Essays on Theory, Narrative, and Nation in the Americas

(London: Verso, 2001).

---. Reading North by South: On Latin American Literature, Culture and Politics.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

Robert T. Tally, Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and

Cultural Studies (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

William Rowe, ‘Latin American Poetry’, in The Cambridge Companion to Latin American

Culture, ed. John King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 136-170.

This America of Ours: The Letters of Gabriela Mistral and Victoria Ocampo. Trans. Elizabeth

Horan and Doris Meyer. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009.

Week 10: Nordic Cool: The Question of Aesthetics (Alexandra Kingston-Reese)

When we think about world literature, we often find ourselves preoccupied by political

concerns and perplexed by ethical questions. But what about aesthetics? Despite these critical

preferences, when we traverse the currents of world literary discourse across the 20th century,

we find aesthetics evoked nonetheless: take, for example, Fredric Jameson’s ‘Third World’

aesthetics from the mid-1980s, or Ezra Pound’s modernist fascination with not only the

haiku’s form, but its philosophy. Though these are aesthetics reducible to a geographic

location, site specific we might say, they have also become global phenomena, cultivated by

the high literati and captured in the kitsch of popular culture. In this seminar, we will consider

the cool Nordic wave that has washed over art, culture, food, architecture, and lifestyle in our

contemporary moment—from Nordic Noir to hygge—as epitomised in the literary world by

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-part, literary-autobiographical project of ideas, My Struggle.

Thinking through the first novelistic instalment of this project, A Death in the Family

(Norwegian 2009, English 2013), we will question how we place these aesthetic categories

into a world literary conversation, and how drawing on the discourse of aesthetics helps art

transcend geographic localities and make global connections. As we do, we will think

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through ideas of contemporary readership, politics of translation, and the literary

marketplace—how are such aesthetics are translated, transmuted, and transformed?

Required Reading:

Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, trans. Don Bartlett (London: Vintage, 2013).

Jacques Rancière, “Politics of Aesthetics”, in Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven

Corcoran (Cambridge; Malden PA: Polity Press, 2009): 17-60.

Rebecca Walkowitz, “Introduction: Theory of World Literature Now”, in Born Translated

(New York: Columbia UP, 2015): 1-48.

Please also read a range of online reviews of the novel, particularly those from James Wood

(The New Yorker), Ben Lerner (London Review of Books), and Zadie Smith (The New York

Review of Books), and the Post-45 Collective’s Slow Burn series on the novels:

http://post45.research.yale.edu/2016/06/the-slow-burn-volume-2-an-introduction/.

Secondary Reading

Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 2007). Essays by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin,

Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukács.

Adorno, Theodor, Aesthetic Theory, trans. (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

Apter, Emily, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London; New

York: Verso, 2015).

Herwitz, Daniel, Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World (London: Bloomsbury,

2017).

Kaur, Raminder, and Parul Dave-Mukherji (eds.), Arts and Aesthetics in a Globalizing World

(London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

Rancière, Jacques, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Bloomsbury,

2004).

Seltzer, Mark, “A Postscript on the Official World”, in The Official World (Durham, NC:

Duke UP, 2016): 178-198. On Knausgaard specifically: pp. 192-198.

Walkowitz, Rebecca, Born Translated (New York: Columbia UP, 2015).

There are also a number of very useful handbooks of, and companions to, aesthetics.

These include the following, but more can be found in the library:

Levinson, Jerrold (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford: OUP, 2005).

Particularly Kathleen Higgins’ section on “Comparative Aesthetics”.

Ribeiro, Anna Christina (ed.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Aesthetics (London:

Bloomsbury, 2015).

Gaut, Berys Nigel, and Dominic Lopes (eds.), Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, 3rd edition

(London: Routledge, 2013).

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Examples of Films to Inform Core Module Classes (listed chronologically)

Things Fall Apart (1971) Dir. Hans Jürgen Pohland

The Harder They Come (1972) Dir. Perry Hazell

Life and Debt (2001) Dir. Stephanie Black

Darwin’s Nightmare (2004) Dir. Sauper

Goodbye Bafana (2007) Dir. Bille August

Red Dust (2004) Dir. Tom Hooper

Tsotsi (2005) Dir. Gavin Hood

An Inconvenient Truth (2006) Dir. Guggenheim

Wall*E (2008) Dir. Stanton

District 9 (2009) Dir. Neill Blomkamp

Outside of the Law (2010) Dir. Rachie Bouchareb

A Prophet (2009) Jaques Audirard

Africa United (2010) Dir. Debs Gardner-Paterson

Brothers in Trouble (1995) Dir. Udayan Prasad

My Son the Fanatic (1997) Dir. Udayan Prasad

East is East (1999) Dir. Damien O'Donnell

Four Lions (2010) Dir. Chris Morris

Examples of Suggested Preliminary Reading (i.e. as module background)

Anthias, Floya and Nira Yuval-Davis (1989) Woman-Nation-State. Basingstoke, Hampshire:

Macmillan.

Appadurai, Arjun, ed., Globalization (2003)

Ashcroft, Bill and Griffiths, Gareth, Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts (2013)

Boehmer, Elleke, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (2005)

Boehmer, Elleke and Morton, Stephen, eds, Terror and the Postcolonial: A Concise

Companion (2006)

Casanova, Pascale, The World Republic of Letters (2004)

Cazdyn, Eric and Szeman, Imre, After Globalization (2011)

Damrosch, David, What is World Literature? (2003)

Damrosch, David, How to Read World Literature (2008)

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Connell, Liam and Marsh, Nicky, Literature and Globalization: A Reader (2011)

Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (1963)

Featherstone, Mike, Lash, Scott and Robertson, Roland, Global Modernities (1995)

Gupta, Suman, Globalization and Literature (2009)

Huggan, Graham, The Postcolonial Exotic (2001)

Jameson, Fredric and Miyoshi, Masao, The Cultures of Globalization (1998)

Jay, Paul, Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (2010)

Jayawardena, Kumari, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (1986)

Kumar, Amitava, ed., World Bank Literature (2003)

King, Anthony D. ed., Culture, Globalization, and The World-System: Contemporary

Conditions for the Representation of Identity (1997)

Lazarus, Neil, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies (2004)

Lazarus, Neil, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (1999)

Lechner, Frank J. and Boli, John, The Globalization Reader (2004)

McClintock, Anne, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest

(1995)

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade et al., eds, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism

(1991)

Moretti, Franco, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review (2000)

Morey, Peter and Yaqin, Amina, Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation after

9/11 (2011)

Parker, Andrew et al. Nationalisms and Sexualities (1992)

Prendergast, Christopher, ed., Debating World Literature (2004)

Saussy, Haun ed., Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (2006)

Stoler, Ann Laura, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in

Colonial Rule (2002)

Tomlinson, John, Globalization and Culture (1999)

Valdez Moses, Michael, The Novel and the Globalization of Culture (1995)

Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Immigrant Fictions: Contemporary Literature in an Age of

Globalization (2006)

Young, Robert J. C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory and Race (1995)

Young, Robert J. C., Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001)

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Examples of Relevant Publications by Teaching Staff

Nicoletta Asciuto

“The Sun Also Sets: The Violet Hour in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land,” Literary

Imagination (Oxford University Press), vol. 18 no. 2 (July 2016).

“Bergsonian Memory and Simultaneity in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot and César Vallejo,”

Forum for Modern Language Studies (Oxford University Press), vol. 52 no. 1

(January 2016).

[Translation] Chapters 5, 6, 24 and 25 of Eduardo González Viaña, Cesar Vallejo’s Season in

Hell, monograph no. 5, UCL Press, Centre of César Vallejo Studies, 2015.

David Attwell

(ed. with Derek Attridge) The Cambridge History of South African Literature. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2012.

(ed. with Anna Bernard and Ziad Elmarsafy) Debating Orientalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2013.

Claire Chambers

British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers. Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2011.

Britain Through Muslim Eyes: Literary Representations, 1780−1988. Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2015.

(ed. with Caroline Herbert) Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora: Secularism,

Religion, Representations. Abingdon: Routledge, 2015.

Ben Holgate

“Unsettling Narratives: Re-evaluating Magical Realism as Postcolonial Discourse through

Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria and The Swan Book,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing

51.6 (2015): 634-647.

“The Fear of Solitude: How Marketing Makes Real Magic.” In The Global Histories of

Books: Methods and Practices. Edited by Elleke Boehmer, Rouven Kunstmann,

Priyasha Mukhopadhyay and Asha Rogers, 297-317. Basingstoke, Hampshire:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

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Alexandra Kingston-Reese

“Teju Cole and Ralph Ellison's Aesthetics of Invisibility,” Mosaic 50.4 (December 2017).

“Imagine(d) Space: Experiencing the urban phenomena of the gallery,” Journal of Urban

Cultural Studies 2.3 (December 2015): 237-252.

Emilie Morin

(ed. with Mary Luckhurst), Theatre and Human Rights after 1945: Things Unspeakable.

Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Beckett’s Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.