The idea of world literature, since first invoked by Goethe and further elaborated by later authors and critics, is now highly contested: What is a world? What is literature? More specifically, the concept has been criticised from a post-colonial perspective for legitimating a globalised regime of literary dissemination and translation that would seem to enshrine a narrow Eurocentric canon, and would seem to cement the questionable status of English as a world language.
Still, even among the most severe critics, there is a certain reluctance to altogether reject the term, as world literature, beside all the bad things, would also reflect the laudable political aim of taking literature seriously for its potential to animate and realise an ideal of cosmopolitan citizenship. Thus world literature today is an international and transcultural critical discourse with many positions problematising, correcting and adding to each other – very much in the spirit of Goethes original coinage of the term.
This seminar will give a comprehensive overview of the world literature discourse by exploring many of its most seminal voices, including, among others, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Rabindranath Tagore, Franco Moretti, Susan Bassnett, Emily Apter, Pheng Cheah, Alexander Beecroft and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
The format for this course will be synchronous online classes (with some asynchronous elements/assignments), where meetings will be held via zoom (and these will always take place during the time slot allotted to the course on PULS)
- Kursleiter*in: Harald Pittel