Throughout the modern history of literature, we encounter the demand that it can be an imaginative locus of the world, theorizing, conceptualizing and contextualizing various understandings of modern literature in its relation to the world. In this course, we will explore a number of texts, which explain, criticize and/or propose alternatives to the concept of world-literature as well as its literary and cultural formations. Most of the texts we will read, whether they can be said to suggest a world-literature and/or alternatives to it, are written by literary critics, cultural theorists, intellectuals and philosophers who reflect on their own role within the systems which had created a special space and status for the cultural formation of world-literature.
Among others, we will read Terry Eagleton “What Is Literature?”, Rabindranath Tagore “World Literature”, Pascale Casanova “World Literary Space”, “The Invention of Literature”, "Literature as a World”, Roland Barthes “Literature as Rhetoric”, Emily Apter “Against World Literature”, Franco Moretti “Conjectures on World Literature”, Deleuze and Guattari “What Is A Minor Literature?”, Susan Bassnet “From Cultural Turn To Translational Turn”.
Assignment: Presentation (individual or in a group) and response paper.
- Kursleiter*in: Abdul Wahed Alkhamrah