 |
|
[Spring 2007]
CLEN W4785y Global English
Literature
|
Prof.
David Damrosch
|
|
OVERVIEW
Globalizaton is not a recent phenomenon in English literature.
Already in1890 while still in his mid-twenties, Rudyard
Kipling achieved a wide readership on three continents,
and from early on he wrote in awareness of the multinational
quality of his audience, even as he enriched his prose
with many terms taken from Hindi and other Indian vernaculars.
Born in Hong Kong, P. G. Wodehouse shuttled back and forth
across the Atlantic during the 1920s and 1930s, producing
plays in London and New York and writing about England
for Americans and about America for English audiences.
The first section of this course will focus on the transatlantic
and global careers of Kipling, Wodehouse, the American
expatriates T. S. Eliot and Djuna Barnes, and the Japanese
expatriate Kazuo Ishiguro, looking at the impact of their
migrations on their themes and their use of language.
The second part of the course will look directly at debates
over language: should writers in colonial and postcolonial
situations adopt standard British English or forge new
Englishes of their own? Examples will be drawn from Africa,
India, the Caribbean, and Britain's "internal colonies"
of Ireland and Scotland.
The third part of the course moves from language to intertextuality,
looking at rewritings of British works read in childhood
by writers across the globe: the Caribbean-born Jean Rhys
rewriting Emily Bronte, the South African J. M. Coetzee
rewriting Daniel Defoe, the Australian Peter Carey rewriting
Dickens, and the Tibetan postmodernist Jamyang Norbu rewriting
Kipling and Conan Doyle.
The course concludes with a final section on multilingualism
in writers of global perspective: James Joyce, Christine
Brooke-Rose (who like Joyce weaves several different languages
into her narrative), the Sri Lankan/Canadian Michael Ondaatje,
and the Kashmiri-American Agha Shahid Ali (considered
together with his American friend and interlocutor James
Merrill, whose "Prose of Departure" adapts Japanese
haiku form in English).
The course is intended to give students a sense of some
of the major issues that recur in much global English
writing, as seen through the lens of a compelling group
of writers over the course of the past century.
|
|
TENTATIVE SYLLABUS
|
| |
I: EXILE AND MIGRATION
|
| WEEK 1: |
Rudyard Kipling, "Without Benefit of
Clergy," selected poetry
T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land," "The Unfading
Genius of Rudyard Kipling"
|
| WEEK 2: |
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
|
| WEEK 3: |
P. G. Wodehouse, "Jeeves Takes Charge,"
"The Clicking of Cuthbert"
Kazuo Ishiguro, Remains of the Day
|
| |
II: STANDARD ENGLISH, DIALECT, CREOLIZATION
|
| WEEK 4: |
Chinua Achebe, "The African Writer
and the English Language"
Wole Soyinka, Death and the King's Horseman
Amos Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard
|
| WEEK 5: |
G. V. Desani, All About H. Hatterr
Salman Rushdie, "Chekov and Zulu"
|
| WEEK 6: |
Bob Marley, selected lyrics
Derek Walcott, Omeros
|
| WEEK 7: |
Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing;
James Kelman, How Late It Was, How Late
|
| |
III: REWRITINGS
|
| WEEK 8: |
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
|
| WEEK 9: |
J. M. Coetzee, Foe
|
| WEEK 10: |
Peter Carey, Jack Maggs
|
| WEEK 11: |
Jamyang Norbu, The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes
|
| |
IV: BEYOND ENGLISH
|
| WEEK 12: |
James Joyce, "Phoenix Playhouse"
chapter from Finnegans Wake
Christine Brooke-Rose, Between
|
| WEEK 13: |
Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost
|
| WEEK 14: |
James Merrill, "Prose of Departure"
Agha Shahid Ali, The Country without a Post Office
|
|
SECONDARY READINGS
Strongly recommended for graduate students, optional for
undergraduates. Secondary readings will be posted on Courseworks,
and will include essays on individual authors as well
as selections from the following general studies:
— Michael Bérubé, ed., Postmodernism
and the Globalization of English (2002)
— Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism
Now (1997)
— Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (2000)
— David Crystal, English as a Global Language (1997)
— Bruce Kay, The Oxford English Literary History,
vol. 13, 1948-200: The Internationalization of English
Literature (2004)
— Susie O'Brian, ed., Anglophone Literature and Global
Culture (2001)
— Afferbeck Lauder, Let Stalk Strine (1965)
— Chandra Mohanty, Feminism without Borders (2003)
— Bruce Robbins, Feeling Global: Internationalism
in Distress (1999)
— Isme Szeman, Zones of Instability: Literature,
Postcolonialism, and the Nation (2003)
|
COURSE REQUIREMENTS
For undergraduates, a 15-page final paper and a
midterm and final exam.
For graduate students, two annotated bibliographies,
one on a relevant area of criticism/theory, one on an
author or cluster of authors
|
|
| |
|
|
|