ENGL 370 - Transnational Literature

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

This course focuses on literary works and cultural networks that cross the borders of the nation-state. Such border-crossings raise questions concerning vexed phenomena such as globalization, exile, diaspora, and migration-forced and voluntary. Collectively, these phenomena deeply influence the development of transnational cultural identities and practices. Specific topics studied in the course vary from year to year and may include global cities and cosmopolitanisms; the black Atlantic; border theory; the discourses of travel and tourism; global economy and trade; or international terrorism and war.

Topic for 2017/18b: The World, In Short. This course in transnational literatures approaches the world through a reading of novellas. We don’t have clarity on what constitutes a novella: a tale longer than a short-story and shorter than a novel. So, on one end we have the Canadian writer Alice Munro’s The Bear Came Over the Mountain or James Joyce’s The Dead and, on the other, Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen or Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold. (Having said that, I should mention that I have also cheated a bit and have thrown into the mix a couple of novels. Maybe the longest of them can be read over the Spring break. On the list are a few novellas that are read the world over and, perhaps as a proof of this, are available free online. I should add that as this is a course which looks outward at the rest of the world, we won’t read The Old Man and the Sea or Miss Lonelyhearts, staples on most lists of novellas.)

We read a couple hundred pages each week and write, apart from very brief book reports, two papers 5-7 pp. in length. Here is the complete list which will be winnowed down but not by much: Anton Chekhov, Ward No. 6; Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich; Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; James Joyce, The Dead; Thomas Mann, Death in Venice; Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower; Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea; Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John; Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis; Albert Camus, The Stranger; Marguerite Duras, The Lover; Nawaal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero; Nadine Gordimer, The Late Bourgeois World; J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians; Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold; U.R. Ananthamurthy, Samskara; Anita Desai, The Artist of Disappearance; Alice Munro, The Bear Came Over the Mountain; Tove Jansson, The True Deceiver; Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen; Ge Fei, The Invisibility Cloak; Jean-Christophe Valtat, 03; Han Kang, The Vegetarian. Amitava Kumar.

One 2-hour period.