Humanities Arts Cultural Stu 0152 - Intro World Lit & Translation

"Any map presents the global as a local utterance, for any attempt to represent 'the world' inevitably bespeaks the mapmaker's own placement." Vilashini Cooppan In this course, we will interrogate the way literary texts map the world. We will think of the author as a mapmaker, the text as a map, and readers like ourselves as interpreters who redraw the textual map. Case studies will include the traveller abroad (Dadi's An African in Paris), the exile (Albahari's Snow Man), and the cosmopolitan postcolonial subject (Walcott's The Fortunate Traveller). We will also read Wu Cheng'en's Journey to the West and Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which challenge the boundaries of East and West, and the categories of "us" here and "them" over there. To help us explore this shifting terrain we will pay special attention to the role of translation in the mapping of the world. We will also be reading and responding to scholarly work, and in addition to analytical papers, you will rewrite some of the readings from the point of view of a different character, narrator, author, or reader.

Culture, Humanities, and Languages Writing and Research Multiple Cultural Perspectives In this course, students are expected to spend 8 hours weekly on preperation and work outside of class time.