Course Syllabus

 

Link to Final Exam Questions:  

https://canvas.harvard.edu/courses/8276/quizzes/23533

Masterpieces of World Literature

David Damrosch and Martin Puchner

 

No national literature has ever grown up in isolation from the cultures around it; from the earliest periods, great works of literature have probed the tensions, conflicts, and connections among neighboring cultures and often more distant regions as well. Focusing particularly on works that take the experience of the wider world as their theme, this course will explore the varied artistic modes in which great writers have situated themselves in the world, helping us to understand the deep roots of today's intertwined global cultures.

 

This course takes its point of departure from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who invented the term and idea of “world literature” in 1827, and from Rabindranath Tagore, who reformulated this term for the world of colonialism in 1907. Like them we consider foundational texts from different cultures such as the Odyssey and the Arabian Nights, but also works that were only recovered and translated in the nineteenth century as we consider how literature has evolved in different parts of the globe, exploring how world literature has changed and also how it has newly emerged as a powerful way of studying cultural globalization today.

 

Humanities E-110 is designed to further the goals of the Program in General Education by transforming the way you read literature from around the world. Through studying literary works from divergent eras and regions, you will come to recognize and understand cross-cultural artistic patterns and developments that form the deep roots of today’s intertwined global cultures. You’ll also learn to analyze richly complex language and rhetoric, to probe beneath the surface of a text, and to discern contexts and subtexts. These skills are useful in many endeavors in a knowledge-based economy, and are important for anyone wanting to be an informed citizen in today’s globalizing world, in which cultural differences are as often heightened as diminished. The masterworks presented in this course offer particularly compelling cases for exploring very different cultural assumptions and modes of expression, as we encounter the world through the lens of great works of literature.

 

While we specify as required reading individual texts, or excerpts from longer works,  we also continually stress the reception and afterlife of these masterpieces, often on a global scale. While tests and other requirements are keyed to the specified excerpts, we treat these works in their entirety.

 

SYLLABUS

 

Jan 25: Introduction: What Is World Literature?

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe formulated his concept of world literature (Weltliteratur) in the early nineteenth century while reading a mixture of Greek and Latin classics, Persian and Serbian poetry, and a Chinese novel. Whereas Goethe saw world literature in terms of an international marketplace, a hundred years later Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-Western winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, gave a new meaning to the term, emphasizing universal values. These writers will introduce us to the astonishingly bold attempt to look at literature as a single, interconnected whole.

 

Feb 1: The Birth of Literature: The Epic of Gilgamesh

Written three and a half millennia ago, The Epic of Gilgamesh was forgotten for nearly two thousand years, until Austin Henry Layard and the Iraqi Hormuzd Rassam excavated the ancient Assyrian capital of Nineveh. There, the library of Ashurbanipal yielded the long-forgotten text, inscribed on clay tablets, the first great masterpiece of world literature and itself a text about exploring the world.

 

Feb 8: Homer and the Archeology of the Classical Past: The Odyssey

World literature has always rested on a foundation of classical works. Continuing the discussion from the previous week, this unit will take up The Odyssey in light of Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations in Troy. Focusing on the episodes from the epic that emphasis cultural contact, we read this text as a quintessential meditation on cultural conflict and exploration.

 

Feb 15: West-Eastern Conversations: The Thousand and One Nights

This work long circulated within the Middle East as popular entertainment and then took a crucial detour into France, where many of its most famous tales first appeared in the translation by Antoine Galland in the early eighteenth century. Scheherazade’s tales of transformation and magic, travel and adventure have themselves changed shape they have circulated abroad in translation, from Galland to Sir Richard Burton to Hussain Haddawy in the present.

 

February 22: The Floating World: The Tale of Genji

A masterpiece of classical Japanese literature, the Genji monogatari was written around the year 1000 by Murasaki Shikibu, a woman deeply learned in the Chinese tradition usually mastered only by men. Drawing on a wealth of Chinese and Japanese poetry and on her keen observations of court life around her, Murasaki revolutionized the vernacular Japanese romance tradition of her day.

 

February 29: The First National Epic: The Lusiads

All of the major qualities of Renaissance culture come together in Luis Vaz de Camões’ epic poem The Lusiads (1572), a work that almost single-handedly created vernacular Portuguese as a literary language. Camões rewrites Homer’s Odyssey as the modern tale of his ancestor Vasco da Gama’s voyage of discovery seventy-five years earlier around the tip of Africa and across the Indian Ocean to south India. Mythic grandeur coexists with modern realism as Camões strives to present Portugal not as the margin of Europe but as the center of the newly evolving world system of trade, conquest, and cultural exchange.

 

March 7: Enlightenment in the Colonies: Candide

Voltaire’s sparkling satire ranges widely around the world, from Europe to South America, before ending in Constantinople, where Candide determines to cultivate his own garden at the crossroads of East and West. We’ll look particularly at the ways in which Voltaire uses non-Western cultures to provide a vantage point for social critique, and the ways he uses satire as a more effective mode than his earlier essays and poetry.

 

March 14: Spring break

 

March 21: China and Its Neighbors: Lu Xun and Eileen Chang, selected stories

The former medical student Lu Xun became a crucial figure in Chinese letters by connecting China to its larger and rapidly modernizing neighbors Russia and Japan through his work as a translator and writer. His short stories set the tone and agenda for much of China’s “New Culture” movement and have made him a major figure in modern world literature. A generation later, the innovative Shanghai-based Eileen Chang carried through the project of writing a new vernacular literature for a China in transition, capturing the intertwined ambiguities of national and sexual politics alike.

 

March 28: Inventing Latin America: Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones

This week takes up one of the most remarkable of all modern writers, the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, whose haunting, enigmatic tales blend Latin American localism and universalism, often through philosophical parables, pseudo-commentaries, and detective stories.

 

 

April 4: From Empire to Globe: Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman

The imperial trade brought new cultural resources to writers engaged in the anticolonial struggle against the British and other European empires. This week's takes up the Nobel Prize-winning Wole Soyinka, whose great drama centrally treats the cultural, religious, and political tensions of the late colonial and early postcolonial periods.

 

April 11: East-West Encounters: Salman Rushdie, East, West; Jhumpa Lahiri, The Interpreter of Maladies

In this week, we look at selected stories by two mesmerizing writers who deal with cross-cultural encounters in a global age. In different ways, the Booker Prize-winning Salman Rushdie and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Jhumpa Lahiri use global English as a stylistic medium and a cultural-political vantage point to probe questions of personal identity and belonging in a world of global conflict and creative exchange.

 

 

April 18: Istanbul in – or as – the World: Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red

This week centers on the best-known novel by one of the most popular contemporary world authors, Orhan Pamuk, who in 2006 became the second-youngest winner of the Nobel Prize in literature – a remarkable achievement for a writer from a peripheral country writing in a non-European language. Pamuk is also a probing, reflective essayist, who has written extensively on the issues of cultural identity in a society straddling “East” and “West.”

 

 

April 25: World Literature Today

Our final week will explore the movement of world literature into the twenty-first century, and out into the wider world of popular culture and the new universe of the Internet. Candidates for the next rising star of world literature will be proposed and presented by members of the course, and voted on by the instructors and teaching fellows.

 

Course Components

      Participation in online discussion 30%

      Wiki on one of the texts and online presentation of the wiki (see explanation below)       40%

      Online open book final exam                                                       30%

 

Wiki requirement. Instead of a paper, we ask you to create a Wikipedia entry on one of the texts we discuss in class. You sign up for one text and produce a first draft of your Wikipedia-style entry by the time your section (the section dedicated to your text) meets. You briefly present this draft online and receive feedback. Using this feedback you then create a finished entry by the end of the semester. Your wiki should follow the genre of the Wikipedia entry, including links, sources, and footnotes. The only rule is that you cannot use any material currently found on the actual Wikipedia website. Your wiki will be posted on the class website, not on the Wikipedia website. However, once your completed entry has been vetted, we'll recommend that you incorporate it into the existing Wikipedia entry (since you will not have used material from the existing entry, what you produce will nicely complement what's already there). We assume that most students will produce their wikis individually, but if you want to collaborate with someone, you may do so (you will, however, receive the same grade).

 

Course Material:

You can find a list of books required for this course at the Harvard Coop textbook website (Search "Spring 2016 Huma 12"). 

You are encouraged to use different editions and translations of the listed books, including translations into languages other than English. 

 

A note on collaboration: Discussion and the exchange of ideas are essential to academic work, and is expected in the case of the wiki. For the term paper, you are encouraged to consult with your classmates on the choice of paper topics and to share sources. You may find it useful to discuss your chosen topic with your peers, particularly if you are working on the same topic as a classmate. However, you should ensure that any work you submit for evaluation is the result of your own research and writing and that it reflects your own approach to the topic. You must also adhere to standard citation practices in this discipline and properly cite any books, articles, websites, lectures, etc. that have helped you with your work. If you received any help with your writing (feedback on drafts, etc), you must also acknowledge this assistance. It is very important that you fully cite sources and avoid the risk of shading over into plagiarism – the use of another person’s ideas or writing without giving them proper credit. Consequences of plagiarism can range from failure on the paper to dismissal from the course to dismissal from Harvard. You are responsible for familiarizing yourself with Harvard’s policy on Academic Honesty, which you can find online at:

http://handbook.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k79903&pageid=icb.page418752

 

 

 

Canvas Resources for Instructors

 

Canvas Resources for Students

 

Humanities 12: Masterpieces of World Literature