Reading & Composition

This year, a global pandemic has conscribed much of our world to the home. Among the many contradictions of late capitalism, few have been so palpable: as we chart the global circulation of a virus, our own individual circuits—our worlds—have become, by necessity, increasingly circumscribed. But even as the border between the home and the world is enforced, by government mandate and by social consciousness, each uncannily bleeds into the other.

In this course, we will examine a variety of works from disparate times and places that are concerned with interrogating the relationship between the home and the world. Our readings and film screenings will take us through: Le Guin’s parable of the social contract on which happy homes are built; questions of fate and free will in the supernatural maritime wanderings and homecomings of Odysseus and Sindbad; Borges’ exploration of the age-old desire to see, and possess, the complexity of the world in a single point; the plight of homeless kings, from Shakespeare’s Lear to Kurosawa’s Sengoku-period warlord; colonial centers impinging on rural childhoods, from Ray’s India to Dangarembga’s southern Africa; and Mambéty’s satire of the desires provoked by globalization through one woman’s sinister revenge on her hometown.

As we are reading and viewing these texts, we will also explore current debates surrounding the politics and ethics of “world literature” and “world cinema.” Until the latter half of the 20th century, the concept of world literature in the West usually denoted the study of European literatures in European languages. As these empires began to fall apart at mid-century, people who had formerly been excluded from the canon—that is, the body of works considered to be worthy of study—began to make their way in: authors from outside the West, women, and minorities in the West. This opening of the canon is something to be celebrated, and yet, it has also created new pressures: What happens to cultural and linguistic differences when all of the many literatures of the world are brought together under one category—are they simply smoothed over? What role does the market, and US university syllabi, play in deciding what gets written, translated, and published? What is lost when texts are read only in translation and not in their original languages or when texts are only written in metropolitan languages? In sum, which representations of homes from around the world make it into our homes and under what conditions are they admitted?

This is also fundamentally a course about composition, designed to help students develop critical thinking, writing, and oral expression skills that are broadly applicable. Through the study of literary texts, students will learn how to develop interesting analytical arguments and refine their ideas through their drafting and revision of several essays. Finally, this is a discussion-based course, so strong emphasis will be placed on active student participation in all of our class activities.

Primary texts include:

Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973)

Excerpts from One Thousand and One Nights (8th-18th cen. CE)

Jorge Luis Borges, “El Aleph” (1945)

Homer, The Odyssey (8th cen. BCE)

Ran, Akira Kurosawa, dir. (1985)

William Shakespeare, King Lear (c. 1606)

Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray, dir. (1955)

Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (1988)

Hyenas, Djibril Diop Mambéty, dir