Senior Seminar

Responding to the growing international circulation of literature in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Goethe declared, “The epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.” The term “world literature,” however, remains elusive and critics continue to grapple with David Damrosch’s question of, “which literature, whose world?” Gayatri Spivak has argued for the urgency of the active inclusion of the literatures of the Global South within the framework of world literature. In recognition of the importance of this project, the broad focus of this course will be to ask how the modern Arabic novel fits into this paradigm. Through readings of seminal texts by the Arabic tradition’s Mohamed Choukri (In Tangier, For Bread Alone) and Elias Khoury (Gate of the Sun, Yalo), French novelist and dramatist Jean Genet (The Thief’s Journal) and American author Paul Bowles (Let It Come Down), whose works were both significantly influenced by, and in turn influenced, modern Arabic fiction, and Hisham Matar (In the Country of Men, Anatomy of a Disappearance), a contemporary Libyan novelist who writes in English, we will address issues critical to current debates on world literature. We will consider the definition and role of cosmopolitanism; the writing of marginalization, trauma and aesthetic responses to systemic violence; the utility of Western critical theory in relation to non-Western literary traditions; the politics of translation and the negotiations that inevitably result from a work of literature’s reception into the space of a foreign culture; and, the global literary market, the limits it may impose on the author’s imagination and the possible international constraints under which literature from the periphery is now written. Critical readings will include essays and/or excerpts by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Mikhail Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, Cathy Caruth, David Damrosch, Sigmund Freud, Nouri Gana, Richard Jacquemond, Abdelfattah Kilito, Claude Lévi-Straus, Samia Mehrez, Franco Moretti, Bruce Robbins, Gayatri Spivak, and Slavoj Žižek, in addition to selections from Paul Bowles’s letters and Jean Genet’s political writings.