An introduction to problems of the comparative study of literatures of the world in international and cross-cultural perspective along with philosophical texts and approaches. Emphasis on principles of comparative methods and analysis with focus on issues of philosophy and ethics along with selected literary, critical, and theoretical texts. Readings in English.

This class inquiries into how notions of time and subjectivity figure in different writing genres, literary traditions, and historical periods. In reading a diverse body of pre-modern and modern texts, we explore how time is constructed and articulated and how it is structured by narrative form and psychological content. We examine how diverse and competing temporalities underlie religious and secular worldviews and how they impact imaginaries of self and of society. We reflect on how articulations of temporality and historicity intersect with ideas of fate and free will, tradition and change, memory and imagination, and existential affect and collective reality. We pay close attention to how literary texts comprise multiple time horizons and we think through their relation with character development, the interplay of events and processes, and the mediation of experiences by cultural symbology. In our class, we also explore the politics of time in modernity, reflecting on the temporalities of nation-state and capitalism, and their interrogation by modernist writing. We will read novels, plays, poems, and essays from different literary traditions and adopt both thematic and historical approaches in studying the conceptualization of time and subjectivity in their imagined worlds.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills