Penn Arts & Sciences Logo
 

Global Literature and Theory

ENGL 773.401
instructor(s):
R 9-12

Globalization is a term much used these days, but when was a global imagination born? How did it become possible to think the peoples and terrains of the world as a single, finite and inter-related entity? How have literary and philosophical texts since the eighteenth century grappled with this peculiar imaginative configuration? We will read writers from different backgrounds who have grappled with this question, often to radically different ends. Our approach will be informed by a juxtaposition of European with non-European points of view. Authors we are likely to read: Defoe, Smith, Kant, Marx, Shelley, Conrad, Devi, Coetzee, Salih, Goenawan, Eltit.

fulfills requirements