Department of English

With an estimated 2.3 billion speakers worldwide, English has become the dominant global language for everything from entertainment and literature to social media, business, aviation, and the law. This course will introduce students to global literatures written in English through a study of the institutions—colonial, educational, legal, philanthropic, and economic—that have helped make English a global language since the mid-nineteenth century. Beginning with some foundational documents about English education in Britain’s colonies, we will study a wide range of novels, poems, and short stories by twentieth- and twenty-first century Anglophone writers that take up the complex relationships between language, social mobility, national identity, economic development, and cultural preservation in the English-speaking world. Along the way, we will examine English pedagogical materials from the colonial period, engage with debates about the English language from the formal period of decolonization, consider the projects of postwar philanthropic institutions designed to “preserve” world languages like UNESCO and the British Council, and explore the role that mass media has played in the proliferation of global Englishes today. Readings may include literature by Julia Alvarez, Carlos Bulosan, Anita Desai, Tsitsi Dangarembga, George Lamming, Salman Rushdie, and Ken Saro-Wiwa, and criticism by Minae Mizumura, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Ngūgi wa Thiong’o. As a Communication Within the Curriculum seminar, this course is designed to sharpen your oral communication skills and will involve a mix of written and oral assignments.