Department of English

This course is aimed to help students develop a more nuanced and complex understanding of the idea of "World Literature," and its will to create a global world order. Knowledge of languages other than English will not be required, nor will prior familiarity with the literary humanities.

The course will be divided into two parts. We will start off with critically analyzing and historicising the idea of world literature. We will trace the history of this idea back to 18th century Europe, and how it overlapped with, and was shaped by the emerging ideas fo Philology, Orientalism and the Englightenment. For this critical inquiry, we will read we will read the works of Aamir Mufti, David Damrosch and Venkat Mani. Alongside, we will also closely read excerpts of the texts like The Arabian Nights, and Goethe's West East diwan, which were very influential in shaping the idea of the World Literature.

With such a critical-historical understanding of the term "world literature," we will, then, move on to explore its legacies in the non-European worlds in the second part of the course, The broader question we will explore is how "world literature" engaged with the diverse literary and cultural worlds of places like South Asia and the Middle East. 
To explore this question, we will read the works of Erich Auerbach, Michael Allan, Pheng Cheah, and Karim Mattar. We will also explore the interconnected theme of World Literature and (un)translatability through the works of Gayatri Spivak, Emily Apter, and Abdelfattah Kilito.