LTST 551 investigates an increasingly influential approach to literary studies—world literature. The course covers the seventeenth century to the present, including diverse forms of literary representation, from broadside ballads to Instapoetry, The Thousand and One Nights to Aboriginal science fiction, as well as drama, short fiction, graphic memoir, and manga to explore international issues such as postcolonialism, globalization, and indigenization. As a multifaceted history of cultural transmission in global contexts, the course challenges traditional conceptions of world literature and considers new directions for literary studies in the twenty-first century.
This course provides intensive study in the English novel in the nineteenth century, when the genre became the most popular literary form in a period that saw the explosive growth of the English reading nation amidst social and economic transformations under British capital and empire. The course adopts the discourse of "the Gothic" as an interpretive framework for closely reading and historically contextualizing the genre of the novel. We will read and discuss seven novels from the period, together with contemporary literary criticism and scholarship about them.
LTST 637: Black Atlantic Literature and Culture
- Teacher: Mark McCutcheon