2012-2013 Academic Catalog

Aug 31, 2025

2012-2013 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

ENG 343 - Literary Theory & Global Culture

Type of Course: Seminar

Our interest in this seminar will be the myriad aesthetic choices available to fiction writers in the era commonly referred to as “globalization”. How do we imagine the relationship between literature and contemporary politics? In what ways do the increasingly permeable borders of the modern world reshape our understanding of literature? How does literature help us to understand the new idioms of self-hood that emerge in a global age? Is there a particular literary form that is best suited to represent - and critique - the era in which we live? This course will survey the vocabularies that humanities scholars have invoked to address the rapidly shifting institutions and cultural frameworks of global capitalism, including, for example, questions pertaining to literary aesthetics and form and debates regarding realism, modernism, and postmodernism. We will touch upon questions of relativism and discourses of human rights; ways of conceptualizing global belonging and global citizenship; and the aesthetics of realism and postmodernism as responses to world-historical events of the late twentieth century and beyond. Students can expect to encounter philosophically rich texts from key thinkers in post colonial and cross-cultural studies