Course details

Name: ENGL - 117

Title: WORLD LIT: VOICES OF TRADITION AND CHALLENGE

Section: 02

Semester: Fall - 2018

Credits: 3

Description:
We will read some wonderful short stories, novels, poems and plays and watch some feature and documentary films from countries and cultures as diverse and rich as India, Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria, Egypt, Palestine and The Caribbean among others. Our aim will be to see how, in the same culture, writers and other cultural artists, express at times, their love of certain traditional values and beliefs, whilst at other times we can glimpse voices of resistance and change in their works. We will interrogate the very idea of what constitutes “tradition” and ask: what are the historical and political conditions governing writers’ artistic responses and aesthetic choices?

Since this course is focused on work from the 20th— 21st centuries, the material studied will help students grasp a better understanding of the world we live in today, with close attention paid to issues of colonialism and its aftermath, and to the neoimperialist times of globalization we live in today.

Sample Texts:
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart
Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy
Tayyeb Salih Season of Migration to the North
Ismat Chughtai (trans Tahira Naqvi) The Quilt and Other Stories
Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer for Freedom
Milan Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being

Last updated on By Harrison Kim (harrisonk)

Schedule: Tuesday From 5:30 pm To 8:00 pm

Graduation requirements:

  • Genre Study (Fiction)
  • International Issues (3a)
  • Women and Gender Studies (3c)

Teaching Faculty: Afzal-Khan Fawzia (khanf)

Is course canceled: No