World Literature

Catalog description

Selected key texts of world literature in English or in translation. This course introduces students to narratives of romance that span Asia’s wide variety of religious, literary, theatrical, and cinematic traditions. Rather than defining romance by what it contains, we will instead consider what romance as a genre does. Through this approach, it becomes possible to examine why certain narratives were compelling enough to be transmitted across and preserved within a diverse range of cultures and historical periods. Texts include English translations of Sanskrit drama, Persian and Hindi Sufi mystical works, early Japanese and Chinese novels, recent Bollywood cinema, Korean television melodramas, and the worldwide Harlequin Romance phenomenon. For example: Prof. J. Holstun, Non- North American Fiction Well read a diverse group of novels and novellas from South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, including And the Rain My Drink, Han Suyins historical novel about the Malay Insurgency against British rule, and its defeat; The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assiss modernist autobiography of a dead man; and Hadji Murat, Lev Tolstoys short novel about a Muslim Chechen warlord.