ENG: Literature as a World-Making Phenomenon: Contemporary Anglophone Literature

This course builds on and develops the skills and competencies you have accumulated in ‘Reading and Writing in the Digital World’ and ‘Literary Legacies of the Anglophone World’. In this third-semester course we will study the many different ways in which literature can be said to engage in world-making. We will take a point of departure in the myriad ways we can approach the concept of world, in order to help us understand literature as a world-making phenomenon. To this end, this course will focus on 20^th and 21^st century anglophone world literature – postcolonial, transnational, multicultural, American and British literature. In our exploration of this literature, we will ask questions about the world of the author, the world in the text, the ‘real’ world outside the text, the natural world, the planetary world, the world of the reader – and, crucially, the relationship between all these worlds. We will continue to close read a number of generically different texts, now also in tandem with theoretical insights and conceptual considerations. The texts we will study ask you to reflect on, for example, the dialogue between the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of texts, between textual and pictorial worlds and between a text and its screen adaptation, thus honing your competencies in comparative analysis across media expressions. As the course focuses in particular on the intertwined relationships between the reader, the text and the world in its many renditions, our readings will also ponder what it means to exist in unpredictable and changing times, in the 20^th and early 21^st centuries. The course encourages you to think about how literature and literary representations of political and societal issues can help you to manoeuvre in complex, interdependent and turbulent times and to consider the notion of world citizenry. ‘Literature as a World-Making Phenomenon’ thus demonstrates how literature plays an integral part in our understanding of what it means to be human beings on a shared planet.