Lit 101 Final

Leslie Dunton-Downer

Harvard professor of Comp Lit; wrote The English is Coming

"Zaabalawi"

1961 short story by Naguib Mahfouz; tells the story of a young man who is afflicted with an incurable disease and sets out on a quest for Zaabalawi, a holy man reputed to possess healing powers; during the search, the protagonist visits a variety of figures including a religious lawyer, a book seller, a government officer, a calligrapher, and a musician; unable to find any definite answers as to the whereabouts of Zaabalawi, he begins to doubt his existence but while in a drunken sleep in a tavern, he dreams he is in a garden and experiences a state of harmony and contentment; he awakes to find that Zaabalawi was with him but has now disappeared again; though upset at having missed him, the protagonist is encouraged and determined to continue his search

"The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man"

1966 article by Clifford Geertz; neatly sets a mid-20th century view of culture in opposition to the typical Enlightenment view that the superficial diversity of culture masks an underlying and readily discovered universal uniformity: the homogeniety of humanity

Solzehnityn's Nobel Speech

1970 speech for the Nobel Prize; discusses the increasing triumph of world literature over national literature

"Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument"

1978 article by Louis Mink; argues that the past is not an untold story waiting for the historian to retell it, but instead is an inscrutable set of innumerable and difficultly defined events; 'Events' (or more precisely, descriptions of events) are not the raw materials out of which narratives are constructed; rather an event is an abstraction from a narrative"; essentially argues that historical narratives have far more in common with fiction than we generally realize

"From Oral to Written: An Anthropological Breakthrough in Storytelling"

1987 examines in depth the complex relationship between oral and literate modes of communication; considers the interface between written and oral in 3 cultures with and without writing and within the linguistic life of an individual; specific analyses of historical change within writing systems, the historic impact of writing on Eurasian cultures, and the interaction between distinct oral and literate cultures in West Africa, precede an extensive concluding examination of contemporary issues in the investigation, whether sociological or psychological, of literacy...

Signs Taken for Wonders (Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under A Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817)

1994 article; examines moments in postcolonial lit that depict the "English book"; although often understood as an emblem of sustained colonial rule and cultural suppression, such passages are paradoxically an emblem of "colonial ambivalence" that suggests the weakness of colonial discourse and its susceptability to "mimetic" subversion; the colonized subject's repetition of the English book invariably involves a subversion that translates into political insurgence

Tokens of Exchange

1999 book by Lidia Liu; approaches translation as a symbolic and material exchange among peoples and civilizations—not a purely linguistic or literary matter; focuses on China and the West; economy of world lit; rejects the familiar regional approach to non-Western societies and contends that "national histories" and "world history" must be read with absolute attention to the types of epistemological translatability that have been constructed among the various languages and cultures in modern times

James English

20-21st century historian; wrote the Economy of Prestige

Pascale Casanova

20-21st century literary historian; wrote the World Republic of Letters

The Economy of Prestige

2008 work by James English; analyzes the history and social function of cultural prizes/awards; suggests contempt for prizes is not harmful to the prize system but actually helps sustain a collective belief that true art has nothing to do with things like politics, money, in-group tastes, and competition; discusses effects of the 1970s explosion of new awards as giving more awards to those who have them, not that more people get awards; interprets the rise of the prize as part of the "struggle for power to produce value, which means power to confer value on that which does not intrinsically possess it"

The English is Coming

2010 work by Leslie Dunton-Downer about the foreign influences that formed the English language and the future development of English as the global language

David Damrosch

20th-21st century World Lit scholar and professor at Harvard; defined world literature as less a vast canon of works and more a matter of circulation and reception; proposed that works that thrive as world literature are ones that work well and even gain in various ways in translation

"Future Reading: Digitization and its Discontents"

Anthony Grafton's 2007 New Yorker article; laments the digitization of reading; follows the evolution of reading materials and libraries from the 3rd millennium BC Mesopotamian scribes' catalogue system to the invention of the printing press in the 1500s to the current process of digitization of literature; does not believe digitization will ever be complete and argues that some research will always be limited to libraries

"The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproducability"

a 1936 essay by Walter Benjamin; written when Adolf Hitler was already Chancellor, it attempted to describe a theory of art that would be "useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art"; argued that in the absence of any traditional, ritualistic value, art in the age of mechanical reproduction would inherently be based on the practice of politics; discusses the concept of authenticity, particularly in application to reproduction, suggesting that in the act of reproduction something is taken from the original by changing its context; introduces the idea of the 'aura' of a work and its absence in reproduction; "fascism asceticizes politics, communism politicizes art"

Japanese Godzilla

a 1954 Japanese science fiction kaiju film produced by Toho and directed by Ishirō Honda; tells the story of a giant monster mutated by nuclear radiation, who ravages Japan, bringing back the horrors of nuclear war to a country that experienced it first hand; 1st of many kaiju films released in Japan, paving the way and setting the standard for future Kaiju films, many of which also feature Godzilla

Orientalism

a 1978 work by Edward Said; effectively redefines "Orientalism" to mean a constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the Middle East; states that this body of scholarship is marked by a "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture"; argued that a long tradition of romanticized images of Asia and the Middle East in Western culture had served as an implicit justification for European and American colonial and imperial ambitions; just as fiercely denounces the practice of Arab elites who internalized the orientalists' ideas of Arabic culture

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler...

a 1979 novel by Italo Calvino; about a reader trying to read a book called If on a winter's night a traveler; odd-chapters are 2nd person and tells the reader what he is doing in preparation for reading the next chapter; even chapters are all single chapters from whichever book the reader is trying to read

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

a 1979 novel by Milan Kundera; composed of 7 separate narratives united by some common themes, in particular the nature of forgetting as it occurs in history, politics and life in general and laughter; stories also contain elements found in Magical Realism

American Godzilla

a 1998 science-fiction monster disaster film co-written and directed by Roland Emmerich; a loose remake of the Japanese 1954 Godzilla; relates a tale of a nuclear incident in the South Pacific which causes an abnormal mutation to occur in a reptile, who migrates to North America and wreaks havoc in Manhattan; themes and message of original Godzilla are altered

Alexander Pushkin

a 19th century Russian author; considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature; wrote "Journey to Arzrum"

Leo Tolstoy

a 19th-early 20th century Russian writer; considered to have been one of the world's greatest novelists; wrote Hadji Murad

Khaled Hosseini

a 20-21st century Afghan-born American novelist and physician; wrote A Thousand Splendid Suns

Rey Chow

a 20-21st century American cultural critic, specializing in 20th-century Chinese fiction and film, postcolonial theory and critical and cultural theory; professor of lit at Duke; wrote "Where Have All the Natives Gone?"

Michael Denning

a 20-21st century American cultural historian and professor of American Studies at Yale; influential in shaping the field of American Studies by importing and interpreting the work of British Cultural Studies theorists; wrote "The Novelists International"

Gao Xingjian

a 20-21st century Chinese-born novelist, playwright, translator and critic; emigrated to France in 1987; recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in lit; prose works tend to be less celebrated in China but are highly regarded elsewhere in Europe and the West, perhaps an example of an author whose works gain in translation

Milan Kundera

a 20-21st century Czech author; lived in exile in France since 1975; writes in both Czech and French and revises the French translations of all his books; wrote The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Orhan Pamuk

a 20-21st century Turkish novelist, professor at Columbia, and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Lit; one of Turkey's most prominent and best-selling writers; born in Istanbul; put on trial in Turkey after he made a statement regarding the Armenian Genocide and mass killing of Kurds in the Ottoman Empire, hoping to highlight issues of freedom of speech in Turkey; the ensuing controversy featured the burning of his books at rallies; wrote Snow

Doris Lessing

a 20-21st century Zimbabwean-British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer; awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature; the 11th woman and the oldest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Lit; wrote Time Bites, a collection of essays

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

a 20-21st century writer; awarded the Nobel Prize in Lit in 1970; expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 but returned to Russia in 1994 after the Soviet system had collapsed

Snow

a 2002 novel by Orhan Pamuk; encapsulates many of the political and cultural tensions of modern Turkey and successfully combines humor, social commentary, mysticism, and a deep sympathy with its characters; tells the story of Ka, a poet who returns to Turkey after 12 years of political exile in Germany in order to investigate a suicide epidemic but also in the hope of meeting a woman he used to know; heavy snow cuts off the town for about three days during which time Ka is in conversation with a former communist, a secularist, a fascist nationalist, a possible Islamic extremist, Islamic moderates, young Kurds, the military, the Secret Service, the police and in particular, an actor-revolutionary; a farcical coup is staged and linked melodramatically to a stage play

A Thousand Splendid Suns

a 2007 novel by Khaled Hosseini; focuses on the tumultuous lives of two Afghan women, Mariam and Laila, and how their lives interact with each others and history, spanning from the 1960s to 2003

Clifford Geertz

a 20th century American anthropologist; wrote "The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man"

Jack Goody

a 20th century British social anthropologist; wrote "From Oral to Written"

Chao Shu-Li

a 20th century Chinese novelist; victim of the persecution of intellectuals and artists during the Cultural Revolution; wrote Sanliwan Village

Naguib Mahfouz

a 20th century Egyptian writer who won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Lit; one of the first contemporary writers of Arabic literature to explore themes of existentialism; wrote Zaabalawi

Italo Calvino

a 20th century Italian journalist and novelist; wrote If On a Winters Night a Traveler

Frantz Fanon

a 20th century Martinique-born French psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary and writer whose work is influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory and Marxism; known as a radical existential humanist thinker on the issue of decolonization and the psychopathology of colonization; wrote the Wretched of the Earth

Edward Said

a 20th century Palestinian-American literary theorist, advocate for Palestinian rights and a founding figure in postcolonialism; wrote Orientalism

Mikhail Bakhtin

a 20th century Russian philosopher, literary critic, and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language; wrote "Epic and Novel"

Louis Mink

a 20th century philosopher of history whose works challenged early philosopher of history R.G. Collingwood and were part of a postmodern dialogue on history and historical narrative; wrote "Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument"

Sanliwan Village

a 20th century socialist realist novel by Chao Shu-Li; tells the story of a North Chinese villages struggle to become better socialists by the collectivization of agriculture; the 3 marriages show important communist messages: Ling-Chih learns that intelligence and ability are more important than formal education and chooses Yu-Sheng, Yu-Yi stands up to his bourgeois family and marries Yu-Mei, and Hsiao-Chun learns to be less bourgeois and less obnoxious and marries Man-Hsi

Colin Thubron

a British travel writer and novelist; wrote "Locked in the Writer's Room"

Voltaire

a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, freedom of expression, free trade and separation of church and state; wrote Candide

Kant

a German philosopher from Königsberg researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th century Enlightenment; wrote "What is Enlightenment?"

Anthony Grafton

a historian and current professor at Princeton; wrote "Future Reading: Digitization and its Discontents"

"Ich bin from Head to Feet"

a satirical short story by Ilf and Petrov about a speaking dog circus act who is not allowed to perform because of censorship

"How the Soviet Robinson was Created"

a satirical short story by Ilf and Petrov about an attempt of a Russian author to create a Soviet version of Robinson Crusoe, which quickly devolved into a standard socialist realist story because of the censorship

Hadji Murad

a short novel written by Tolstoy from 1896-1904 and published posthumously in 1912; Tolstoy's final work. The protagonist is an Avar rebel commander who, for reasons of personal revenge, forges an uneasy alliance with the Russians he had been fighting; thistle symobl

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

an Indian literary critic, theorist, and professor at Columbia; wrote "Can the Subaltern Speak?"

on Goethe and "World Literature"

article by David Damrosch; discusses Goethe's first use of the term Weltliteratur and the death of national literatures; gives 3 categories for world lit: classics, masterpieces, and windows

"Can the Subaltern Speak?"

article by Spivak; discusses the race and power dynamics involved in the banning of sati; argues that because all that we hear about sati are accounts (by British colonizers or Hindu leaders) of what sati meant to, or how it oppressed, women, but never hear from the sati-performing women themselves -- the subaltern cannot speak; gives example of girl who hung herself for political reasons and timed it with her period to prove she was not killing herself because she was pregnant but people still believed she killed herself because she was in love; "white men protecting brown women from brown men"

"The Anxiety of Global Influence: What is World Poetry?"

article by Stephen Owen; discusses the struggle of non-English poets in choosing between authentic poetry of their culture and poetry that will translate easily into English; argues that the desire for world poetry decreases the quality of poetry; gives Bei Dao's poems as an example; they are appreciated by the international audience because they believe that much has been lost in translation, while the native audience loves it because the international audience has recognized it as good

"The Pitfalls of National Consciousness"

chapter from Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth; argues that nationalism often fails at achieving liberation across class boundaries because its aspirations are mainly those of the colonized bourgeoisie--a privileged middle class defeats colonial rule only to usurp its place of dominance; colonialism is not just colonizers and colonized but instead a complicated network of factions within the 2 broader categories; the power struggle ostensibly between colonized and colonizers is displaced on power relationships within the colonized body itself

"The Culture Industry"

chapter of a 1944 book of philosophy and social criticism by Adorno and Horkheimer; argued that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods - through film, radio and magazines - to manipulate the masses into passivity; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture make people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances; saw mass-produced culture as a danger to the high arts; mass culture cultivates false needs, created and satisfied by capitalism

"Censorship"

essay from Doris Lessing's 2006 collection, Time Bites; describes the way 'political correctness' is a form of censorship that limits creativity and expression

"On Tolstoy"

essay from Doris Lessing's 2006 collection, Time Bites; focuses on Tolstoy's views on sexuality and women, particularly in his Kreutzer Sonata

"What Novel or Novels Prompted Your Own Political Awakening?"

essay from Doris Lessing's 2006 collection, Time Bites; focuses on political literature; distinguishes between lit that describes politics and lit that pushes a political message

"Where have all the Natives Gone?"

essay in Rey Chow's 1993 Writing Disaspora; examines the construction of images of the "native"; "Native" works, either timeless (art museum) or historical (ethnographic), are determined in post-imperialist discourse by the search for "authenticity"; expands Benjamin's "Art in the Age of Mech Rep" to include people and asks if technological reproduction is inevitable is cultural displacement too?; considers the cultural other in terms of Rousseau's "big Other" as a way of getting at a general definition of difference without privilieging any specific form of alterity; presents danger of looking behind image of "native" for a "true voice"; points to "gaze" of native as alternative that recognizes an essential untransibility of subaltern into imperial discourse but does so with the native at the center of inquiry

Horkheimer and Adorno

members of the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory; together wrote The Dialectic of Entertainment

Homi K Bhabha

professor of English and American Lit and Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard; important figure in contemporary post-colonial studies; has coined a number of the field's neologisms and key concepts, such as hybridity, mimicry, difference, ambivalence, which describe ways in which colonised peoples have resisted the power of the coloniser; wrote "Signs Taken for Wonders"

Stephen Owen

professor of comp lit at Harvard; wrote "The Anxiety of Global Influence: What is World Poetry?"

Michael Holquist

professor of comp lit at Yale; wrote Corrupt Originals: The Paradox of Censorship

"Cramp"

short story from Gao Xingjian's 1990 collection, Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather; tells the story of a man who swims about a kilometer from shore, gets a cramp, and almost drowns, only to have no one notice he's been gone when he finally makes it back to shore

Corrupt Originals: The Paradox of Censorship

the introduction to Michael Holquist's 1994 book describing the positive ability of censorship to create "sophisticated audiences" who must read between the lines

"Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather"

title story of Gao Xingjian's 1990 collection; tells the story of a man who sees a fiberglass fishing rod in a store window and is reminded of the times he went fishing and hunting with his grandfather

Ilf and Petrov

two Soviet prose authors of the 1920s and 1930s who often worked together; natives of Odessa; wrote "How the Soviet Robinson was Created" and "Ich bin from Head to Feet"

Lidia Liu

wrote tokens of exchange

"Journey to Arzrum"

1836 travel diary of Pushkin; follows his journey through Georgia and into Turkey; example of orientalism although Pushkin has rather unbiased and open views and a sense of humor

Poetry selections from Longman Anthology, Vol F, in this sequence: pp 473-477, pp 311-328, pp 238-239, p 243

...

"Epic and Novel"

Bakhtin's 1941 essay that compares the novel to the epic; sees the novel as capable of achieving much of what other forms cannot, including an ability to engage with contemporary reality and to re-conceptualize the individual in a complex way that interrogates his subjectivity and offers the possibility of redefining his own image; stresses the novel's flexibility and it's unique ability to constantly adapt, partly because there is no novel canon as there is for epic or lyric poetry; epic, in comparison, is a 'high-distance genre', i.e. its form and structure situate it in a distant past time that assumes a finished quality, meaning it cannot be re-evaluated, re-thought or changed by us; compares the novel to clay and the epic to marble; epic past is irretrievable and idealized in a way that makes it appear hierarchically superior to the present

"Locked in the Writer's Room"

Colin Thubron's 2007 review of Pamuk's Other Colors: Essays and a Story; discusses Pamuk's history as a political exile and his feelings towards Turkey, Istanbul, and writing

"The Novelists' International"

Michael Denning's essay Franco Moretti's The Novel; describes of nationalizing or aestheticizing proletarian literature; mainstream lit criticism generally either argues that social realist novels share a transnational formula that marks them as less-than-literary outsiders to the national lit or claims that the best left-wing writers transcend the generic formula and are best understood within the particular linguistic and cultural tradition of the national lit; rather than a successor and antagonist to social realism, magical realism is best seen as a 2nd stage of the proletarian avant-garde

The World Republic of Letters

Pascale Casanova's 2004 book; discusses world lit as a struggle for dominance between language systems, aesthetic orders, and genres; rejects idea of world lit as a happy "melting pot', instead shows emerging inequality, where minor languages and lits are subject to violence from their dominant counterparts; develops systematic model for understanding the production, circulation, and valuing of world lit; argues for the importance of literary capital in giving value and legitimacy to nations as they struggle for global power; locates 3 main periods of world lit--Latin, French, and German--& examines 3 main figures--Kafka, Joyce, and Faulkner

Walter Benjamin

a 19-20th century German-Jewish literary critic, philosopher, social critic, translator, and essayist; wrote "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproducability"

"Candide"

a 1759 French satire by Voltaire; begins with a young man who is living a sheltered life and being indoctrinated with Leibnizian optimism by his mentor, Pangloss; describes the abrupt cessation of this lifestyle, followed by Candide's slow, painful disillusionment as he sees and experiences great hardships; concludes with Candide, if not rejecting optimism , advocating an enigmatic precept, "we must cultivate our garden", in lieu of Pangloss' "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds"; characterised by its sarcastic tone, as well as by its erratic, fantastical and fast-moving plot; picaresque novel that parodies many adventure and romance clichés

"What is Enlightenment?"

a 1784 essay by Kant in response to a question posed to the intellectual public by a Reverend and official in the Prussian government; defines Enlightenment as "man's emergence from his self-incurred minority"; addressed the preconditions necessary to make enlightenment possible and praised Frederick II for creating these preconditions; distinguishes between private (doing something because we have to) and public (doing something on the public sphere because we choose to improve our private function) use of reasoning