Anglophone Poetry & the Problem of World Lit
- Autumn 2013
Additional Details:
Anglophone Poetry and the Problem of World Literature. Is “world literature” a
meaningful category in 2013? For whom, and why? As studied in a twenty-first-
century English department, does it amount to “comp lit light,” a monolingual
academic pursuit inherently biased in favor of American and British
neoimperialisms? This class will survey a number of arguments on behalf of (and
against) “world literature” as an object of scholarly analysis while we also
read a series of long poems written in English that have addressed themselves to
global, international, diasporic, postcolonial, transnational, and other
audiences that exceed/defy the boundaries of the nation-state (and their
national canons). The four poems that we will be discussing are Theresa Hak
Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune, M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, and
Derek Walcott’s Omeros, and among the literary scholars and cultural critics
that we are likely to read are Emily Apter, Pascale Casanova, David Damrosch, Wai
Chee Dimock, James English, Erick Hayot, Franco Moretti, Shu-mei Shih, and
Gayatri Spivak.