🌎 World Literature II

📅 September 10, 2021

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Course Description: In this course, students will explore World Literature of the 20th and 21st centuries post-World War II. We will read the likes of Haruki Murakami, Max Porter, Kyung-Sook Shin, Sandra Cisneros, and examine the larger questions posed by these authors and the genres in which they write (we will look at science fiction, magical realism, satire, realism, etc)—and just how widely the cultural contexts of these authors vary across time and space. We will read critical essays not just on the primary texts, but also on recent history and culture to understand the larger context that informs these themes and pushes these authors toward their respective genres.

Reading List: Max Porter Grief is the Thing with Feathers, Albert Camus The Stranger, Sandra Cisneros House on Mango Street, Italo Calvino The Nonexistent Knight and the Cloven Viscount, Kyung-sook Shin Please Look After Mom, Bessie Head When Rain Clouds Gather, Valerie Lusielli Faces in the Crowd, Marjane Satrapi Persepolis.

Second section switched out some of the readings in favor of these: Haruki Murakami, "The Little Green Monster," Sui Sin Far, "Mrs. Spring Fragrance," Leo Tolstoy, "The Death of Ivan Ilyich."

Short Response Paper: You must submit your paper here in this dropbox, and also in person in class.

The first major assignment, a short response paper, asks you to briefly (3-5 pages) analyze and expand on, or respond to, themes, issues, or critical responses from one of the novels or stories we have read so far. You can incorporate secondary readings, but this first paper asks you to do most of the work yourself here; tell me what you see going on and think through it.

Further detail: Since this paper is so short, and no secondary sources are needed, the idea here is for you to 1) choose a novel or story that seems important to you so far and to 2) analyze the major themes of the text. This is 3-5 pages of you thinking through the text: you will give me your best go at a critical reading, which we will talk more about as the semester continues. This paper is meant to be a bit lower stakes, a chance for you to start writing and thinking about the text without the burden of a scary "big final argument paper" style assignment hanging over your head, so go for it!

Final Research Paper: The second major assignment for the course is the final paper, a 7-10 page paper in which you will include at least five critical sources (one may be from class readings) and discuss elements of more than one of the novels and how they help us understand something about the world as a whole.

This paper is pretty much up to you in terms of the direction you go in; if you look back to your topic proposals, you should have a thesis (or, a start to one!) and a source or two lined up as a starting point. This paper should be 7-10 pages, include five sources (one of which can be from class) and feature two of the novels or stories we have (or will read). You should be examining them together to answer some sort of question about this world: what I mean by that, is, you can synthesize two novels with a theme (say, death in Please Look After Mom and Grief is the Thing with Feathers) but your synthesis should be pointed BEYOND the novels. What does death in these two novels tells us about society? Is the way we talk about death universal, or does it change from culture to culture? Does it seem different on the surface, but ultimately feel the same? How does grief work in Korean cultures vs western cultures? Is Max Porter utilizing more ritual elements of death with the crow that emulates eastern cultural thought? Some of these types of questions can help to shape the essay, and make your essay useful to a reader who hasn't read the novels you chose. If you have further questions, I'm an email away!

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