World Literature and the World-System

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This class will take as its points of departure Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature and Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century, pairing literary history with economic history to investigate the aesthetics, pragmatics, and sociology of world-literary production, circulation, and reception, over the past (long) century. We will consider racial capitalism and ethnic literature, social reproduction and the precarisation of the publishing industry, underdevelopment and the literary prize system, amongst other problematics. Our goals are to consider two prominent periodising frameworks for understanding cultural and material history in relation to one another, to extend, revise, or dispense with these twinned frameworks where they seem to us to fall short, and to produce critical analysis of literary works that either apply these frameworks or can answer criticisms informed by them. Primary texts will include works by Achebe, Chang, DeWitt, Kuang, Machado, Plaatje, and Pramoedya; secondary texts will include works by Arrighi, Auerbach, Brouillette, Chow, DuBois, Irele, Ngai, Rodney, Schwarz, and Tanoukhi, among others.