WISE: The Institutions of World Literature

Pick a work of "World Literature" from your bookshelf. Now ask yourself - how did it come to be yours? Did a friend recommend it? A bookstore? A professor? Amazon? And how did you come to think of it as "World Literature"? Did publisher decisions on the book cover, blurb, or summary tell you that? Was it marketed as such on a class syllabus? Was it on the Booker Prize shortlist? This course asks questions about the production, dissemination, and consumption of World Literature through three primary texts: Beloved by Toni Morrison (a syllabus classic), The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola (the first internationally recognized Nigerian novel in English), and The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye by Sonny Liew (a graphic novel criticized by the Singaporean government). Through the reading and contextual examination of each text, we will explore how these texts come to our attention in the first place, how we have been taught to aesthetically value them, and how we have come to classify them as "World Literature." What identifying and gate-keeping mechanisms, what historical contingencies and systemic inequalities, comprise a work's "worldliness"?