COML 6099 - From Colonial to Global: Literary Study and the Politics of Knowledge

(crosslisted) ROMS 6099

Spring. 4 credits.

C. Joubert.

The debates over World Literature which have generated fresh critical energies in Comparative Literature form part of a wider “global turn” across the Humanities. The seminar explores the contributions that a literary-theory perspective can make to an understanding of the globalized present, by retracing the genealogy of “the knowledge society” in the development of colonial “politics of knowledge” and their ulterior dissection by anticolonial, de-colonial and postcolonial critiques. Going back to the Orientalist invention of the comparative study of languages, we trace the relation of poetics to politics through successive stages of scholarship and intellectual struggle, and study the power of literary critique in cultural hegemony, past and present. Readings will possibly include Jones, Renan, Saussure, Said, Lyotard, Jameson, Dirlik, Spivak, Apter, among others