Instructor: W. Jin
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). This course offers an introduction to “postnational” writing, i.e. literary works (mostly narratives in this case) that challenge common conceptions of national identity, bear witness to the global circulation of people, things, ideas and images, or create new mythologies as a way of staging processes of globalization. The three words that constitute the course title are overlapping terms most often used to name different varieties of postnational writing. Our readings are drawn from 20th-century literature of the Americas. They include Nabokov’s Lolita, Pynchon’s Vineland, William Burroughs’ The Western Lands, Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps, Borges’s selected stories, Du Bois’s Dark Princess, Erick Setiawan’s Of Bees and Mist, and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo. The syllabus also includes theoretical and critical essays explaining the significance of reading outside of a national framework. The key critics are Tim Brennan, Rey Chow, David Damrosch, Paul Giles, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha.
