Prerequisites: Instructor’s permission (Seminar). Students in this course will join millions of readers around the world who have made the texts on the syllabus into bestsellers. Why is it that travelers have found Khalid Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner featured prominently in airport bookshops in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa? Such popularity on a global scale offers an occasion for critical reflectionabout the transnational economic forces and cultural politics that shape literary supply and demand. Our specific focus will be on novels, memoirs, and films whose authors come from places outside publishing centers of New York and London (Afghanistan, Haiti, India, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa), yet find massive audiences in the US, UK and worldwide. We will do some reading in literary and cultural theory, and we will attend to the material networks of publishing and distribution, in order to understand how these bestsellers emerge, what kinds of conventional narratives or images of otherness they reinforce, and what new narratives and images they might generate. How can we understand the relationship between these texts popularity and their literary role? What frameworks of evaluation and interpretation are appropriate for such texts? What do these texts tell us about globalization?
Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Wenzel (jw2497@columbia.edu) with the subject heading “Global Bestsellers seminar.” In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course. Admitted students should register for the course; they will automatically be placed on a wait list from which the instructor will in due course admit them as spaces become available.
