Dear Graduate Students,

If you're planning on taking classes during the first summer session (June 1-24), please register ASAP. One of the Summer I courses, ENGL 781: The Global Novel, is currently under-enrolled and will likely be canceled if a few more students don't register for it. So please do check it out if you need an elective. I've pasted the seminar's intriguing course description below.

ENGL 781: The Global Novel

Pamela Burger

Class no. 8527; Mon/Tue/Wed/Thu 6:45–8:25pm; KY 412

In this course, we will reconsider the concept of "world literature" by investigating the novel's current status as a global form. Our starting point will be the development of the Anglophone novel as it emerged alongside (and perhaps in conjunction with) globalization, a term we will take to include economic and cultural imperialism as well as transnational migrations.  We will then look at how this history shaped the current debates regarding the role of the English-language novel in the international literary market. Questions of interest will include: how does literature circulate in the twenty-first century? Can we read the novel, in English or otherwise, as a "global form" that extends beyond nationalization, that de-territorializes literary study? Finally, how might such reading shift our understanding of established literary critical fields, including post-coloniality, translation studies, and cosmopolitanism?  Novelists we might examine include Conrad, Adichie, Coetzee and Diaz. Critical readings will include works by Arjun Appadurai, Rebecca Walkowitz, Pascale Casanova, and Franco Moretti, among others.