350:511

Index # - 72868

Distribution Requirement:  A5, B

Wednesday – 4:30 p.m.

MU 207

John McClure

Perspectives on Globalization:  Literature and Theory

In his introduction to a special issue of the PMLA, "Globalizing Literary Studies," Giles Gunn suggests that scholars of literature need both to familiarize themselves with globalization theory and to undertake "a much more careful analysis of just how [literary texts] have themselves subjected aspects of globalization to careful scrutiny and to serious critique and revaluation."    Following Gunn's lead, this course will put several strands of globalization theory in conversation with the fiction of globalization. It will pair analyses of the history of modernization/globalization with Garcia-Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things; studies of globalized corporate and religious structures, flows, and sensibilities with Don DeLillo's The Names; studies of explosive urbanization, self-shattering, and religious revitalization with Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying and Bessie Head's When Rain Clouds Gather; and studies of chronic war and its subjective consequences with Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost.

Manfred Steger's Globalization: A Very Short Introduction and sections of David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity will provide introductions to some of the basic concepts and debates of globalization theory. For theoretical efforts to think the relation between globalization and the production of new subjectivities and modes of being we'll turn to works by Marshall Berman, Mike Davis, Fredric Jameson, Saba Mahmood, Achille Mbembe, Gayatri Spivak and others. Finally, we'll draw on Berman, Harvey, and Jameson to address the question of the  "voices" of globalization and on Franco Moretti to explore the formal borrowings and innovations of novelists striving to represent globalized systems and experiences. Since cinema is rapidly becoming one of the most important sites of narrative reflection on globalization, I will encourage class members to study and discuss films such as Syriana, Tsotsi, City of God, Blood Diamond, The Clay Bird, and  The Last King of Scotland.

Course requirements: Regular attendance and participation. Two 10-page papers, the first reviewing work on a course topic, text, or author, the second deploying this research in a conference-style paper on one or more course texts; an oral presentation based on this work.