world literature reading list for spring

i'm teaching literature again after six courses of cinema and violence! much excitement and relief. while it was convenient and kind of fun to screen films and cajole, beg and threaten recalcitrant students into reading film theory, and foucault and zizek besides, i missed the straightforwardness of teaching literature. also, i suppose after teaching large classes of more than fifty students, it'll be nice to have a smaller class again. so, delighted anticipation. i've been thinking of the texts i want to assign for a while now, only casually, without any serious rigorous disciplinary thought. when teaching world literature and literature and society courses before, often i've developed syllabi that could easily be called "books i am really taken with right now," consisting of texts with only a very tenuous thematic or stylistic connection. but i've always managed to erect a plausible defense of my choices. this time around, i've decided to write it all down in the rough before my reasons escape me so that i can have this handy when i am drafting my course rationale. i have learnt to choose short (under three hundred pages) works for my classes. that, and the fact that i wanted to limit myself to contemporary world literature (available in english from 1980), were my only constraints.

novels:

The Ghost Rider Ismail Kadare

that kadare hasn't won the nobel yet is sort of incomprehensible to me, but wikipedia says he's been in the running more than once, so perhaps it is coming to him soon. The Ghost Rider is a perfect text for a world literature course: it is a retelling of a well established and well disseminated legend (the lenore motif, SO much to say about narrative and traveling motifs here), it is a gothic detective story (who doesn't love detective stories?), it is a slim volume, the language in translation is lucid, and kadare is from albania (what does the average freshman know about albania?).

Arabian Nights and Days Naguib Mahfouz

another retelling. by a nobel laureate. and talking of traveling motifs, the nights are perhaps the most worlded of worldy tales ever collected. cannot not have them in a world lit course.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories Salman Rushdie

rushdie is a world phenomenon. since the disastrous reception of the moor's last sigh, i've shied away from assigning anything by him, but haroun is delightful and accessible, and a joy to teach because of it's unrestrained referencing and self-conscious intertextuality.

Liquidation Imre Kertesz

another nobel laureate. no one could ever think of reading about the holocaust in this way. well, perhaps readers of sebald could, but kertesz is so much more compelling in this short pomo tour de force of a novella. this is on my syllabus because i firmly believe every freshman should read it.

Ignorance Milan Kundera

i've assigned the book of laughter and forgetting before. kundera is inescapable, and ignorance creates a space to talk about home, belonging, exile and diaspora. pet topics, all.

After Dark Haruki Murakami

i've assigned murakami before, this very same title, to the general puzzlement of my students. murakami's as inescapable as kundera, and after dark is as good a novel about urban alienation as any. 

short stories:

“The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders” Aleksandar Hemon

a list short story! i can talk about danilo kis and pavic and bruno schulz and perec and experimental fiction and so much more!

“The Garden of Forking Paths” Jorge Luis Borges

come on, really?

essays:

“Cybernetics and Ghosts” Italo Calvino

“Conjectures on World Literature” Franco Moretti

“Literature as a World” Pascale Casanova

yes, i am being eurocentric. no, i am not teaching canon. if i were, i'd include one of the latin american boom authors, but anything my vargas llosa and marquez is too long, fuentes, i haven't read, and cortazar i love, but have no idea how to teach. what is the point of reading writers with the kind of reach kundera, murakami and rushdie enjoy? are they world writers? universal? global writers? is it because they, like pamuk, have managed to infuse their writing with just the right flavour of foreignness that jibes well with the leading reading markets' expectations? there is something universal about kadare's doruntine retelling, about murakami's surreal but anonymous series of night-time encounters, and kundera's hilarious and poignant tale of homecoming: they could have happened anywhere. one is not going to gain a complete picture, a la something by amitav ghosh, of the spatiotemporal location of any of these novels, a complete, and meticulously researched portrait of the weltanschauung of these foreign people-albanians and czechs and japanese, not the characters populating the texts. i am always suspicious of narratives that provide too much description of the "local culture," like an assured informant. i find myself checking the facts. this is a good thing. one is at least made curious, even if it is quite impossible to know definitively. but how many people will believe fakelore about distant cultures and content themselves with such bastadised notions?