Model I: A Two-Semester World Literature Course

FIRST SEMESTER (VOLUMES A–C)

Gilgamesh (Vol. A): 1 Week

• Introductory discussion—orality and epic.
• Defining styles of leadership and heroism and exploring the relationship between sexuality and civilization. Why is it a woman who acculturates Enkidu?
• Male bonding, the forest, and the city. Gilgamesh reverses the pattern of Enkidu’s acculturation.
• Individual conscience and the sense of guilt, exile, and wandering. The encounter with Utnapishtim, to set up a comparison with Genesis: the plant of life, the flood. Eternal life and human mortality.

The Rāmāyana of Vālmīki (Vol A): 1 Week

• Defining a hero, exploring the relationship between sexuality and civilization. Societal demands, burdens of leadership. Who is the rightful ruler?
• Sītā’s role and attitudes toward women. Male bonding and fraternal ties, exile and wandering, the forest and the city.
• Masculine rivalries. War and the demonic; Hanuman and the protection of Sītā. The Formation of Religious and Philosophical Codes (Vol A): 2 Weeks
• The Leiden Hymns (Ancient Egyptian Poetry), Genesis 1–3. Sources of monotheism, the need to celebrate origins, the complexity of life in Eden—naming of animals, the relationship between sexuality, knowledge, and civilization. Biblical attitudes toward women. Individual conscience and the sense of guilt.
• Genesis 4, 6–9, 11. The loss of Eden: the disruption of fraternal ties, exile and guilt. Causes of the flood and divine intervention, with comparison to Gilgamesh; the building of the city and the tower, with comparisons to Ayodhyā and Uruk.
• The Bhagavad-Gītā. Attitudes toward family ties, ideas of individual conscience and guilt, dharma, view of time, doctrine of reincarnation, karma.
• Chuang Chou, (Chuang Tzu). Comparative notions of the body and ideas about leadership; contrasting views of categories and boundaries with those in Hebraic and Hindu religious thought; contrasting Hebraic and Hindu orthodoxy with the profoundly skeptical attitudes here.

Sophocles. Antigone (Vol A): 1 Week

• Sibling ties, exile and the city, the woman as hero.
• Societal demands, burdens of leadership, notions of human control.
• Individual conscience.  Punishment, mercy, and the law.

Kālidāsa. Śākuntala (Vol A): 1 Week

• Forest and city, attitudes toward animals, erotic love, Śākuntala and the natural world—attitudes toward women.
• Societal demands, burdens of leadership, punishment, and karma. Art and self-expression.

Aristotle. Poetics (Vol A): ½ Week

• Dramatic techniques, modes of characterization: contrast the linear, rational relentlessness of Athenian tragedy with the spacious, intricately figured structural patterns of Kālidāsa’s heroic romance. Different audiences; drama and religion. Cf. the reversal of Enkidu’s and Gilgamesh’s experiences of the wild and of culture with the mirror images of acts 1 and 7, 2 and 6, 3 and 5, and the centrality of act IV in Śākuntala.

The Bible: The New Testament (Vol B): 1 Week

• Revising a tradition—Luke 2 as a story of origins (John 1’s importation of the Logos into Creation would be worth consulting here as well); Matthew 26–28—defining a hero, individual conscience, burdens of leadership, tragic relentlessness, ideas of immortality, mercy, and law.

The Koran (Vol B): ½ Week

• Suras 1, 5, 10, 19, 62, 71. Revising a tradition—the People of the Book and the new revelation. Attitudes toward women, societal demands, punishment, mercy, and law.

Popol Vuh (Vol C): ½ Week

• Parts 1 and 4. Native tradition and involuntary revision, story of origins, definitions of humanity.

The Thousand and One Nights (Vol B): ½ Week

• Attitudes toward women, sibling ties, demons and enchantments, the power of the word. Framing narratives.

The Epic of Son-Jara (Vol C): 1 Week

• Epic as performance, audience and griot, story of origins, defining a hero, family bonds. Demons, enchantments, and allusions to Islam.
• The ethics of war, attitudes toward evil, burdens of leadership, exile and return, powers attributed to women.

Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales (Vol C): 1½ Weeks

• General Prologue. Sacred and profane, pilgrimage, Christianity and Islam (the Knight’s wars, sources and analogs of the tales).
• Society on parade, modes of characterization.
• "The Miller’s Tale." Framing narratives, orality and tale telling. A love triangle, modes of characterization, punishment and mercy.

Machiavelli. The Prince; Montaigne. "Of Cannibals"(Vol C): ½ Week

• Humanism and writing; politics, defining a hero, the ethics of war, the burdens of leadership, attitudes toward evil, judging others. Cf. Chuang Chou (Chuang Tzu).

Shakespeare. Hamlet (Vol C): 2 Weeks

• Act I. The loss of Eden—the garden gone to seed. Defining a hero, family bonds, fraternal ties and tensions, demons and enchantments—the ghost.
• Acts II–III. Humanism and politics, Machiavellian ideas, attitudes toward evil, judging others, the burdens of leadership.
• Acts IV–V. Modes of characterization, dramatic techniques, "painting" and staging; Ophelia and Gertrude in light of Antigone and Śākuntala—politics and women, nature and women.
• Course summary: recapitulate themes of exile and return, morality and mortality and action, from Gilgamesh and the Rāmāyana through Hamlet.

To lighten this very tightly packed syllabus, some effort is made to vary the length and difficulty of selections and to bring in comic relief when possible. A natural midterm break comes after the consideration of classical drama, which students enjoy. It is interesting to see what happens to Hamlet when taught in company with the Rāmāyana and the epic of Son-Jara and without reference to Homer and Virgil. Chaucer and The Thousand and One Nights work well in juxtaposition, not surprisingly, as does the creation story of the Popol Vuh with Genesis and the invocation to Śākuntala.

All of these connections make for good paper topics: an early assignment might ask students to compare the flood in Gilgamesh with the biblical revision. Later, the creations in the Popol Vuh might be set against the story of Eden. One might ask students to compare the use of the frame in The Thousand and One Nights and The Canterbury Tales and to situate culturally the political crises in socially conscious works like Antigone, the Epic of Son-Jara and Hamlet.

Wonderful studies may be made of the many and diverse portraits of women, from the temple prostitute in Gilgamesh, who civilizes the wild man; to Antigone, a sister who embodies the conscience of a civilization; to Śakuntalā, who is the essence of the forest world; to Ophelia, another sister caught between realms, who dies a most problematic death, weighted down with the garments of civilization and betrayed by the broken branch on which she hangs her garland of flowers.

SECOND SEMESTER

Molière. Tartuffe (Vol D): 1½ Weeks

• Acts I–II. Social organization and rhyme—have students read the first scene out loud on the first day of class as a lead into a discussion of Wilbur’s translation; Molière’s audience; patriarchy and young love; Dorine and dramatic conventions.
• Acts III–IV. The individual ego; the limits of reason, the powers of passion; view of the provinces (Dorine on the pleasures of marrying Tartuffe).
• Act V. Molière’s Petitions. Religiosity and hypocrisy; the playwright as servant of the king; art and censorship; the satiric mode.

Swift. "A Modest Proposal" (Vol D): ½ Week

• Social organization and the proposer; view of the city; unconscious hypocrisy; another satiric mode.

Sor Juana. Reply to Sor Filotea de la Cruz (Vol D): ½ Week

• Ego and identity; public function of this letter; social organization and hierarchies; religion and service; role of women; submission to higher authority.

T‘ao Ch‘ien, Wang Wei, Tu Fu (Vol B): 1 week

• The role of poetry in traditional Chinese social organization via civil service examinations; submission to authority, attitudes towards originality.
• Interplay of inner life and nature observed.

Cao Xueqin. The Story of the Stone (Vol D): 1 Week

• Social organization and novelistic form; the difference between the opening chapter and the other chapters in the anthology: coexistence of Buddhist allegory and realistic characterization; view of the natural world—life in the garden.
• Patriarchy and young love; education as a means of submission to authority; references within the novel to poetry and drama as media for self-expression.

Bashō. The Narrow Road of the Interior (Vol D): 1 Week

• Poetry and the sense of place; lyric and the individual ego.
• Zen Buddhism in Japan; cf. Chinese traditions.

Rousseau. Confessions (Vol E): ½ Week

• Ego and identity; autobiography and truth; submission to higher authority; view of the city.
• Wordsworth. "Tintern Abbey" and "Westminster Bridge" (Vol E): 1 Week
• Poetry and the sense of place; nature observed; the mind and nature; cf. Bashō.
• View of the city.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Vol E): 1 Week

• Ego and identity; patriarchy and social organization; poetry and pain; education as a means to escape from authority; view of the city.
• Violence and submission; the efficacy of letters; slave narrative as a Romantic form; public function of this narrative.
• Roles of people of color in the west; view of the Christian tradition.

Tolstoy. The Death of Iván Ilyich  (Vol E): 1 Week

• Social organization and identity; realism and detail; culture of materialism; view of the city.
• Idealized purity of service against egotism of professionals.
• Cf. Gerásim and Dorine; view of Christian tradition and submission to authority—contrast assumptions in Tartuffe.

Tagore. "Punishment" (Vol F): ½ Week

• View of women; submission to authority; modern relation to traditional texts. Cf. Bhagavad-Gītā.

Eliot. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (Vol F): ½ Week

• Modern relation to traditional texts. Fragmentation and alienation; self-assertion or submission; view of the city.

Lu Xun. "Diary of a Madman" and "Upstairs in a Wineshop" (Vol F): 1 Week

• Diary of a Madman. Modern relation to traditional texts. May Fourth Movement as a backdrop; cf. Bao-yu’s education and the madman’s experience of Confucian texts; compare Swift’s use of cannibalism—metaphoric and real; satiric modes.
• Upstairs in a Wineshop. The ineffectual hero; cf. Prufrock. Education as a means to escape (or confirm) the power of authority.

Borowski. "This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen" (Vol F): 1 Week

• Individual conscience and the power of authority; self-assertion or submission.
• The loss of Eden; the literature of witness.
• Enlightenment traditions and the rise of Nazism.

Akhmatova. "Requiem" (Vol F): ½ Week

• Cf. "This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen"; Stalinism and World War II as backdrop.
• The poetry of witness. View of the Christian tradition.

Achebe. Things Fall Apart (Vol F): 1½ Weeks

• Ego and identity; portrait of a hero. Cf. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
• Attitude toward traditional social organization: submission to authority; women’s roles. Cf. Lu Xun and Tagore.
• Impact of Western education and religion; family in crisis.
• Narrative modes—cf. Cao Xuequin and Tolstoy.

A good midterm break would come after Wordsworth, establishing Molière’s ambivalent view of the world of Louis XIV as a baseline from which to measure Enlightenment and Romantic critiques of hierarchy, and similar ambivalence about hierarchy and culture in Chinese letters. Students may be asked to write short papers analyzing Romantic lyrics in tandem with those of T‘ao Ch‘ien, Tu Fu, or Bashō. After the midterm break, modes of realism and the changing use of detail link selections from the West with the work of Lu Xun and Achebe’s appropriation of European narrative. Concluding these surveys with overtly political writing intensifies the social and political content of the texts collected here. It is also instructive to compare the voices of women writers with the depictions of women by their contemporaries (Sor Juana; Elmire; Ahkmatova)