Model II: A Two-Semester World Literature Course with a Western "Core"

FIRST SEMESTER: A VIEW OF THE WESTERN TRADITION

Ancient Greece and the Formation of the Western Mind

Homer. Selections from The Odyssey (Vol A): 2 Weeks

• Invocation. It’s a good idea to get started on the very first day of classes by distributing the opening lines of the first text to be studied. Careful and detailed analysis of Homer’s dense invocations indicates how a poet sets out themes; students should be asked to watch for ways in which the rest of the poem bears out these early hints and emphases.
• Books V–VII. Orality and epic. Defining a hero, exploring the relationship between sexuality and civilization. Women and passion.
• Books VIII–X. Societal demands, burdens of leadership. Masculine rivalry, exile and wandering. Culture of the Kyklopês, crisis of identity.
• Books XI–XIII. Human mortality and existence in the underworld. Going home, crisis of identity. Role of the Olympian gods.
• Books XXI–XXIV. Reclaiming identity, reunifying family. Problems of retribution and justice.

Sappho. Lyrics (Vol A): ½ Week

• Lyric poetry, personal emotions, women and passion; the appropriation of Homeric materials.

Sophocles. Oedipus the King (Vol A): 1 Week

• Societal demands, burdens of leadership, notions of human control.
• Individual conscience and the sense of guilt, family crises, problems of retribution and justice.

Aristophanes. Lysistrata (Vol A): ½ Week

• Powers attributed to women, critique of masculine rivalries (war); questions of tone.

The Roman Empire

Virgil. The Aeneid (Vol A): 1 Week

• Book I. Revising a tradition—secondary epic, cf. Homeric ideas in The Odyssey.
• Book IV. Creating a tradition—a woman in love—cf. the depiction of Dido’s passion with the treatment of women in Lysistrata.
• Book VI. Extending a tradition—cf. Odysseus and Aeneas in the underworld—evolving notions of Hell.

The Formation of a Western Literature

Marie de France. "Laustic" and "Lanval" (Vol B): ½ Week

• Women and poetry; cf. Sappho. 
• Evolving ideas of love: cf. Dido. Courtly romance, marriage, and passion.
• The king’s court and the rendering of justice; punishment, mercy, and law.

Dante. Inferno (Vol B): 1½ Weeks

• Cantos I–III. Identity crisis, exile and guilt, evolving notions of Hell, Beatrice and new attitudes toward women.
• Cantos IV–V. Role of the poet; choice of the vernacular. Punishment, mercy, and law. The unequal treatment of Paolo and Francesca—women and the traditions of romantic love.
• Cantos XXVI, XXXII–XXXIV. Dantean punishments and what they tell us about his world—Ulysses (cf. Odysseus); Ugolino; Satan.

Cervantes. Don Quixote (Vol C): 1 Week

• Part I, chapters 1–10. Defining a hero, revising traditions. The power of reading; courtly romance and passion; cf. Paolo and Francesca and Laustic. Selecting a companion—Sancho Panza; fat and lean, realism and fantasy. Satire transcended.
• Part I, chapters 22 and 52. Punishments and what they tell us about the worldview of Cervantes.
• Part II. Conception of Islam; role of an author.

The Enlightenment in Europe

Voltaire. Candide (Vol D): 1 Week

• Chapters 1–13. Education and quest. Names as a satiric device; selecting companions; revising the heroic tradition of war; class distinctions and their consequences; attitudes toward Christianity—from Anabaptist to Auto-da-Fé; mysteries of free will and predestination.
• Chapters 14–30. Reflections on the literature of travel; vision of the New World; function of Eldorado in the satiric plan. Constantinople as place of rest; view of Islam; cultivating gardens.

Revolution and Romanticism in Europe and America

Goethe. Faust (Vol E): 1½ Weeks

• Prologue in Heaven through Study. Dramatic texture—cf. Sophocles. Idea of Christianity—cf. Voltaire’s Jesuits, etc. Cultural roles of Voltaire and Goethe—the sage.
• Auerbach’s Keller through Witch’s Kitchen. The Faustian quest according to Goethe; treatment of Mephistopheles.
• Street through Dungeon. Domestic tragedy—Gretchen (cf. Schubert song, Gounod’s opera)—crisis of innocence.

Pushkin. "The Queen of Spades" (Vol E): ½ Week

• Another author as cultural hero; Hermann as quester—cf. Odysseus, Dante, Don Quixote, and Faust; nature of goals, supernatural interventions. Increasingly psychological penetration of character. (Tschaikovsky’s opera.)

Realism, Symbolism, and European Realities

Ibsen. Hedda Gabler (Vol E): 1 Week

• Acts I–II. Heroine as hero, social organization and patriarchy; realistic detail as psychological clue—portrait, flowers, piano, guns.
• Acts III–IV. Two views of history, two failed "heroes," aesthetics and death.

The Twentieth Century: Self and Other in Global Context

Woolf. A Room of One’s Own (Vol F): ½ Week

• What it meant to be the daughter of a cultural hero.  Information in quest of interpretation.
• Where does meaning come from? Realistic detail as psychological clue.

Cognitive processes observed.

Kafka "The Metamorphosis" (Vol F): 1 Week

• Psychological angst. Society vs. individual.  What does it mean to be the son of an authoritarian father?
• Cognitive processes observed: disintegration of the inner life.
• The celebration of endurance: what remains at the end?

A natural, if slightly late, midterm break comes after Don Quixote, which looks both backward and forward. It would be a good idea to assign a major paper early in the semester dealing with the grand epic tradition of Homer and Virgil, since so much will be made in the second third of the semester of Christian revision and ironic reflection of the heroic. Comparing Voltaire’s satiric fable with that of Cervantes makes a marvelous transition into the second half of the semester, when inherited traditions come into question.

Second Semester: A Sampling of Non-Western Canonical Works

India’s Heroic Age

The Mahābhārata (Vol A): 1½ Weeks

• Origins. It’s a good idea to get started on the very first day of classes by distributing the opening of the first text to be studied. Careful and detailed analysis of the epic’s account of the birth and education of heroes should allow you to set out themes and contrast the Sanskrit and the Homeric epic traditions.
• Book 2:  Compare the multiplicity of narrating voices with the impersonal Homeric narrator.  Family conflict; gambling as an aristocratic activity; women and ownership.
• Books 5, 8. Role of the gods; weaponry and war. Cf. Homeric descriptions of battle.
• Books 9, 11, 12. Vengeance and the sense of identity. Destiny and the aftermath of war.

Poetry and Thought in Early China

Classic of Poetry (Vol A): 1 Week

• Select from among I, XX, XXIII, XXVI, XLII, LXIV, LXXVI, LXXXI, LXXXIII, CXL: The nature of Chinese writing—see "A Note on Translation." 
• Origins:  Beginning with lyric—human passions in nature’s frame, another series of miniature narratives.
• The view from below: political understanding of ritual, social and economic realities.

Confucius. Analects (Vol A): ½ Week

• Conversation as instruction; a view from below; political understanding of ritual, social and economic realities.
• The appropriation of the Classic of Poetry as a "Confucian" document:  the role of
• music and the art of the gentleman.
• Ssu-ma Ch’ien. Historical Records (Vol A): ½ Week
• Po Yi and Shu Ch’I:  Questioning Confucian assumptions.
• Yu-jang and Nieh Cheng:  Vengeance and the sense of identity.  The view from below: ideas of service and the nature of authority.

The Rise of Islam and Islamic Literature

Ferdowsi. Shâhnâme (Vol B): 1 Week

• Rivals within the family, women as initiators of action—cf. The Odyssey, The Mahābhārata. Tahminé’s midnight visit—cf. midnight visits in The Tale of Genji; Gorfdafaríd. Fathering children who go unrecognized.
• Geopolitical realities:  awareness of other civilizations in the references to helmets—political themes in this book of kings.
• Tone of the battle scenes and the death of Sohráb. Cf. descriptive techniques as cultural markers in various epics: The Odyssey, The Mahābhārata, Historical Records.

Sa’di, Golestan (Vol B): ½ Week

• Anecdotal literature: compare the Analects of Confucius. Thinking about the nature of authority and moral life.
• The view from below: justice and mercy.

The Golden Age of Japanese Culture

The Man’yōshū (Vol B): ½ Week

• Poetic forms; Hitomaro and the expression of emotion—in the landscape, in natural imagery, in tears.

Murasaki Shikibu. The Tale of Genji (Vol B): 1½ Weeks

• Chapters 2 and 4. How men speak about women; how poems speak for women; sexuality in shuttered rooms. Veiled expressions of emotions; dreams and the moral life—a woman’s pain.
• Chapters 12 and 13. From the court to Suma—the provincial world. Japanese landscapes—cf. Hitomaro. Dreams and the moral life—a father’s counsel. Music and the aristocratic aesthetic.
• Chapter 25. Illumination and enlightenment—fiction and the aristocratic aesthetic, dreams and warnings. Fathering children who go unrecognized—contrast Genji’s paternal anxieties with Rostám’s.

Mystical Poetry of India. Mahādēviyakka; Govindadāsa; Mīrābāī (Vol B): ½ Week

• Revisiting the lyric—images of sensuality and spirituality. Women as initiators of action—midnight trysts with a dark lover. Cf. Genji and the Shahnama.

Africa: The Mali Epic of Son-Jara. (Vol C): 1½ Weeks

• Episodes 1 and 2; Prologue in Paradise. Cf. Homeric invocation, Goethe’s Prologue to Faust. Participatory narrative style—improvisation and orality; demands on the audience. Women as initiators of action—cf. Shâhnâme. Folkloric themes.
• Episodes 4 and 5. Birth of a hero: divine ancestry and family destiny. Cf. Mahabharata. Rival wives and the supernatural. Arjuna, Odysseus, and Son-Jara contrasted, Vyasa and the griot compared.
• Episodes 6 and 7. Sumamuru—fetish and the hero’s sister. Magical powers and political strageties.

Native America and Europe in the New World

Cantares Mexicanos (Vol C): ½ Week

• Performance and song—cf. orality of epic and shared themes—the animal realm, the heroic: a warrior culture. Compare the sensual imagery of the devotional lyric.

Popol Vuh (Vol C): 1 Week

• Gods of creation: the animal realm. Prehuman heroes—folkloric themes. The twins as tricksters.
• Descent into the underworld: Xibalba and the Mesoamerican ballgame—cf. Odysseus and the shades, Dante’s Inferno. The human work completed.

The Twentieth Century: Self and Other in Global Context

The Night Chant (Vol F): ½ Week

• Performance and song; literature and the nature of ritual. Changing attitudes toward non-Western cultures in the traditional West: disruption and continuity in native American practice.
• The created world in Navajo and Maya texts, ideas of beauty and assumptions about
• violence in Cantares Mexicanos, Popol Vuh, and the Night Chant. The promise of healing.
• Zhang Ailing. Love in a Fallen City (Vol F): 1 week
• Disruption and continuity in Confucian culture. Filial piety and individual rights.
• Modern love: reconceiving traditional notions of high romance.  The Classic of Poetry
• invoked.
• Geopolitical motifs: Hong Kong as melting pot, wartime confusions.

Mahfouz. "Zaabalawi" (Vol F): ½ Week

• Mahfouz as culture hero and target—the role of the intellectual in contemporary non-Western cultures.
• The quest for healing unresolved—disruption and continuity in Islamic culture.
• Kojima. "The American School" (Vol F): ½ Week
• Impact of Westernized education on a traditional society; reasons for disruption in Japanese culture.
• Geopolitical motifs:  wartime confusions, the prospects for healing the hero’s feet, the
• society’s wound. 

El Saadawi "In Camera" (Vol F): ½ Week

• Impact of education and activism on a traditional society; reasons for disruption. Arabic-Islamic women’s feminism. Reaction against patriarchy.
• El Saadawi as culture hero and target—the role of the intellectual in contemporary
• non-Western cultures.

Course summary: Idiosyncratic uses of form in ancient and medieval non-Western writing yield to the universal contemporary form in a sequence of short stories that critique the old conventions.

Each semester of this syllabus balances ancient, medieval, and modern texts; comparisons may be made among the variety of lyric forms in early selections, visions of the underworld and of women’s roles in the weightier narratives, and the evaluations of traditional culture against the pressures of the modern in the last readings. Raised on television, students might prepare papers on the different performance traditions encountered in the course of the semester, or the entire year, and reflect on the role of the audience in various media.