ENGL 3106 - Writing Southern Worlds

This course will introduce students to and deepen their understandings of literatures of the south and world literary debates. Students will encounter a range of representational forms - including fiction, poetry and film - from various locations in the geographic, global and/or post-colonial south, and including works from Africa, Australasia, the Caribbean, South America, South Asia, and islands of the Indian and Pacific oceans. They will also engage with key questions arising from various theories of the south and different ideas of southness (including the geographical south or southern hemisphere, the Global South, and the postcolonial south) along with related debates on world literature (including positions that foreground global circulation, metropolitan acclaim, and the world-making potential of literature). Through careful attention to the specificities of particular texts and locales, we will be asking and responding to questions such as: What is a world? How does literature represent or make worlds? What defines the south? Can we speak of a southern aesthetic? What prospects on the world are presented by literatures of the south?