Onder de tutorialreeks Hedendaagse literatuur vallen tutorials die draaien rond thema's die betrekking hebben op de actuele literatuur binnen het betreffende taalgebied of binnen de literatuurwetenschap. De studenten kiezen voor één (taalspecifiek of taaloverstijgend) thema en spreken een paar keer per blok met de betreffende docent af om hun voortgang te bespreken. Tijdens de cursus werken ze voornamelijk zelfstandig of in kleine werkgroepen. Afhankelijk van de aantal studenten per tutorial worden meer of minder bijeenkomsten afgesproken.

Thema Literatuurwetenschap: Writing the World. Literary Cosmopolitanism in World Literature

In this tutorial we examine how the notion of cosmopolitanism, with its European roots (ancient Greece and the Stoic philosophers, Kant and Enlightenment cosmopolitanism), and literary cosmopolitanism specifically, has been reconceptualized, in ways that further our analysis of contemporary world literatures. The notion of the ‘citizen of the world’, the cosmopolitan, has been critically nuanced in recent times, and has been used to ask questions about the study of ‘world literature’ in comparative perspective. We shall examine the influence of the cultural industry on the reception and circulation of cosmopolitan literature.  While tracing the genealogy of cosmopolitanism, we shall explore debates and contestations around the concepts of cosmopolitanism and world literature. We shall be particularly interested in vernacular or local cosmopolitanisms.  We shall examine how contemporary ‘cosmopolitan’ writers chart new cultural spaces across national boundaries - or cosmopolitan locations - enabling the exploration of the changed landscape of home and abroad, of Self and Other. Literary texts will be examined in the context of their genres, styles, and languages. We shall situate cosmopolitanism in the context of the politics of location, post-colonialism, migration, exile, and globalization. We will engage with the theoretical and methodological contours of analyzing contemporary literary cosmopolitanism in comparative perspective.  Students will be asked to read a repertoire of critical and theoretical readings on cosmopolitanism (by David Damrosch, Gayatri Spivak, Martha Nussbaum, Bruce Robbins, and Homi Bhabha, among others). They will also analyse selected fictional works by two out of three authors, namely Kazuo Ishiguro, J.M. Coetzee, and Amitav Ghosh, in comparative framework.