Students will be made familiar with the key concepts pertaining to postcolonial and cosmopolitan literary depictions selfhood, as applied to our contemporary world. They will learn to understand theoretical arguments and broaden their theoretical knowledge. They will practice applying such knowledge to the analysis of literary texts by means of close reading of a variety of literary and filmic texts.
|
|
In this course, students familiarize themselves with literary depictions of subjectivity that have been developed in the past four decades in the fields of postcolonial theory and cosmopolitanism. Both postcolonialism and contemporary cosmopolitanism are responses to essentialist and colonial ideas of the subject. We offer an outline on how cosmopolitanism has been revised and rethought from a postcolonial perspective, often also defined as cosmopolitanism from below or vernacular cosmopolitanism. We shall explore theoretical debates and contestations around the concepts of cosmopolitanism and postcolonialism and analyse how these mediate and impact our reading of literary texts, particularly the depiction of selfhood in these texts, from a comparative perspective. Colonial as well as postcolonial literary innovation and hybridity will be analysed. Texts will be discussed in the integral context of world literature.
|
|