Eric Hayot

This is a course in the history of prose fiction from the eleventh century to 1880. Among other things it aims to destabilize the category of the “novel,” and to ask whether the structure that would separate the novel from its predecessors can be justified on grounds beyond the ideological.  Readings will come from a variety of novelistic (or para-novelistic) forms, including the monogatari, the romance, the picaresque, the xiaoshuo, the maqama, the historical novel, the epistolary novel, the fictional memoir, and the bildungsroman. We will also study theories of narrative and narratology, theories of genre, and theories of literary history. Readings from: Murasaki, Malory, de Quevedo, Al-Hamadhani, Rabelais, Cervantes, Richardson, Cao Xueqin, Sterne, Goethe, Scott, Sand, Balzac, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Machado de Asis, and others.

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World, n.
I. Human existence; a period of this.

1. a. Chiefly this world, the world: the earthly state of human existence; this present life. to (unto, OE.o )theworld’send:aslongashumanthingsshalllast,totheendoftime(withadmixtureof senses 7, 9). Similarly in phrases such as as long as the or this world lasts, and in this world.

II. The earth or a region of it; the universe or a part of it.

7. a. The earth and all created things upon it; the terraqueous globe and its inhabitants. (See also 21a, 22a.)

This is our subject. How we imagine it; its singularity or multiplicity; its relation to the globe; to the planet; to globalization; to history; its limitations on the possible; its articulations thereof; its self- containment; its arbitration of the boundary between the virtual and the real; its virtuality; its reality, nonetheless; the forms of its representation and its imagination; its conceptual history; its mapping; its status as a limit to the imagination, to philosophy, to thought; that it is a goad to those same. The present moment as one of globalization; as one in which virtual worlds become “real”; how those interact; their relation to utopia; to history; to law; to literature, to nature. All these toward a theory of modernity.

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At first this course will seem to be a course about poetry, but it is in truth a course about reading. Poetry will be our first vehicle for this learning, and we will spend ten weeks looking at poems and thinking about ways to read them. We will discuss meter and rhyme; we will learn how to scan a poem; we will articulate differences in tone or color produced by enjambment, caesura, verse form, subject, history. Following the midterm, we will read a short story and a novel in order to extend, via metaphor or translation, the reading of poetry to other things: we will move from “reading poetry” to simply “reading”—the work of the profession of English literature, the basic building block of all literary analysis. We thus begin by reading and end by reading, and reading will—if we let it—make us readers.

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The only thing everyone agrees on about globalization is that it’s happening. This course is devoted to wondering what that happening means, and how competing definitions of what globalization is participate in the event of its appearance in the contemporary world. What is at stake in “globalization”? Is it a process, and if so, what kind of process is it? Human? Inhuman? Is it an effect of capital? Of information? Or are those two, rather, effects of globalization? How are contested definitions and attitudes towards globalization, and its companion terms, “diaspora” and “cosmopolitanism,” shaped by disciplinary contexts? How is globalization constituted in relation to the future, and what are the terms of its threat, or its promise?

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This course offers a broad introduction to the history and culture of Asian Americans, focusing on the ways that ideas of ethnicity and race, Americanness and the foreign, of labor and of leisure, of demotic and highbrow culture, and of the relation between nation and history have been transformed by the movement of people from Asia to the United States. In addition, the course considers how the international movement of people and ideas in, around, and out of Asia since the 16th century constitutes an important framework for understanding the Asian American experience. Accordingly, we will focus on such topics as the history of European exploration and colonization in South, Southeast, and East Asia, colonial and national relations among Asian countries, and among those countries and Western ones, on the relation between Asian “coolie” labor and the history of American slavery, on the history of immigration law, on the cultural and social effects of U.S. military action in the Pacific, Southeast Asia, Korea, China, and Japan, on the ways that globalization is shaping or reshaping the experience of being Asian (or being Indian, or Chinese), and on the ways that all of these factors have interacted with the development of an “Asian American” identity and have established its particular challenges and privileges. The course will be broadly interdisciplinary, wide-ranging in its historical and geographic scope, and catholic in its cultural tastes (including television shows, poetry, pamphlets, novels, films, and manifestoes).

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Original syllabus

This is basically a class on what happens to Western poetry (mainly that written in English and French) and, by the end of things, all poetry (including that which we think of as “world” poetry) when it encounters forms, styles, and modes that emerge from East Asia. We’ll begin with the minor revolution in the treatment of Asian poetry inaugurated by Ezra Pound (in English) and Victor Segalen (in French), exploring what happens in the encounter between Asianness and modernism, before moving on to consider some mid-century Americans (Rexroth, Snyder, and Kerouac), who picked up on the work of the early modernists and turned it in some new directions (including the direction of Japan). Following on from the American pseudo-Buddhists, we’ll consider the international formal success story that is the haiku (along with the sonnet probably the only poetic form most people have heard of) for a few weeks. We’ll close out the course with a brief review of the problem of authenticity as it emerged in the 1990s around the Chinese poet Bei Dao and the American one Kent Johnson, before moving on to some poetry that calls the utility of the category of authenticity (and indeed of conventional theories of translation) entirely, and excitingly, into question.

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