Course info

Modern and Contemporary literature is part and parcel of a wide range of historical, philosophical, global, and sociopolitical contexts that inform the spirit of 20^th and 21^st century literature, culture and theory. In a similar vein, the form and content of the selected literary texts in this course have been prompted intricately by multiple aesthetic, existential, global, orientalist, postcolonial, and postmodernist trends regarding gender issues, race, Middle Eastern and Eurocentric encounters. Such trends address multiple pressing and timely premises such as black aesthetic (e.g., African American literature), ecological crises (Ecocriticism and the dystopic scenarios), post 9/11 literature, world system (core, periphery, genocide of modernity, etc.,) advances in science and technology, the refugee crisis and Occidentalism. Finally, our conversations and discussions will critically address the way(s) in which this literature can be interpreted and reimagined to rethink national and transnational sociopolitical and socio-ecological relations and world literature toward just and sustainable postcolonial ecologies and a culture of hope in the face of neocolonial, capitalist and colonial dogmatism and determinism. In this course, the emphasis is on a selection of major texts written after 1950 and address the above central issues by a range of prominent writers.