What you'll learn

  • The history of world literature
  • How literary works and books are transformed by cultural transmission
  • How to critically analyze literary works
  • The significance of major technological advances in writing
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Course description

This literature course explores how great writers refract their world and how their works are transformed when they intervene in our global cultural landscape today.

No national literature has ever grown up in isolation from the cultures around it; from the earliest periods, great works of literature have probed the tensions, conflicts, and connections among neighboring cultures and often more distant regions as well.

Focusing mainly on works of literature that take the experience of the broader world as their theme, this course will explore the varied artistic modes in which great writers have situated themselves in the world, helping us to understand the deep roots of today's intertwined global cultures.

Course outline

  • Goethe
  • The Epic of Gilgamesh
  • Homer, The Odyssey
  • The 1001 Nights
  • Voltaire, Candide
  • Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red
  • Wole Soyinka, Death and the King's Horseman
  • Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman
  • Eileen Chang
  • Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji
  • Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones
  • Salman Rushdie and Jhumpa Lahiri
  • The Lusiads
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Instructors

  • David Damrosch

    Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature, Harvard University

  • Martin Puchner

    Byron and Anita Wien Professor of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature, Harvard University
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