Afterword

Abstract

The problem with a World Literature course, especially a World Literature Survey course, is the nagging suspicion that the whole endeavor of covering 400 or so years of everything else is, in and of itself, more than a little silly. How am I to move from a day of looking at Urdu poetry with my students to a day of Borges without revealing the disjointed, schizophrenic narrative of the modern English department—that this stuff is all relevant, even though it isn’t British or American, which of course sets British and American literature apart in exactly the way a World Literature course is fighting against. A whiff of the old colonialist ethos exists in every syllabus, a combination of globetrotting tourist hours with an ill-prepared doctoral student at the helm (I am referring here to myself) and retreats to the safe harbors of the Russians, Marquez, and Achebe. No matter how animated the lecture, no matter how grandiose the claim that a particular culture’s literary output is relevant and important and alive, the clever student thinks to herself, “Why are we talking about it for just an hour, again? And what of the next hour?”