WORLD LITERATURES

World Literatures is one of the core curricular courses of Ca' Foscari International College's graduate major program in World Cultures and Heritage.

The course aims to provide students with a critical understanding of world literatures from diverse historical periods and geographical areas. By means of a wide-ranging study of literary texts belongning to different cultures, the course will help students develop a global understanding of literary facts. At the same time, it will offer them the intellectual, methodological, and technical tools to proactively navigate the social and political complexity of past and present cultural expressions, as well as the historical stakes posed by a globalized modernity and postmodernity.

The course is reserved to the graduate students of Ca' Foscari International College. Advanced knowledge of English is required.

Geographies of the Tragic
In the early 1960s, George Steiner declared the death of tragedy, controversially bringing back an old refrain of idealist and post-idealist philosophy about the impossibility of the tragic in the modern world. In contrast with the mournful evaluations of philosophy, as of the last decades of the nineteenth century the world history of the novel has often told a different story. The universal and absolute dimension of the tragic has not always been perceived, indeed, as something radically incompatible with the private and relative character of the modern novel. The evidence of this is the substantial number of tragic novels written starting from the last quarter of the nineteenth century until today. We will focus on two of them—Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion,—in the attempt to reconstruct the times, modes, meanings, and diverse geography of the dialogue between the tragic and the novel on a global scale, across Western and non-Western epistemologies, as well as specific historical and political contexts.

Literary texts
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Idiot (1869). Trans. Alan Myers. Intro. William Leatherbarrow. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Mishima, Yukio. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956). Trans. Ivan Morris. London: Vintage, 2001.

Films
Kurosawa, Akira. Hakuchi [The Idiot]. Japan, 1951.

Reference materials
Billings, Joshua. Genealogy of the Tragic: Greek Tragedy and German Philosophy. Princeton (NJ) and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017. (Introduction, chapters 4 and 6, Exodos).
Mazzoni, Guido. Theory of the Novel (2011). Trans. Zakiya Hanafi. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017.
Moretti, Franco. "Two Theories." Daedalus 150.1 (2021): 16–25. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_01831 .
Pavel, Thomas. The Lives of the Novel: A History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Rankin, Andrew. Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist: An Intellectual Portrait. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019. (Introduction, chapters 2 and 3).
Szondi, Peter. An Essay on the Tragic (1961). Trans. Paul Fleming. Stanford (CA): Stanford University Press, 2002.

Learning will be verified through the evaluation of: (1) participation to in-class discussion; (2) student presentations; and (3) a 6-7,000-word final paper to be agreed upon with the teacher.

In-class participation 20%
Presentation 20%
Final paper 60%

(1) Frontal lectures;
(2) Guest lectures;
(3) In-class and online discussion.

English

written