DYNAMITE READS -- WORLD LITERATURE AND THE NOBEL PRIZE
C LIT 200 B & SLAVIC 175 A
PLEASE NOTE: C LIT 200 B AND SLAVIC 175 A ARE TWO SECTIONS OF THE SAME CLASS.
IF C LIT 200 B IS FULL, PLEASE ENROLL IN THE SLAVIC 175 A!
Coordinator: Professor Gordana Crnković
Teaching Assistant: Jingsi Shen
shenjs@uw.edu
This course offers a grand tour of world literature as seen through the writings of Nobel Prize winners. Each year, it features a different group of authors from a range of countries, languages, and traditions. In Autumn 2021 we will get introduced to these writers: Eugene O’Neill (USA), Frans Eemil Sillanpää (Finland), Albert Camus (France), Nelly Sachs (Germany and Sweden), Isaac Bashevis Singer (Poland, US), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Kenzaburo Oe (Japan), Orhan Pamuk (Turkey), Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru), Alice Munro (Canada), as well as select Slavic authors discussed in a beginning intro lecture of the class. Those enrolled in Slavic section or simply wanting more Slavic content will have an option of replacing two of the above live lectures with previously recorded lectures on two Slavic authors (such as Ivo Andrić, Yugoslavia). Please let Prof. Crnković know by October 20th at the latest if you want to use this option!
This class is team-taught: a different faculty member will be giving a lecture each week about the work of a writer from their area of expertise. In this way, this team-taught course will also provide you with a unique view of the many language and literature departments and disciplines at the UW, including Asian, Classics, English, French and Italian, Germanics, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Scandinavian, Slavic, and Spanish and Portuguese, as well as Comparative Literature (a major within the CMS Department). You will see that these departments, while providing a unique opportunity to learn many world languages and read their literatures in the original language, also offer a large number of classes, as well as majors and minors, that do not require a foreign language study. This class gives you a small taste of such classes, majors and minors, as all our non-English texts are given in English translation and can be read, enjoyed, and studied in such translation. Our instructors will touch on the issues of literature in translation in their lectures as well.
Lectures by faculty from each unit will focus on the writer and text of the week, but also discuss the wide-ranging questions of literature and the politics of prizes.
This is an in-person class.
The syllabus for the class is published as an attachment in the Canvas Announcement of September 29th.
3 credits, C/NC, 70% gives a grade of Credit. VLPA.