Comparative Literature

This course introduces students to fiction and other critical and cultural perspectives from the postcolonial world.  This course discusses selected texts from postcolonial Africa, beginning with examining what Ngugi wa Thiong’o has called the “struggles to move the centre”—that is, the political and cultural struggles to “correct the imbalances of the last four hundred years” of colonization. The course then turns to fictional writings and other cultural texts that come out of various decolonization struggles in Nigeria, Algeria, Kenya, and South Africa.  The course seeks to answer the question: Why should these texts and ideas matter to us today?
 

This course introduces fictional and other critical and cultural perspectives from the postcolonial world. It focuses on selected texts from postcolonial Asia. The course begins by critically investigating the concept of the nation—what Benedict Anderson has famously called an “imagined community.” It explores this concept through reading and discussing texts representing the complexities of imagined communities in Taiwan, India, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines, texts that also represent uneven power relations with China, Japan, the UK, the US, and elsewhere. The course explores the question: why should these texts and ideas matter to us now? 

This course provides a study of Korean famous prose written in Chinese characters. Intellectual and historical Korean writing is based on Chinese Characters. The course focuses on reading and exploring prose in the original language. However, since students may not be familiar with Chinese characters, the lecture focuses on reading the original text, but also exploring the text’s originality.

The brutal struggle between free will of humanity and historical force has long been a controversial and intriguing subject in the discussions of literature. The point lies not in which side wins eventually, but in exploring what happens in the process of struggle. Viewed from the perspective of literary development, it is quite clear that each different literary movement in postwar Taiwan provides its own unique understanding of the relationship between man and history, between social agency and historical transformation, and ultimately between history and fiction. This course is divided into four parts each dealing with specific historical issues or events. The first deals with how historical figures, such as Song Qingling and Chen Yi, are treaed in fiction. The second part looks at history and politics. The third part discusses how past experiences have been represented from different ideological points of view by different writers. Finally, the course takes a close look at how writers explain the failure (or success) of certain social movements after they have long perished. In short, all the four parts try to explore the complicated interactions among history, human experience, and literary mind.