ENG 5910: World Literature- Imaginary Maps
- Professor: Dr. Vanessa Evans
- Meeting time: Wednesdays from 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
- Modality: Face-to-face
Do you ever wonder what forces shape the literal and figurative maps we rely upon to make sense of our world(s)?
How, for example, are the borders of literary fields drawn? Who decides which texts are included or excluded and why? What inherited and underlying assumptions about space, land, and belonging do these maps teach us? Given how maps and mapping have been mobilized as tools of colonial domination and control, should maps unsettle us more than they do?
Using mapping as a heuristic device, this course examines the shifting and contested boundaries of World Literature’s twentieth-century reanimation. Together, we will consider not only the temporal, thematic, and national maps that organize literary canons, but the figurative maps of knowledge, identity, and power that underpin them. Through a foundation in Indigenous worldviews and theories of World Literature, we will work to understand mapping otherwise and against the Cartesian spatiality of colonial maps that segment and isolate. With Indigenous and postcolonial literatures as our focus, we will interrogate our own cartographic impulses in favor of more fluid and relational understandings of space and time.
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ENG 5910: World Literature