July 14 – 24

David Damrosch, "Globalization and Its Discontents"

This seminar will trace the problematic of global world literature over the course of the modern period, looking at the rise of capitalist markets, the shifting of centers, peripheries, and semi-peripheries, and the interplay of empires and broader global frameworks in the age of (semi-)global English. Works by Molière, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, James Joyce, Higuchi Ichiyo, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Clarice Lispector, Eileen Chang, Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Ang Lee will be explored in light of debates over world literature and globalization from Goethe and Auerbach to contemporary scholars including Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti, Emily Apter, Shu-mei Shih, and the Warwick Research Collective.

David Damrosch is Director of the Institute for World Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. His books include What Is World Literature? (2003), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007), How to Read World Literature (2d. ed. 2017), and Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age (2020). He is the general editor of the six-volume Longman anthologies of British Literature and of World Literature, editor of World Literature in Theory (2014), and co-editor of The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature, and of two collections in Chinese, Theories of World Literature (2013) and New Directions in Comparative Literature (2010).

Proto-globalization

Session 1: World Literature(s)/Weltliteratur(en)

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, from Conversations with Eckermann
• Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett, “World-literature”
• Erich Auerbach, “Philology of World Literature”
• Selections from Apuleius, Hafiz, and Goethe

Session 2: Comparing the Incomparable

• Marcel Detienne, “Constructing Comparables”
• Sheldon Pollock, "Comparison without Hegemony"
• Molière, from The Bourgeois Gentilhomme
• Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Love Suicides at Amijima

Shifting Centers:

Session 3: Peripheries and Semi-peripheries

• Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature” and “More Conjectures”
• Critiques of Moretti by the Warwick Research Collective
• Higuchi Ichiyo, “Separate Ways”
• James Joyce, “The Sisters,” “Eveline”
• Clarice Lispector, “Happy Birthday”

Session 4: Provincializing Europe

• Pascale Casanova, “Literature, Nation, and Politics”
• Oswald de Andrade, “The Anthropophagist Manifesto”
• Jorge Luis Borges, “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” “Pierre Menard”
• Julio Cortázar, “Axolotl”
• Clarice Lispector, “The Fifth Story”

Translation in the Global Market

Session 5: The Uneven Playing Field

• Georg Brandes, “World Literature”
• Jorge Luis Borges, “The Translators of the 1001 Nights”
• Emily Apter, “Untranslatables: A World System”
• Selections from translations of The Thousand and One Nights

Session 6: Making a World Author

• Stephen Owen, “What Is World Poetry?”; “Stepping Forward and Back”
• Selections from Wu Cheng’en, Bei Dao, and Mo Yan

Born Global

Session 7: The Politics of Global English

• Gillian Lane-Mercer, “Global and Local Languages”
• Rebecca Walkowitz, from Born Translated
• Salman Rushdie, “Chekov and Zulu”
• Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Third and Final Continent”
• Jamyang Norbu, from The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes

Session 8: From Shanghai to Hollywood

• Eileen Chang, “Lust, Caution”
• Ang Lee, Lust, Caution
• Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution and Its Reception”

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Matylda Figlerowicz, "Multilingualism as Critique"

What would a multilingual critical theory look like? What geographies do we build from the vantage point of multilingualism?

In this course we read multilingual literary works and put them in conversation with texts pertaining to different branches of critical theory. Multilingual writing cuts through linguistic borders and forces us to mistrust the idea of language as a stable and complete system. It invites us to question monolingualism as a basis for different categorizations––for the delimitation of literary fields, as well as personal and collective identities. We study multilingualism as a dynamic and polyphonic form through which literature creatively conjugates different experiences of ethnicity, race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Matylda Figlerowicz is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard.  She works on the aesthetics and politics of multilingualism. Ranging across ten languages, her research is broadly comparative in fields of Latin American, Indigenous, Peninsular, and Latinx studies, as well as World Literature. It also branches into Visual Studies, Art History, and Slavic literatures. Besides her book La memoria en construcción (2015, awarded Premi Fundació Mercè Rodoreda), her work has appeared in several journals and essay collections, including Revista Hispánica Moderna, Textual Practice, Journal of World Literature, and The Oxford Handbook of Latino Studies.

Session 1: Multilingual Critique and Literary Disciplines

• Ricardo Piglia, The Absent City.
• Jacques Lezra, Untranslating Machines: A Genealogy for the Ends of Global Thought.
• Yasemine Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue.

Session 2: The Impossibility of Monolingualism

• Abdelkebir Khatibi, Love in Two Languages.
• Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or the Prosthesis of Origin.

Session 3: Indigenous Multilingualisms

• Luz Jiménez, Life and Death in Milpa Alta. A Nahuatl Chronicle of Díaz and Zapata.
• Daniel Heath Justice, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter.

Session 4: Decolonization Between Languages

• Ateri Miyawatl, Neijmantototsintle—La tristesa és un ocell––Sadness is a bird.
• Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.

Session 5: Intimate and Political Tongues

• Sylvia Molloy, Living Between Languages.
• Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: On Practices and Discourses of Decolonization.

Session 6: The Fears of Multilingualism

• Joseph Conrad, “Amy Foster.”
• Edward Said, “Between Worlds.”

Session 7: Language and Global Power

• Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin.
• Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.”

Session 8: Multilingual Happy-Endings?

• Bernardo Atxaga, Obabakoak.
• Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness.

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Debjani Ganguly, "Oceanic Comparatism and World Literature"

This seminar will explore the ocean as a generative frame for comparing literatures of the world. Since antiquity writers have captured the vast sublimity of oceans and have portrayed oceanic voyages as the ultimate test of human endurance. Oceans gird the shores of cities, nations, islands, and continents. They generate contact zones that are multilingual, demographically mixed, economically varied, and culturally hybrid. Oceans are the world’s oldest trading routes. Archaeological remains across the Pacific attest to the movement of peoples, goods, and cultural practices as early as 50,000 years ago. The Mediterranean Sea has been a zone of intense contact for centuries between civilizations that encompass present-day North Africa, West Asia, and Southern Europe. The Indian Ocean was a ‘world system’ much before the advent of world system as a category. Variously referred to as an ‘interregion’ or a ‘network,’ this oceanic world has linked the cultures of the Chinese, Indians, Arabs, Africans, and Malays for more than three millennia. The Atlantic has been at the heart of maritime modernity and the rise of modern European empires.

Modern literary historiography has scarcely reckoned with oceans until recently. Comparative literature with its origins in nineteenth-century theories of terrestrial, racial, and linguistic filiation through the nation-state, organized itself around competing national literatures determined primarily by terrestrial borders. Even when the idea of world literature was canvassed as a civilizational ideal by icons such as Goethe, Schlegel, and Tagore, it was thought of primarily in land-based terms. With the contemporary emergence of world literature as a rubric characterized by literary networks and flows across transregional spaces and histories, oceanic perspectives have gained in significance. Scholarship on pre-modern oceanic literatures, maritime cultures, hydro-colonialisms, terraqueous creole cultures, submarine worlds, and thalassography encompassing various land and water bodies such seas, bays, estuaries, lakes, islands, and archipelagos, have acquired substantial visibility in the past three decades. With oceanic acidification, warming seas, and the rapid melting in Arctic and Antarctic regions, oceans figure prominently in literary works on the planetary crisis.

This seminar will explore these developments across a range of literary and art works from major oceanic regions of the world. These will encompass novels, short stories, poetry, travel writing, paintings, and installations. Literatures in English and French will feature alongside writings in Arabic, Swahili, Mauritian patois, Caribbean creole, and a shipboard tongue called laskari.

Debjani Ganguly is Professor of English at the University of Virginia and Professor of Literature  at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, ACU Melbourne. She is the author of This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel a

s Global Form (2016) and Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity (2005), and the editor of the two-volume The Cambridge History of World Literature (2021). Her third monograph, Catastrophic Modes and Planetary Realism, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She is the general editor with Francesca Orsini of the monograph series, Cambridge Studies in World Literature. As director of humanities institutes at the University of Virginia (2015-2023) and the Australian National University (2007-2014), Debjani has fostered international projects and networks in the fields of world literature, pre-modern global cultures, oceanic studies, environmental humanities, digital humanities, big data and AI, and human rights and refugee migration.

Session 1: The Oceanic Turn

• Hester Blum, “Terraqueous Planet: The Case for the Oceanic Turn,” In The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century, eds. Amy Elias and Christian Moraru.
• Margaret Cohen. “Literary Studies on the Terraqueous Globe.”
• Debjani Ganguly, “Oceanic Comparativism and World Literature.” In Cambridge History of World Literature, Vol I, ed. D. Ganguly.
• Rachel Price, “The Last Universal Commons.”

Session 2: Premodern Oceanic Contact Zones

• Philip Beaujard, “The Indian Ocean in Eurasian and African World-Systems Before the Sixteenth Century,.
• Molly Greene, “The Mediterranean Sea.” In Oceanic Histories, eds David Armitage, Alison Bashford, Sujit Sivasundaram.
• Jonathan Miran, “The Red Sea.” In Oceanic Histories, eds David Armitage, Alison Bashford, Sujit Sivasundaram.

Session 3: Atlantic Worlds

• David Armitage, “The Atlantic Ocean,” In Oceanic Histories, eds David Armitage, Alison Bashford, Sujit Sivasundaram.
• Elizabeth Deloughrey, “Heavy Waters: Waste and Atlantic Modernity.”
• Paul Giles, “The New Atlantic Literary Studies.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies, eds Leslie Eckel and Clare Elliott.
• Paul Gilroy, selections from The Black Atlantic.
• Christopher Miller, “Introduction”, The French Atlantic Triangle.
• Adam Piette, “Sputniks, Icepicks, GPU: Nabokov’s Pale Fire." In The Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies, eds Leslie Eckel and Clare Elliott.
• Caribbean poetry, excerpts from the works of Nourbese Phillip, Kamau Braithwaite, and Derek Walcott.
• Jason Decaires Taylor, Underwater Installations https://underwatersculpture.com/
• J.M.W Turner, “The Slave Ship”, painting https://collections.mfa.org/objects/31102/slave-ship-slavers-throwing-overboard-the-dead-and-dying-t

Session 4: Indian Ocean Worlds

• Ashley Cohen. “The Global Indies: Historicizing Oceanic Metageographies.”
• Gaurav Desai, “Oceans and Narration.” In Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India and the Afrasian Imagination.
• Amitav Ghosh, excerpts from the novel, Sea of Poppies.
• Abdul Razak Gurnah, excerpts from the novel, By the Sea.
• Abdul Rahman Munif, excerpts from the novel, Cities of Salt.
• Isabel Hofmeyr, “Universalizing the Indian Ocean.”
• Clarissa Vierke, “Sensuous Imaginaries in Indian Ocean Precolonial Swahili Poetry.”

Session 5: Oceania and the Pacific

• Alison Bashford, “The Pacific Ocean.” In Oceanic Histories, eds David Armitage, Alison Bashford, Sujit Sivasundaram.
• Julia Boyd, “ATOMic Modern: Pacific Women’s Modernities and The Writing of Nuclear Resistance” in New Oceania, eds. Long and Hayward.
• Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward, excerpts from The Rise of Pacific Literatures.
• Alice te Punga Sommerville, “Where Oceans Come From.”
• Teresia Teiawa, “Reclaiming the Visual Roots of Pacific Literature.”
• Craig Santos Perez, excerpts from his poetry volume unincorporated territory.  

Session 6: Creolization and Multilingualism

• Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “Island Writing, Creole Cultures.” In Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, ed. Ato Quayson.
• Edouard Glissant, selections from Poetics of Relation.
• Amitav Ghosh, “Of Fanas and Forecastles: The Indian Ocean and Some Lost Languages of the Age of Sails.”
• Ananya Kabir, “Creole Indias, Creolizing Pondicherry: Ari Gautier’s Le Thinnai as the Archipelago of Fragments.”
• Francoise Lionnet, “Continents and Archipelagoes: From E Pluribus Unum to Creolized Solidarities.”
• B. Venkat Mani “Multilingual Code-Stitching in Ultraminor World Literatures: Reading Abhimanyu Unnuth’s Lal Pasina (1977) with Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies.”

Session 7: Polar Oceans and Planetary Crisis

• Adriana Craciun, “The Frozen Ocean.”
• Isabel Hofmeyr, “Southern by Degrees: Islands and Empires in the South Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and the Subantarctic World.” InThe Global South Atlantic, eds. Kerry Bystrom and Joseph Slaughter.
• Graham Huggan, “From Arctic Dreams to Nightmares (and back again).”
• Dan Ringaard, Tomas Tranströmer’s Östersjöar and the Making of an Archipelagic Nordic Literature.” In Cambridge History of World Literature, ed. D.Ganguly.
• Sverker Sorlin, “The Arctic Ocean,” In Oceanic Histories, eds David Armitage, Alison Bashford, Sujit Sivasundaram.

Session 8: Wrap up and discussion

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Françoise Král, "Linguistic worldliness: literature and the polyglot turn"

Engaging with world literature starts with an understanding of how literature allows us to reconfigure an increasingly interconnected world and deal with an ever-growing awareness of linguistic diversity and multilingualism at a time when many languages have disappeared and many more are threatened by hegemonic languages. In this seminar we will set out to recontextualize the question of linguistic diversity in the long history of the fear of linguistic diversity, the fear of Babel, and in parallel the fascination for a language common to the whole of mankind.

Today, the ubiquity of English as a language gone global provides a sort of lingua franca. However, contemporary anglophone world literature spans a variety of situations and ways of relating to English. The seminar will investigate this increasingly complex map of linguistic genealogies and cultural crisscrossings, and probe the zones of friction and tension which continue to surface in literary texts, those moments when texts express the resilient ruggedness of our ‘globalized world’. The seminar will consider a large variety of literary, linguistic and epistemological issues which will be approached contrapuntally, through the dual focus of theorization (Walter Benjamin, Barbara Cassin, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Edouard Glissant, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Naoki Sakai) and literature (John Agard, Cristina Garcia, Amitav Ghosh, V.S. Naipaul, Marlene NourbeSe Philip, Arundhati Roy).

Françoise Král is Professor of contemporary literature at Université Paris Nanterre and Director of the C

REA Research Centre (Centre for Research in Anglophones Studies). Her research interests include postcolonial literatures and cultures, critical theory, contemporary 20th and 21st century Anglophone literature and diaspora studies. She is the author of Critical Identities in Contemporary Anglophone Diasporic Literature (Palgrave, 2009), Social Invisibility in Anglophone Diasporic Literature and Culture: The Fractal Gaze (Palgrave, 2014) and Sounding out History (2018). She has directed several collected volumes, (Re-presenting Otherness (Publidix, 2004), Architecture and Philosophy: New Perspectives on the Work of Arakawa and Gins (co-edited with Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Rodopi, 2011) as well as journal issues including a special issue of Commonwealth Essays and Studies, Crossings (37.1 autumn 2014), Polygraphiques (2018) and a special issue of The Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2019). Her current research focuses on the perception of monoglossia and linguistic diversity in a historical perspective and on the resilience of polyglot imaginaries in a global context.

Session 1: Beyond the monoglot paradigm

• Arundhati Roy. Azadi, “In What Language does Rain Fall Over Tormented cities? The Weather Underground in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.”
• Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language.
• Recommended reading: Yasemin Yildiz. Beyond the Mother Tongue, The Postmonolingual Condition. 

Session 2: Denaturalizing the mother tongue

• Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or the Prosthesis of Origin.
• Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves.
• Marlene NourbeSe Philip, “Discourse on the Logic of Language.” 

Session 3: From colonial legacies to double belonging

• Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind : The Politics of Language in African Literature.
• Gilles Deleuze,. Essays Critical and Clinical.
• John Agard, “Listen Mister Oxford Don.” 

Session 4: Lost or gained in translation?

• Naoki Sakai, Translation & Subjectivity. On Japan and Cultural Nationalism.
• Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant. Eloge de la Créolité. In Praise of Creoleness.
• Recommended reading: Jhumpa Lahiri. In Other Words. 

Session 5:  Linguistic genealogies

• Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation.
• Pascale Casanova, La République Mondiale des Lettres. The World Republic of Letters.
• V.S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival, A Novel in Five Sections. 

Session 6:  Affecting language

• Walter Mignolo,  Local Histories/ Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border thinking.
• Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban.
• Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake.

Session 7: “Complicating the universal”

• Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator.”
• Barbara Cassin, “To Translate.”
• Amitav Ghosh, Gun Island. 

Session 8: Languaging and cultural resilience

• Jean-Jacques Lecercle, A Marxist Philosophy of Language.
• Françoise Král, “Polyglossing in English: The Diasporic Trajectories of the English Language.” 

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Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, "Short Forms in World Literature"

Among the three primary literary forms—prose, poetry, and drama—prose has undoubtedly become the dominant mode across most literary cultures. Even more so, the novel overshadows other prose forms in terms of publishing and translation. However, short prose forms hold significant potential, especially within the context of world literature. This potential is particularly evident in educational settings, where there is a growing demand for shorter, more accessible texts. In this course, we will explore the status and significance of short forms in world literature. Our readings will include short prose by Michel de Montaigne, Hans Christian Andersen, Jorge Luis Borges, Clarice Lispector, Franz Kafka and Anne Carson, as well as the sonnet, the haiku, and works that have gained canonical status through fragments and excerpts.

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen is Professor of Comparative Literature at Aarhus University, Denmark. 

 He is chair of the Book Panel of the Ministry of Culture Denmark and director of the Center for Language Generation and AI. Thomsen is the author of four books, including Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures (2008) and The New Human in Literature: Posthuman Visions of Changes in Body, Mind and Society after 1900 (2013), a co-author with Stefan Helgesson of Literature and the World (2019), and the editor of fourteen books, including World Literature: A Reader (2012), The Posthuman Condition: Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics of Biotechnological Challenges (2012), Danish Literature as World Literature (2017), Literature: An Introduction to Theory and Analysis (2017), and The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism (2020). 

Session 1: Short forms in world literature

• Hans Christian Andersen: “The Ugly Duckling,” “The Great Sea Serpent,” “The Shadow” and “The Nightingale”
• Anton Chekhov: “The Bet”
• Mads Rosendahl Thomsen: “The Big Canvas”

Session 2: Sonnet and Haiku

• William Shakespeare: Selected Sonnets
• Inger Christensen: Butterfly Valley: A Requiem
• Matsuo Basho: The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Session 3: The Art of the Fragment

• Friedrich Schlegel: Athenaeum Fragments (excerpts)
• Sappho: Poems and Fragments (excerpts)
• Fernando Pessoa: The Book of Disquiet (excerpts)

Session 4: Infinity and symbolism

• Jorge Luis Borges: “The Library of Babel”, “The Garden with Forking Paths” and “The South”
• Franz Kafka: “In the Penal Colony” and “Before the Law”

Session 5: The very short novel 

• Clarice Lispector: The Hour of the Star

Session 6: Intimacy and war

• Yukio Mishima: “Patriotism”

Session 7: Digital short forms

• Jennifer Egan: Black Box (excerpt)
• Neil Sadler: Fragmented Narrative (excerpt)

Session 8: The essay

• Jesmyn Ward: “On Witness and Respair”
• Nicholson Baker: “The Size of Thoughts”
• Theodor W. Adorno: “The Essay as Form”

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Jennifer Wenzel, “World, Globe, Earth, Planet: Climate Fictions and Energy Imaginaries”

This seminar will take a world literature approach to key questions in environmental and energy humanities, asking how we can understand the relationship between the “world” in “world literature” and the earth or planet at stake in urgent environmental challenges such as global warming. How can we think between the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere and oceans, on the one hand, and the circulation of texts within literary world space, on the other? What work does the literary imagination do in the world, in grappling both with the worlds that humans have made, and with the boundary parameters of the Earth system that have shaped life on this planet as we have known it? Given the ever-more evident effects of climate change, why do so many people remain so attached to the world that fossil fuels have made, and how might we imagine new modes of living in a warming world?

The seminar will begin with the questions, “what is a world?,” “what is a planet?,” and “what does climate change mean for (world) literature?” Turning to the question of how to read for energy, we’ll consider particular genres (e.g. the running out of gas narrative) and sites of oil extraction, including Saudi Arabia, northern Alberta, and the Niger Delta, with a view toward intertextuality and the tensions between literary and economic value. We’ll read texts by authors including Amitav Ghosh, Thangam Ravindranathan, Edward W. Said, Immanuel Wallerstein, Pheng Cheah, Aamir Mufti, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Achille Mbembe, Mary Louise Pratt, Stephanie LeMenager, Patricia Yaeger, Imre Szeman, Italo Calvino, Henrietta Rose-Innes, Abdulrahman Munif, John Updike, Warren Cariou, Ogaga Ifowodo, Ben Okri, and Amos Tutuola.

Jennifer Wenzel is a scholar of postcolonial studies and environmental and energy humanities jointly 

 appointed in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. She is an affiliate of the Columbia Climate School. Her first book, Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond, was awarded Honorable Mention for the Perkins Prize by the International Society for the Study of Narrative. With Imre Szeman and Patricia Yaeger, she co-edited Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment. Her recent monograph, The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature, was a Finalist for the 2020 Book Prize by the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) and shortlisted for the 2022 Ecocriticism Book Prize awarded by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. She is a member of the Petrocultures Research Group and the After Oil Collective.

Session 1: Climate Realisms

• Amitav Ghosh, excerpts from The Great Derangement
• Thangam Ravindranathan, “The Rise of the Sea and the Novel”

Session 2: What Is a World?

• Edward W. Said, excerpt from The World, the Text, and the Critic
• WReC, excerpt from Combined and Uneven Development
• Aamir Mufti, excerpt from Forget English!
• Pheng Cheah, excerpt from What Is a World?

Session 3: What Is a Planet?

• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, excerpts from Death of a Discipline
• Jennifer Wenzel, “Planet vs. Globe”
• Achille Mbembe, excerpts from Out of the Dark Night and Critique of Black Reason
• Mary Louise Pratt, excerpts from Planetary Longings

Session 4: How to Read for Energy

• Patricia Yaeger et al, “Literature in the Ages of…”
• Stephanie LeMenager, preface and introduction to Living Oil
• Jennifer Wenzel, introduction to Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment
• Imre Szeman, “Conjectures on World Energy Literature”

Session 5: Running Out of Gas Stories

• Italo Calvino, “The Petrol Pump”
• Henrietta Rose-Innes, “Poison”
• Russell, “Goodbye, Oil”
• Paolo Bacigalupi, “A Full Life”
• Graeme Macdonald, “Fiction”

Session 6: Petrofictions

• Abdulrahman Munif, excerpts from Cities of Salt
• John Updike, “Satan’s Work and Salted Cisterns”
• Amitav Ghosh, “Petrofiction”
• Amitav Ghosh, excerpt from The Great Derangement

Session 7: Athabasca Petrographies 

• Imre Szeman, excerpt from “How to Know about Oil”
• Warren Cariou, “Tarhands: A Messy Manifesto”
• Warren Cariou, “An Athabasca Story”
• Jon Gordon and Warren Cariou, “Petrography”

Session 8: Niger Delta Literature as World Literature

• Ben Okri, “What the Tapster Saw”
• Amos Tutuola, excerpt from The Palm-wine Drinkard
• D. O. Fagunwa, excerpt from Forest of a Thousand Demons
• Ogaga Ifowodo, excerpt from The Oil Lamp
• Nnedi Okorafor, “Spider the Artist”