Global Lit Class Notes Introduction

Introduction to Global Literature is a survey class – this is to say, it is a kind of a bus trip through the world’s literature. This is not the best way to learn literature, but it’s a start.

What we’ll attempt to do, over the next weeks, is sample enough of the world’s great works to get the beginnings of an understanding of how world literature is alike, and how it differs – all great literature has some things in common; every country’s literary work is different in essential ways.

We will, in this class, be focusing on literature other than American Literature. This isn’t because American Literature is inferior in any way. It’s because we have, here at UAFS, a separate class that focuses entirely on introducing students to American Literature. So this is the companion course – literature other than American Literature.

Obviously in the time we have we’ll barely touch the surface of any country’s work – again, think of the bus tour analogy. It’s just enough to give you an idea of what’s possible. Deeper exploration is possible in the future.

During this semester, we’ll be thinking about (among other things) why people create, read, and study literature. What is literature for, in other words?

Engineering is for building and creating useful things, like roads and space stations and more efficient windmills. Medicine we study because we’re interested in improving people’s health and saving lives. The study of law and law itself is useful for regulating the social order and settling conflicts. But what is literature for?

One reason we create, read, and study literature is entertainment. Humans love stories, and we love to be entertained by those stories. Thus, for example, most of us read or watch The Game of Thrones because we’re interested in the story George R.R. Martin has created. We want to know what happens, and we want to read about, or watch, it happening. (This is why some of us hate spoilers – spoilers tell us what happened in the story, but that’s not all we want. We want to experience the pleasure of watching it happen, of experiencing the plot along with the characters.)

Entertainment isn’t the only reason for literature, however. Literature is also one vehicle by which we transmit our cultural ethos – the ethics and morality of our culture. This is why some of us like to study literature, because of what the literature can tell us about our culture and about the culture that created a given piece of literature. Thus, for example, when we’re reading Gilgamesh, we’ll be thinking about what certain events in the epic tell us about the culture that created the epic – and, since Gilgamesh is one of the big epics in human history, we’ll think about how that ethos has shaped our ethos.

We also read literature for information – what was it like to be a warrior in the Euphrates Valley three thousand years ago? How did the Greeks define love? What does Tao mean?

Finally, literature is an art form. Like all art, it creates feelings and reactions in us – pleasure, sometimes, but also pain, and empathy, and horror, or delight. We enter into the experience of literature at least in part in order to feel. This is why so many of us enjoy popular literature (the stories and songs and drama of our own era) more than, say, classical literature, or literature from fifth century Japan. Popular literature is our own literature, about how culture, and we have a direct connection with it. This means we understand it more easily, obviously, but it also means we feel what it wants us to feel more directly and strongly.

Most of what we’ll be reading in this class is not literature from our own culture or our own century. So we’ll have to work a little harder to understand it, and to feel the reactions the work asks us to feel.