via University of Chicago
HUMA 14000-14100-14200. Reading Cultures: Collection, Travel, Exchange I-II-III.
Examines "how literary texts can variously express, differ from, or even critique the cultural situations out of which they emerge. "
Sample texts: Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio; Homer’s Odyssey, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Tomás Rivera’s And the Earth Did Not Devour Him; Richard Wright’s Native Son, Honoré de Balzac’s Le Père Goriot, and Xiao Hong’s “Hands”
"we consider the extent to which culture comes into being through the accumulation, assemblage and transmission of narratives[;] how to think about narrative and storytelling in terms of the production, organization and control of culture. Who gets to collect and to tell the stories of a culture, we ask, and what difference does their identity make to cultural representation?"
"we ask how cultures have retained their coherence, historically, under conditions of migration, diaspora and violent or enforced movement. We also consider the ways that cultures themselves travel and change, and analyze the ways that language and narrative function as mediums of cultural movement and transmission."