World Literature TextbooksMay 5, 2014 – 04:51 pm
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Description Reading about any culture foreign to one’s own tends to create a form of culture shock in the reader. In a world literature class, students frequently face texts that are completely unfamiliar to them, and the typical culture shock reactions set in. We tend not to like things that we do not understand, in part because we do not…
World Literature course HarvardMay 21, 2015 – 04:28 pm
The Institute for World Literature (IWL) has been created to explore the study of literature in a globalizing world. As we enter the twenty-first century, our understanding of “world literature” has expanded beyond the classic canon of European masterpieces and entered a far-reaching inquiry into the variety of the world’s literary cultures and their distinctive reflections and refractions of the political, economic, and religious forces sweeping…
World Literature Company Ottawa caMay 17, 2014 – 09:22 am
Renowned authors to speak about Canada’s First World War literary contributions The University of British Columbia Okanagan, the University of Ottawa, and the Canadian War Museum are marking the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the “war to end all wars” with a conference on Canadian war literature and a distinguished speakers series in Ottawa, July 31 to August 2, 2014. For nearly a century, Canada’s role in the First World War has elicited a…
World Literature RenaissanceNovember 6, 2013 – 12:34 pm
The Renaissance in Europe was in one sense an awakening from the long slumber of the Dark Ages. What had been a stagnant, even backsliding kind of society re-invested in the promise of material and spiritual gain. There was the sincerely held belief that humanity was making progress towards a noble summit of perfect existence. How this rebirth – for Renaissance literally means rebirth – came to fruition is a matter of debate among historians. What…
World Literature playsMarch 21, 2014 – 12:41 pm
As a follower of Christ and an academic I take for granted that the stuff I teach my students in class is fair game for religious discussion. But, I have the feeling that the majority of my students do not automatically use a faith-based approach to the reading of most of the texts we read in my world literature course . The difficulty of the ancients like the Epic of Gilgamesh, the eroticism of A Thousand and One Nights, or the wit and sarcasm of…
World Literature PublicationsJune 20, 2015 – 07:34 am
Three Women of Liege: A Critical Edition of and Commentary on the Middle English Lives of Elizabeth of Spalbeek, Christina Mirabilis, and Marie d’Oignies - Jennifer Brown Elizabeth of Spalbeck, Christina Mirabilis, and Marie d’Oignies were three of the famous late twelfth-/early thirteenth-century holy women from the region of Brabant and Liege: their life stories (written in Latin by Philip of Clairvaux, Thomas of Cantimpre, and Jacques of Vitry)…
World Literature poetsOctober 19, 2013 – 04:57 pm
In an address to the Yale Political Union on April 23, 2013, Meena Alexander began with a line from Shelley’s 1821 essay, “A Defence of Poetry.” The resolution—“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”—led to a lively debate. What follows is a slightly revised version of the text she wrote for that occasion. Photo: Valentina Storti A while back, I was in Colorado in a hall with huge windows that gave out onto the Rockies. I was stunned…
