ENGL 7810 Studies in Comparative Literature
Fictions of India
7:00-9:40 W
Donald Wehrs
Begining with a situating of Vedic, Buddhist, and Jainist traditions in historical
and cultural context, this course will consider the great Sanskrit narrative
texts, The Bhagavad Gita and The Ramayana, as at once foundational and dialogic,
hegemonic and syncretic, in ways that establish paradigms that Indian narratives
continue to follow and rework. After exploring tensions and reciprocities between
Northern and Southern traditions, Sanskrit and Hindi, Persian and Urdu, Islamic
and Hindu culture, theology, and literature, this course will trace the emergence
of the novel in India, through the 19th-century “Bengali Renaissance” to
the Anglo-Indian novel–Kipling’s Kim and Forster’s A
Passage to India–to contemporary Indian fiction in English, concentrating on
novels by Narayan, Mukherjee, Desai, and Rushdie, focusing on such questions
as the relationship among cultural, national, and gendered identities, the
persistence of the past amid postmodern uprootings, and the vexed interconnections
between narrative form and Indian experiences of marginalization and transcendence.
No prior study of Indian literature, culture, or history is presumed.
Requirements:
One short, interpretative paper (5-8 pages); one longer (15-20 page) term paper;
a final exam; class discussion.