Up-to-date syllabus here.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there emerged a constellation of concepts such as literature, civilization, and history that played a vital role in the formation of modernity in all of its geo-cultural and linguistic diversity. In the colonial geography called the “Middle East,” these modern concepts took form through a set of shared methodologies and presuppositions that constitute Orientalism as a discipline. This seminar explores the relationships between philology, knowledge, and power and their integration as parts of the modern disciplines of Orientalism and literature.
To critically understand this historical phenomenon, we will read and discuss key critiques of modern knowledge, primarily Edward Said’s Orientalism and Foucault’s Order of Things as points of departure. We will also look at how Said’s critique has itself been deployed, and extended, and problematized by others. In the latter part of the seminar, our focus will be on recent debates in comparative literature on the formation and function of the modern category of literature.