World Literature: 17th Century to Modern

LIT 2120 Survey of World Literature: 17th Century to Modern

Section: 1831
Class Meetings: M W F 6 (Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays 12:50-1:40 PM)
Location: FLI 0119 (Keene-Flint Hall 1st Floor)
Syllabus: Click here to view/download

Imag(in)ed Journeys

Journeys have been the subject of stories since before humans could verbally articulate complex narratives. Storytellers and their audiences have long been fascinated with tales of adventures—true and fictional—not only to distant places but to destinations deep within ourselves. The scope of “17th Century to Modern World Literature” is impossibly vast to cover in a lifetime, let alone in one semester. Therefore, we will chart our modest course through four centuries of European literature with stops every few decades or so in Spain, France, Victorian England, the Belgian Congo, Soviet Russia, and beyond.

In this class we will read a selection of European texts from the 1600s through the mid-1900s that tackle the journey narrative in one form or another. Some, such as Don Quixote and Candide, are humorous and satirical, while books like Heart of Darkness challenge us to face dark, even disturbing topics. We will be reading these stories alongside comics adaptations or illustrated editions. Since we are reading texts that have been translated from other languages into English, as well as from text to image, we will also be discussing adaptation and translation throughout the course. We will put several novels, poems, and other texts into conversation with adaptations and illustrations through the lenses of adaptation/translation theory and comics/visual rhetoric in order to gain a greater understanding not only of canonical texts, but also of the adaptations they have inspired.

This course confers CLAS General Education credit for either Composition (C) or Humanities (H) and International Studies (N), as well as 6,000 of UF’s 24,000-word writing requirement (WR).