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World Literature — Stories Across Continents

Stories across continents — from the clay tablets of Uruk to the contemporary novel in translation.

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Stories across continents — from the clay tablets of Uruk to the contemporary novel in translation. Key sections include: World Literature; The Epic of Gilgamesh; Greek Epic & Tragedy; Sanskrit Classics; Chinese Classics; One Thousand & One Nights; Don Quixote & The Tale of Genji; The 19th-Century Novel; Modernism; The Latin American Boom.

Key sections

  • 01World Literature
  • 02The Epic of Gilgamesh
  • 03Greek Epic & Tragedy
  • 04Sanskrit Classics
  • 05Chinese Classics
  • 06One Thousand & One Nights
  • 07Don Quixote & The Tale of Genji
  • 08The 19th-Century Novel
  • 09Modernism
  • 10The Latin American Boom
  • 11Postcolonial Voices
  • 12The Contemporary Novel
  • 13Further Reading

Topics covered

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Slide outline
  1. 01World Literature
  2. 02The Epic of Gilgamesh
  3. 03Greek Epic & Tragedy
  4. 04Sanskrit Classics
  5. 05Chinese Classics
  6. 06One Thousand & One Nights
  7. 07Don Quixote & The Tale of Genji
  8. 08The 19th-Century Novel
  9. 09Modernism
  10. 10The Latin American Boom
  11. 11Postcolonial Voices
  12. 12The Contemporary Novel
  13. 13Further Reading
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Presentation Transcript

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Slide 01

World Literature

  • A Reader's Atlas · MMXXVI
  • ❦ · ❦ · ❦
  • Stories across continents — from the clay tablets of Uruk to the contemporary novel in translation.
  • Thirteen leaves · pressed in cream & gilt
Slide 02

The Epic of Gilgamesh

  • Leaf II · The Beginning
  • Inscribed on twelve clay tablets in cuneiform, copied and recopied across Mesopotamia for two thousand years — the oldest surviving great work of literature.
  • What it tells
  • A king of Uruk, two-thirds god, befriends the wild man Enkidu. Together they slay the cedar giant Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven. When Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh wanders in terror of his own mortality, seeking the immortal Utnapishtim — survivor of a great flood — and learns that even kings must die.
  • "He saw the Deep, the foundation of the country… he came back, and engraved his story on stone."opening of the Standard Babylonian text
  • Why it matters
  • Friendship, grief, mortality, the journey to the underworld, a flood story older than Genesis — the archetypes of all later epic, written in a script that had to be deciphered before the poem could speak again in 1872.
  • c. 2100 – 1200 BC
  • Sumerian → Akkadian
  • Earliest poems in Sumerian; the Standard Babylonian version, on twelve tablets, is attributed to the scribe Sîn-lēqi-unninni (~1200 BC).
  • Rediscovered 1872
  • George Smith
  • A British Museum scholar reads the flood tablet aloud and, the story goes, runs about the room undressing in excitement.
Slide 03

Greek Epic & Tragedy

  • Leaf III · Hellas
  • From the rhapsode's recital to the open-air theatre at Athens — a literature that gave the West its measure of the heroic and the tragic.
  • ~750 BC
  • Homer · Iliad
  • The wrath of Achilles in the tenth year of the Trojan War. A poem about anger, mourning, and the brevity of glory.
  • ~720 BC
  • Homer · Odyssey
  • Twenty years of homecoming — Polyphemus, Circe, the Sirens, Penelope at her loom. The first novelistic hero.
  • 5th c. BC
  • Athenian Tragedy
  • Aeschylus' Oresteia, Sophocles' Oedipus & Antigone, Euripides' Bacchae — fate, conscience, the limits of the polis.
  • "Sing, goddess, the wrath of Peleus' son Achilles, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans."Iliad I.1
  • The legacy
  • Aristotle's Poetics turned these works into theory: plot, character, catharsis. Every later epic — Virgil, Dante, Milton — is in dialogue with Homer; every tragic stage from Shakespeare to O'Neill carries the bones of Athens.
  • iii
Slide 04

Sanskrit Classics

  • Leaf IV · Bhāratavarṣa
  • Two epics that, between them, are roughly fifteen times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey combined — and remain living scripture in much of South Asia.
  • Mahābhārata
  • Ascribed to Vyāsa, ~400 BC – 400 AD. A war between cousins for the throne of Hastināpura grows into an encyclopedia of dharma, kingship, and metaphysics. Embedded within it is the Bhagavad Gītā, Krishna's discourse to Arjuna on the battlefield.
  • Rāmāyaṇa
  • Ascribed to Vālmīki, ~500 BC. Prince Rāma, exiled to the forest, watches his wife Sītā carried off by the demon-king Rāvaṇa, and recovers her with the help of the monkey-warrior Hanumān. A poem of duty, love, and the ideal sovereign.
  • "Whatever is here, on Law, on Profit, on Pleasure, and on Salvation, that is found elsewhere. But what is not here, is nowhere else."Mahābhārata 1.56.33
Slide 05

Chinese Classics

  • Leaf V · Zhōngguó
  • The Four Great Classical Novels of late-imperial China — long, encyclopedic, popular, and now read everywhere from Beijing to Boston.
  • 18th century
  • Dream of the Red Chamber 紅樓夢
  • Cao Xueqin's vast novel of the declining Jia clan: a love triangle among Baoyu, Daiyu, and Baochai unfolds against meticulous depiction of Qing aristocratic life. Often called the greatest of Chinese novels — and the founding text of Redology, an entire academic field.
  • 16th century
  • Journey to the West 西遊記
  • Wu Cheng'en's comic-mythic retelling of the monk Xuanzang's pilgrimage to India, accompanied by the Monkey King Sun Wukong, the pig Zhu Bajie, and the river-spirit Sha Wujing — endlessly adapted as opera, manga, anime, and film.
  • 14th century
  • Romance of the Three Kingdoms 三國演義
  • Luo Guanzhong's historical epic of the warlord struggle after the Han dynasty's collapse — Liu Bei, Cao Cao, Zhuge Liang. The bedrock of East Asian strategic imagination.
  • 14th century
  • Water Margin 水滸傳
  • 108 outlaws gathered at Mount Liang under Song Jiang — bandits, brothers, righteous rebels. Robin Hood, multiplied and Confucianized.
Slide 06

One Thousand & One Nights

  • Leaf VI · The Golden Age
  • Alf layla wa-layla — a frame story in which the vizier's daughter Shahrazad, married to a king who kills each bride at dawn, postpones her death by telling stories that never quite end.
  • Sources & layers
  • Persian, Arabic, Indian, and Egyptian tales accreted over centuries. The Arabic core dates to the 9th century in Baghdad under the Abbasid caliphate; later layers, including Aladdin and Ali Baba, were added in Cairo and arguably first written down by the 18th-century French translator Antoine Galland.
  • Why it endures
  • The frame device — story within story within story — and the conviction that narrative itself is what staves off death. Borges, García Márquez, Rushdie, Pamuk all return to its waters.
  • "And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased to say her permitted say."refrain across the nights
Slide 07

Don Quixote & The Tale of Genji

  • Leaf VII · The Novel Emerges
  • Two beginnings of the novel — half a world apart, six centuries between them.
  • ~1010 · Heian Japan
  • Murasaki Shikibu · The Tale of Genji 源氏物語
  • Written by a lady-in-waiting at the imperial court in Kyoto, this 54-chapter work follows the "Shining Prince" Genji and, after his death, his descendants — across some seventy years and four hundred characters. Subtle psychology, melancholic atmosphere (mono no aware), an immense formal command of point of view: arguably the world's first true novel, six centuries before Cervantes.
  • 1605 / 1615 · Madrid
  • Miguel de Cervantes · Don Quixote
  • An aging hidalgo, his head turned by chivalric romances, sets out as a knight with the peasant Sancho Panza. Cervantes invents — by parodying older forms — irony, unreliable narration, the self-conscious novel that knows it is a novel. Part II (1615) has characters who have read Part I. Foundational for everyone after, from Sterne and Flaubert to Borges and Calvino.
  • "In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind…"Don Quixote, opening
  • vii
Slide 08

The 19th-Century Novel

  • Leaf VIII · The Great Realists
  • The novel becomes the dominant literary form — a moral, social, and psychological instrument for understanding a world transformed by industry, empire, and the bourgeoisie.
  • Russia
  • Tolstoy · Dostoevsky
  • War and Peace, Anna Karenina; Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov. Vast canvas of history and society against pressurized inquiry into faith, guilt, the soul.
  • England
  • Dickens · Eliot
  • Dickens' London teems — Bleak House, Great Expectations. George Eliot's Middlemarch remains, for many, the supreme English novel of moral life.
  • France
  • Hugo · Flaubert · Balzac
  • Hugo's Les Misérables; Flaubert's Madame Bovary with its surgical free indirect style; Balzac's vast Comédie humaine mapping a whole society.
  • "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."Anna Karenina, opening
  • By 1900 the novel could absorb history (Tolstoy), theology (Dostoevsky), provincial sociology (Eliot, Flaubert), urban grotesque (Dickens, Hugo). The form felt almost limitless — until the Modernists asked what was going on inside one mind during a single day.
  • viii
Slide 09

Modernism

  • Leaf IX · The Inward Turn
  • After 1914 the realist confidence cracks. Writers in Paris, Dublin, London, Prague, and Petersburg invent new forms for the inside of the head.
  • The protagonists
  • James Joyce — Ulysses (1922), one Dublin day refracted through stream of consciousness; Finnegans Wake, the language itself dreaming.
  • Virginia Woolf — Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves: time, memory, the "luminous halo" of consciousness.
  • Marcel Proust — À la recherche du temps perdu: a madeleine, a thousand pages, a theory of involuntary memory.
  • Franz Kafka — The Trial, The Castle, The Metamorphosis: bureaucratic dread as metaphysics.
  • "Yes I said yes I will Yes."Ulysses, final words
Slide 10

The Latin American Boom

  • Leaf X · El Boom
  • In the 1960s and 70s a generation of writers from Buenos Aires, Bogotá, Mexico City, and Lima broke into world consciousness — bringing with them magical realism, labyrinthine form, and a continent's worth of history.
  • Colombia
  • Gabriel García Márquez
  • Cien años de soledad (1967): a hundred years of the Buendía family in the imagined town of Macondo. Banana plantations, ghosts, civil war, ascensions to heaven — all narrated in the same level voice.
  • Argentina
  • Jorge Luis Borges
  • Short fictions — Ficciones, El Aleph — that compress libraries into a few pages. Mirrors, labyrinths, infinite books, the Library of Babel.
  • Argentina
  • Julio Cortázar
  • Rayuela (Hopscotch): a novel you may read straight through, or in the order Cortázar suggests, jumping between chapters like a child on a chalk grid.
  • Peru
  • Mario Vargas Llosa
  • The Time of the Hero, Conversation in the Cathedral, The War of the End of the World: politics, machismo, history, told in dazzlingly braided structures.
Slide 11

Postcolonial Voices

  • Leaf XI · After Empire
  • Writers from Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia, and the African diaspora reshape the novel in English (and many other languages) — writing back to empire, and beyond it.
  • Foundational figures
  • Chinua Achebe (Nigeria) — Things Fall Apart (1958): the Igbo world before, during, and after the British arrival, told from inside.
  • Salman Rushdie (India / UK) — Midnight's Children (1981): a thousand and one children born at India's independence, narrating partition in Bombay-baroque English.
  • J. M. Coetzee (South Africa) — Disgrace, Waiting for the Barbarians: spare, unsparing parables of complicity.
  • Toni Morrison (USA) — Beloved, Song of Solomon: the inner life of African American history, recovered as myth.
  • Also essential
  • A wider circle
  • Wole Soyinka, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Naguib Mahfouz, Tayeb Salih, Anita Desai, Arundhati Roy, Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott.
  • "Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter."Chinua Achebe, after an Igbo proverb
Slide 12

The Contemporary Novel

  • Leaf XII · Now
  • In an age of globalization, the novel is more porous than ever — borders, genres, and selves all in flux.
  • Translation
  • The world reads sideways
  • Han Kang, Olga Tokarczuk, Elena Ferrante, Mieko Kawakami, Jenny Erpenbeck, László Krasznahorkai, Mariana Enríquez. The International Booker, the Nobel, and a thriving small-press culture move books across languages faster than at any time in history.
  • Autofiction
  • The first person, dilated
  • Karl Ove Knausgård's six-volume My Struggle; Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy; Annie Ernaux's The Years (Nobel 2022); Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Teju Cole. The line between memoir and novel goes deliberately blurry.
  • New scales
  • Climate, AI, planet
  • Richard Powers' The Overstory; Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future; Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement; Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun. The novel reaches for the planetary.
  • "The more I read, the more I felt connected, across the centuries, to the great chain of those who have lived before me."after Borges
  • xii
Slide 13

Further Reading

  • Colophon · Leaf XIII
  • A reader's life is long, and the shelf is longer. Begin anywhere; the path home is always Ithaca.
  • Companions
  • Books about books
  • Erich Auerbach — Mimesis
  • Italo Calvino — Why Read the Classics?
  • Harold Bloom — The Western Canon
  • David Damrosch — What Is World Literature?
  • Martin Puchner — The Written World
  • Watch
  • YouTube searches
  • Great Books of World Literature
  • Epic of Gilgamesh
  • Both links open YouTube searches — pick the lecture, animation, or documentary that suits your hour.
  • · · ·
  • Set in cream & gilt · MMXXVI · finis
  • xiii
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