World Literature in English & Translation
Reading epics, novels, and poetry across languages and continents in comparative perspective
A comparative survey of world literature moving from oral epic traditions through the global novel, modernism, and postcolonial writing to poetry in translation, always asking how texts travel across languages and how Indian writers and readers participate in, respond to, and reshape global literary movements.
- 01
World Epics and Oral Traditions: Gilgamesh, Homer, and the Mahabharata Compared
Examines the world's foundational epic and oral narrative traditions, their composition through performance, and what comparative reading reveals about shared and divergent concerns across cultures.
5 concepts · 5 sources · 3 exercises
- 02
The Global Novel and Realism: From Balzac to Premchand
Traces the nineteenth-century rise of realist fiction as a global literary form, examining how the novel adapted to represent social change in Europe, Russia, and colonial India.
5 concepts · 5 sources · 3 exercises
- 03
Modernism Across Continents: Fragmentation, Interiority, and Formal Experiment
Examines early twentieth-century literary modernism as a genuinely international movement, comparing European, American, and Indian/South Asian responses to formal experimentation and psychological interiority.
5 concepts · 5 sources · 3 exercises
- 04
Postcolonial and Global South Writing: Achebe, Rushdie, Marquez, Adichie, Coetzee, Mahfouz
Surveys major postcolonial and Global South novelists writing after formal decolonisation, examining shared strategies of language, memory, and narrative form used to contest colonial representation.
5 concepts · 5 sources · 3 exercises
- 05
World Poetry and the Problem of Translation: Neruda, Rilke, Basho, Rumi, Szymborska
Examines poetry in translation as a distinct field of literary study, using major non-English poets to explore what is gained, lost, and remade when poems cross languages.
5 concepts · 5 sources · 3 exercises