Global fiction

To be edited by Sümeyra Buran and Jiré Emine Gözen. Knowledge and culture are medially conditioned, crystalised, and perpetuated by narratives in science, art, and literature. Orientalism represents one of these narratives and has constructed the perceptions in which the distinction between the Occident and the Orient culminates. Orientalism has thus created the "other": identities, politics, culture, media, art, literature, and the perceptions that the Occident destabilized. Orientalism has also taken a different shape after Edward Said's Orientalism (1979) 40 years ago, and current perspectives increasingly ask for counter-models. However, these counter-models cannot demand the simple abandonment of universalisms, nor can the discourse on these counter-models be a soliloquy of the Western or the non-Western.

This course will focus on the interrelated fields of globalization, transnational and cosmopolitan studies. We will consider the evolution of these terms in light of recent historical, cultural and technological developments, and interrogate them from a variety of critical perspectives. The sessions will involve the close reading and discussion of a number of extracts related to these specific theories, and we will look at how they can be applied in different ways to a number of selected literary texts and movies.