COML6636 - The Problem of Vernacularity in Literary Modernity

The vernacular, despite its origins in European empire and later colonialism, and its role in creating inherently oppositional relationships between different languages and literary cultures, persists as a foundational way of thinking categorizing literary cultures throughout the post-imperial and post-colonial world. How does literary history appear from the perspective of vernacularity? What might we see when we privilege literary cultures seen as vernacular rather than metropolitan languages such as English or French? How, in turn, might such a perspective inform our understanding of the larger field, across language, of world literary history during the twentieth century?
This course begins with a term that indexes relations of power, hierarchy, and empire as a starting point to rethink crucial debates in twentieth century literary history. The category of the vernacular, in its move from the European post-Latinate to a range of imperial, colonial, and post-colonial configurations, introduces problems of comparison that continue to trouble contemporary disciplinary understandings of literary study. Some of the implications of the vernacular, such as those highlighted by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o refusal to write in English, are obvious in their shift towards literary cultures marginalized in colonial and post-colonial contexts. But the concept of the vernacular also intervenes in ideas of reading publics, orality, and indigeneity such that it can be the basis for a wider range of inquiry into the social conditions of multilingual literary histories.
This course uses the inherent tension caused by this difficult word to engage in a number of case studies in contexts including interwar Central Europe, Cold War literatures of the Third World, and Korean literature during the period of Japanese occupation; authors discussed will include Fredric Jameson, Abdelfattah Kilito, Aamir Mufti, and Shu-mei Shih. This course is open to all MA and Ph.D. students regardless of prior knowledge. Advanced undergraduates should contact the instructor to request permission to enroll and should submit a permit request via Path@Penn.