Global English

With an estimated 2.3 billion speakers worldwide, English has become the dominant global language for everything from entertainment and literature to social media, business, aviation, and the law. This course examines the role that literature and literary education have played in enabling, managing, criticizing, and reimagining the global spread of the English language from the early nineteenth century to the present. Beginning with some foundational documents about English education in British India, we will study a wide range of novels, poems, and short stories by twentieth- and twenty-first century writers that take up the complex relationships between language, social mobility, national identity, economic development, and cultural preservation in the Anglophone world. We will also examine English pedagogical materials from the nineteenth century, engage with debates about the English language from the formal period of decolonization, and consider the projects of postwar philanthropic institutions designed to "preserve" world languages, like UNESCO and the British Council. Readings may include literature by Julia Alvarez, Carlos Bulosan, Anita Desai, Tsitsi Dangarembga, George Lamming, Salman Rushdie, and Ken Saro-Wiwa, and criticism by Minae Mizumura, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. Assignments will include weekly participation, a short critical essay, a biography of an English idiom, and a final creative or critical research project.