"We are witnessing not the end of history, as a certain professor in the United States has claimed, but a rebeginning. The resurrection of buried realities, the reappearance of what was forgotten and repressed, which can lead, as it has in other times in history, to regeneration." These lines by the Mexican Octavio Paz, published in 1990, identify our focus for reading recent world poetry and fiction, represented in recent Nobel Prize winners, as well as in international and American films. Laureates such as Pablo Neruda (Chile), Odysseus Elytis (Greece), Octavio Paz (Mexico), Derek Walcott (Saint Lucia), Kenzaburo Oe (Japan), Seamus Heaney (Ireland), Wislawa Szymborska (Poland), Gao Xingjian (China), V. S. Naipual (Trinidad), J. M. Coetzee (South Africa). The adulteration, demise, and disintegration of the great utopias of the twentieth century; and the dehumanization and environmental crisis brought by modernization and colonialism ask for a conception of life that is no longer distorted, for a culture of life instead of a culture of death. Human life, for instance, has become, again, a "more-than-human" experience, "grounded" in the environment and the body as well as in the social, deserving a holistic, trans-disciplinary approach. In recent world literature, the attack on life, social, cultural or biological, is resisted by "unearthing" the dignity of the human, the respect for other forms of life, the return of myths and rituals for drawing cosmic meaning from experience; the Creation as a mystery, cognitive processes other than rational objectivity, forgotten experiences with nature, stories about the places where migrant people live, stories about the places that migrant people left behind, and the memory of the dead. All readings in English. Format: seminar/discussion. Requirements: active participation in class discussions, one oral report on a theoretical reading, two take-home exams, and a final 10-page paper. Prerequisites: one 100-level literature course or permission of instructor. Enrollment limit: 19 (expected: 19). Preference given to Environmental Studies concentrators and Comparative Literature/Spanish majors. This course satisfies "Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences" requirement for the Environmental Studies concentration.

Hour: MARCONE