This UG course is dedicated to the literary canon and its afterlives in contemporary Anglophone literatures and cultures with special attention to the so-called ‘cancel culture’, also known as ‘call-out culture’.
Cancel culture is a relatively recent phenomenon that focuses on the past and its memory in the present, most especially with the uses and the abuses of memory in contemporary times.
On the negative side, cancel culture seeks to ostracize the Western literary canon as a symbol of white domination culture. This is in view of promoting an inclusive culture whereby the canon is revisited to include marginal and minority literatures as well. While the latter has become necessary, and it is auspicable in our postnationalist, postcolonial, postfeminist and ecoconscious society, it also poses a serious threat to our cultural roots as represented through the canon.
Students will familiarize with debates concerning cancel culture and will focus on the place of translation as a viable tool for language and cultural mediation. This approach aims to preserve the canon and promote its permanence, thereby promoting our dialogue with the past and with tradition. The literary text is re-thought as a special place where this type of dialogue can develop and expand, a special creative place, the site for rebellion, for change, for desire and mutual exchange.
This year’s course focuses on Homer’s Odyssey and on its protagonist, Ulysses, as revisited in a selection of anglophone texts written between the 1600s and the present.