THE CHALLENGES OF WORLD LITERATURE AS AN ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE

World literature has been institutionalized as a field of study since Goethe put forward the term Weltliteratur in 1827, to the explosion of world literature anthologies in the second half of the 20th century. Departments of literary studies around the world include world literature disciplines in their curricula to ensure that literary scholars experience different perspectives of literatures from various nations and cultures around the globe. Thus, the definition of world literature and the methods used to approach it remain troublingly divided. The discipline could principally vary from focusing on timeless pieces of art; or on their ephemeral nature; or on the cross-cultural interchangeability of themes and styles. In 2012, I undertook the task of developing a course design for a graduate course on world literature offered to students of literature at the department of English language and literature in King Saud University. The task was a very challenging one for I had to establish a theoretical foundation on which to base the selection of works, and then form the conceptual framework of the material covered avoiding as much as possible obvious overlapping with courses on comparative literature and post colonial literature that were offered in the same program. Hence, I also had to acknowledge the significance of critical approaches to literature, linguistic variables lost in translation to English, and cross cultural ties and influences. In the end, the overall approach to world literature that fit the program's criteria was to form a module that introduces students to a wide variety of representative works of world literature, whose objective is to understand the integration of literature and culture with an emphasis on cross cultural contacts and exchanges of literary movements, themes, styles, and genres. In the pages that follow, I shall discuss the course's objectives, learning outcomes and the selection of works in accordance to the notion of world literature mentioned above.