Texas Tech University

Current and Recent Courses

Spring 2017

Studies in Religion,  McNamara

One of the major global controversies today is over religion. While religious practices and faith have been integral to peoples lives in past centuries, recently religion's validity and role in informing individual and communal identities, as well as ethics, has been questioned in a world that is becoming increasingly secular. Critics remind us that religion is responsible for some of the recent atrocities across the world, be it Christian fundamentalism in the United States, Hindu and Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism in South Asia, and Islamic extremism across the globe. At the same time, millions of people who practice Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam would be hard pressed to recognize a world in which religion has no place, for religious ethics, values, and sensibilities have been crucial in shaping individual and communal identities.

This course examines some of the reasons for these extreme reactions to religion—either in opposition or in endorsement. First, we will trace how these responses are shaped by the rise of secularism, first in Europe and then across the globe as the perception of "religion" shifted from something that imbued many, if not all, aspects of life to an ideology that could be practiced exclusively in the private sphere and propagated in the public sphere. Second, we will pay specific attention to how literary texts represent religion. Specifically, we will examine the textual and iconic representations of Hindu nationalism in 19th century India as it challenged the British colonial state (and how this later would inform Hindu nationalism in the 20th century) and of Islam in Europe with regard to The Satanic Verses in the 1980s and the Danish Cartoons in 2005 that brought into focus different conceptions of religion, free speech, and blasphemy. Finally, we will examine literary texts that attempt to sidestep these controversies by exploring alternative conceptions of religion.

Studies in Comparative Literature,  Shu

This course investigates comparative literature not only as a discipline but also as a methodology and critical theory. We begin by examining the history and the changing definitions of comparative literature in relation to area studies and American studies in the U.S. context on the one hand, and by focusing on the paradigm shifts from the European and American models to the multicultural and postcolonial ones during the past three decades on the other. Specifically, we explore the debate on comparative literature as world literature, the connection between comparative literature and globalization studies, and the new critical role that translation theory has played in informing and reshaping the discipline. We conclude by rethinking comparativism in relation to new modes of reading that vary from "surface reading" to "distant reading" and by reimagining our humanity and post-humanity against the background of the rise of the rest and the post-American world.

Fall 2016

Postcolonial Literature,  McNamara

Though the concept of cosmopolitanism originates in ancient Greece, it has become increasingly debated in our globalized world where national economies are dependent upon each other, where peoples and cultures are constantly circulating and being transformed, and where states that were unconcerned with each other have come into conflict. In our integrated world critics like Martha Nussbaum believe that cosmopolitanism is the only viable model that can promote social consensus and harmony. For others, such as Kwame Anthony Appiah, cosmopolitanism surreptitiously asserts normative values (typically associated with Europe) and suppresses differences. This course examines the debate over the relevance of cosmopolitanism through the lens of postcolonial theory and literature. How do artists and theorists of color and of different religious and ethnic backgrounds debate the relevance of cosmopolitanism? To this effect, we will be reading theorists like Kwame Anthony Appiah, Leela Gandhi, Walter Mignolo, and David Scott in conjunction with writers from the early twentieth century to the present like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria-US), Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe), Amitav Ghosh (India), Michael Ondaatje (Canada-Sri Lanka), Rabindranath Tagore (India), and Pramoedya Ananta Toer (Indonesia).

Advanced Problems in Literary Studies,  Batra

Chandra Mohanty's conceptualization of feminism without borders is premised on intersections between women's movements, activism, and analysis on a global scale. As a method of inquiry encompassing biological, kinship, and work-related categories that span cultures and continents -- women as unwaged, white, blue, or pink collar workers performing corporate, academic, manual, domestic, or sexual labor -- transnational feminist studies has emerged as an important branch of globalization theory. Following Nancy Fraser, we can identify struggles for recognition of new identity categories and redistribution of economic, social, and political power as the major strands in transnational feminist analysis.

'Redistribution' and 'recognition' are keywords in the feminist philosophical, anthropological, and historical accounts we will read in this course. Some of the issues the course will address are: emergence of new categories of work such as 'higglers' and ‘migrant sex workers' in the Caribbean; transnationalization of labor practices such as those in the export processing zones all over the world; women's responses to their changing public and private roles including an increase in domestic and social violence; new forms of affective intimacy in late capitalism including the adoption of a global vocabulary of identity politics such as 'gay', 'lesbian' or 'queer,' and the intersection of these identities with practices of tourism and migration. While we will examine these issues in a transnational framework, the course includes a special focus on the political, social, and cultural economies of the global South as manifested in gender studies scholarship and curricula in the Euro-American academy.

Spring 2016

Studies in Comparative Literature,  Shu

This course investigates comparative literature not only as a discipline but also as methodology and critical theory. We begin by examining the history and the changing definitions of comparative literature in relation to area studies and American studies in the U.S. context on the one hand, and by focusing on the paradigm shifts from the European and American models to the multicultural and postcolonial ones during the past three decades on the other. Specifically, we explore the debate on comparative literature as world literature, the connection between comparative literature and globalization studies, and the new critical role that translation theory has played in informing and reshaping the discipline. We conclude by rethinking comparativism in relation to new modes of reading that vary from “surface reading” to “distant reading” and by reimagining our humanity and post-humanity against the background of the rise of the rest and the post-American world.

Advanced Problems in Literary Studies,  McNamara

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (published in 1905), Max Weber argued that the rise of secularism resulted in a “disenchanted” world. In other words, secularism—through the instrumental use of reason, a rational bureaucracy, and science—transformed a world dominated by religion and filled with mystery, awe, and magic into one that was objective. The world could now be understood on the basis of science and reason and molded to suit human purposes.

While some have celebrated living in a disenchanted world and others have lamented it, contemporary critics are exploring how enchantment can help resolve some of the major problems of our time. Two of these are the continued march of an impersonal and dehumanizing global capitalism and the upsurge of religious fundamentalism. While writers and intellectuals of a religious persuasion have been examining how enchantment can provide an alternative to both, non-religious critics have recently begun to argue that secularism and science can also be the basis for “re-enchanting” the world.

In this class, we will explore secular and religious enchantment in contemporary literature across the world. This includes works by Marilynne Robinson and Paul Elie (North America), Amitav Ghosh and Michael Ondaatje (Asia), and Zakes Mda and Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie (Africa). We will supplement these literary texts with theoretical material by intellectuals like Talal Asad, Jane Bennett, William Connolly, George Levine, Bruce Robbins, etc.

Department of English

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