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If much of the world today has learned to imagine language similarly, to see and hear through language similarly--and that's a big "if"--why? This course will venture an answer to that question by taking a transcontinental approach to three modern literary movements--Romanticism, realism, and surrealism--often understood in exclusively European terms. We will rethink Romanticism, realism, and surrealism as movements of literature between Europe and key parts of Africa and Asia that articulated new relations--aesthetic and social-- between word, image, and sound. During the long nineteenth century, Europeans imagined other lands as wellsprings that might breathe new life into Western literature--yet paradoxically, too, as territories that Europe should colonize, control, or "civilize." Writers from Egypt to Lebanon and Iraq, India to Japan, Martinique to Senegal, in turn, confronted the force of modern European empires by "reviving" their literary or expressive traditions with transfusions from the West--even as they interrogated the logics of life, nature, the "real," the imagination, and the supernatural that underpinned modern Western understandings of word/image/sound. In this traffic, the language of modern literature was born. With an eye to this troubled history, we will read manifestos and literary works (cross-cut with visual art and film) that announce or critique the movements of Romanticism, realism, and surrealism, as well as theory by contemporary scholars who reframe their terms for comparative literary studies. We will explore vital questions: How did the idea of literature itself migrate between East and West, North and South, in an age of imperialisms and nationalisms? How and why did specific literary genres travel under these conditions, and what ideological baggage did they carry along the way? How do our understandings of word/image/sound today hark back to the long nineteenth century? And what might the crossings of art, science, and empire in Romanticism, realism, and surrealism teach us about similar interrelations now, in the twenty-first century?

We will begin by examining the politics of the "new" that drive literary and artistic movements and manifestos, whether statements that explicitly herald the new or artworks that imply it. We will consider how Romanticism, realism, and surrealism--entangled with cultural "renaissances"--shaped modes of literary and artistic modernity closely tied to the rise, decline, and reassertion of empires. With manifestos that defined modern understandings of language and literature in the global North and South--essays by William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Courbet, Rabindranath Tagore, Natsume Sōseki, Khalil Gibran, Nāzik al-Malāʾika, André Breton, and Suzanne Césaire--we will read novels, short fictions, and poetry as manifestos in their own right, as texts that define, defy, and exceed Romanticism, realism, and surrealism: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Honoré de Balzac's Père Goriot (1835), Rabindranath Tagore's "Postmaster" (1891), Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī's What ʿĪsā ibn Hishām Told Us; or, A Period of Time (1898-1902, 1907), Natsume Sōseki's I Am a Cat (1905-1906), and Léopold Sédar Senghor's "In Memoriam" (1930s, published 1945). Turning to moving images, we will compare the first film adaptations of Shelley's Frankenstein (1910, directed by J. Searle Dawley and produced by Thomas Edison) and Tagore's "Postmaster" (1961, directed by Satyajit Ray). Theoretical writings by Raymond Schwab, Raymond Williams, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Mrinalini Chakravorty, Samah Selim, Maha Abdel Megeed, Karatani Kōjin, and Souleymane Bachir Diagne will complement our readings.