GLOS3602: Other Worlds: Globalization and Culture

'Globalization' and 'Culture' are both terms that have been defined and understood in a variety of ways and the significance of which continues to be debated to the present, both inside and outside the academy. Globalization has been talked about both as an irresistible historical force, tending toward the creation of an increasingly interconnected, or, as is sometimes claimed, an increasingly homogeneous world, and as a set of processes, the outcome of which remains open-ended and uncertain, as likely to produce new kinds of differences as universal sameness. Culture meanwhile has been variously defined as that which distinguishes humans from other species (and which all humans therefore share) and as that which divides communities of humans from one another on the basis of different beliefs, customs, values etc. This course reflects on some of the possible meanings of both "Globalization" and "Culture" and asks what we can learn by considering them in relation to one another. How do the phenomena associated with globalization, such as increasing flows of people, capital, goods and information across increasing distances challenge our understandings of culture, including the idea that the world is composed of so many discrete and bounded "cultures"? At the same time, does culture and its associated expressive forms, including narrative fiction, poetry and film, furnish us with new possibilities for thinking about globalization? Does global interconnection produce a single, unified world, or multiple worlds? Are the movements of people, goods, ideas and information across distances associated with new developments caused by contemporary globalization, or have they been going on for centuries or even millennia? Might contemporary debates about climate change and environmental crisis compel us to consider these phenomena in new ways? The course addresses these questions as they have been discussed by scholars from a variety of disciplines and as they have been imagined by artists, poets, novelists and filmmakers. In doing so, it considers whether the distinctiveness of present day globalization is to be sought in part in the new forms of imagining and creative expression to which it has given rise.

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