COML612 - Hannah Arendt

Within the last ten or fifteen years, there has been a flowering of scholarship revealing the diversity of oral verbal art worldwide. The course surveys a selection of recent book-length studies of specific narrative and other verbal art traditions in their cultural contexts. We will move from North Africa through the Middle East, South Asia, Australia, the western Pacific, and native America, examining particular traditions and texts, the ways they intersect with their societies, and the ways different scholars have found to document and interpret them.