This course is an invitation to survey how literature has treated the challenges of the “global“ in the past twenty-five years, from 2000 to 2025. Authors read in the course represent the breadth of the world‘s literary map and perspectives on writing: Alexievich, Bolano, Coetzee, Krasznahorkai, Kundera, Kurkov, Lahiri, Makine, Mueenudin, Murakami, Pamuk, Rushdie, Soyinka, Szalay, Tokarczuk among others. Highly distinguished (all but Kundera and Bolano are living authors although Kundera’s text is from 2015 and Bolano’s new work is still being released) they are often transplants who have migrated under the press of adversity more than once, or they are „translingual“ (writing in, or being inspired by, more than one or two active languages and several more “inherited“ ones). Their largely cosmopolitan concern notwithstanding, their starting point is often a historical or generational trauma (e.g. the fall of communism, regime change, war crimes in the family, nuclear disaster). Unlike the twentieth century authors, contemporary authors from the list above show no anxiety of influence; instead, they lay bare their debts to infinite conversations with Kafka or Chekhov, for example. This aspect of deep and wide borrowing both enriches and complicates the examiner’s task. In the course, work with literary texts will be combined with considering seminal shifts in criticism and theory that reexamine the problem of the global from Goethe’s World Literature to Appiah’s take on cosmopolitanism. Emerging critics will receive an opportunity to develop their skills by paying attention to the legacy of Marxism; postcolonialism; the discourses of power; tags and tendencies of “major“ and “minor“ literature; theories of gender and sexuality; memory studies; and writing on the environment. Longer texts (such as novels and documentary nonfiction) will alternate with shorter prose, drama, and poetry. Participants in the seminar will write two trial reviews of two texts of their choice and a final paper that will approximate the level of a publishable review or a piece of criticism.