July 4 -14

David Damrosch, "Grounds for Comparison"

As we widen the scope of literary studies beyond a national or regional focus, we need to consider freshly the grounds for discussing and comparing works that are not necessarily or primarily linked by relations of direct influence and imitation. This seminar will take up a number of important discussions of the problems and possibilities for comparison and incomparability across time and space, with readings in Detienne, Moretti, Casanova, Apter, Young, and others. We will test these theories against a variety of literary cases, including comparisons of Du Fu and Wordsworth, Molière and Chikamatsu, Gogol and Lu Xun, James Joyce and Clarice Lispector, Eileen Chang and Ang Lee.

David Damrosch is Director of the Institute for World Literature and Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA. A past president of the American Comparative Literature Association, he has written widely on comparative and world literature. His books include What Is World Literature? (2003), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007), and How to Read World Literature (2009). He is the founding general editor of the six-volume Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004), editor of Teaching World Literature (2009), co-editor of The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature (2009), and co-editor of a recent collection, Xin fangxiang: bijiao wenxue yu shijie wenxue duben [New Directions: A Reader of Comparative and World Literature] (Peking U. P., 2010).

Session 1: Introduction: What Is “Literature”?

  • Poems for comparison by Sappho and Catullus; Du Fu and Wordsworth
  • Anandavardhana and Alejandra Pizarnik; Aztec poems

Session 2: Reading across Cultures

  • Marcel Detienne, “Constructing Comparables”
  • Molière, The Bourgeois Gentilhomme
  • Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Love Suicides at Amijima

Session 3: Evolution and Diffusion

  • H. M. Posnett, “Relativity of Literature”
  • Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,”
  • "Evolution, World-Systems, Weltliteratur
  • Sonnets by Petrarch, Wyatt, Labé, and Shakespeare
  • Short stories: Higuchi Ichiyo, “Separate Ways,"
  • James Joyce, "The Sisters," "Eveline," and Clarice Lispector, "Happy Birthday"

Session 4: Comparative Peripheries (1)

  • Gogol, “Diary of a Madman”
  • Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”
  • Lu Xun, “A Madman’s Diary”
  • Hu Shih, “Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of Literature”
  • Selected pages from New Youth magazine

Session 5: Comparative Peripheries (2)

  • Oswald de Andrade, “The Cannibalist Manifesto”
  • Jorge Luis Borges, “The Argentine Writer and Tradition”
  • Pascale Casanova, “Literature, Nation, and Politics”
  • Borges, “Pierre Menard”
  • Julio Cortázar, “Axolotl”
  • Clarice Lispector, selections from Crónicas

Session 6: Globalization and the Politics of Language

  • Salman Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands”    
  • Robert J. C. Young, “World Literature and Postcolonialism”
  • Rudyard Kipling, selections from Kim
  • Salman Rushdie, “Chekov and Zulu”
  • Jamyang Norbu, selections from The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes

Session 7: World Languages, World Literatures

  • Stephen Owen, “Stepping Forward and Back: Issues and
  • Possibilities for 'World' Poetry"
  • Emily Apter, “A New Comparative Literature”
  • Derek Walcott, “Volcano,” “The Fortunate Traveller”
  • Agha Shahid Ali, selected ghazals

Session 8: Global Media

  • Denilson Lopes, “Global Cinema, World Cinema”
  • Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang), “Lust, Caution”
  • Ang Lee, Lust, Caution; with an evening screening of the film
  • Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries, “Dakota,” “DMZ Tour with Bulgoki Lunch,” and “Cunnilingus in North Korea”

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Paul Giles, "Transnational and Crosstemporal: World Literature across Space and Time"

This seminar will analyze ways in which questions relating to the mapping of space and time have been integral to the construction of World Literature. By tracing interactions between the local and transnational on one hand and the historicist and crosstemporal on the other, we will consider ways in which literary texts have always placed themselves in a complex relation to spatiotemporal measures. Issues to be discussed will include historicization, periodization, genre, intertextuality, anachronism, and aesthetics, along with theoretical problems involved in issues of scale and comparison. Texts will be drawn from a wide historical and cultural range, including Chaucer (Treatise on the Astrolabe), Wigglesworth (The Day of Doom), Charlotte Lennox (The Female Quixote), George Boyer Vason (“Vincent Ogé”), Dickens (Great Expectations), Furphy (Such is Life), Rich (An Atlas of the Difficult World), Tarantino (Django Unchained). These will be read in conjunction with the work of critical theorists such as Harry Harootunian, Srinivas Aravamudan, and Susan Stanford Friedman.

Paul Giles is Challis Professor of English at the University of Sydney, Australia. He was previously Professor of American Literature at Oxford University (2002-2009) and President of the International American Studies Association (2005-2007). His books include Antipodean America: Australasia and the Constitution of US Literature (Oxford UP, 2014); The Global Remapping of American Literature (Princeton UP, 2011); Transnationalism in Practice: Essays on American Studies, Literature and Religion (Edinburgh UP, 2010); Atlantic Republic: The American Tradition in English Literature (Oxford UP, 2006); Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (Duke UP, 2002); Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730-1860 (U of Pennsylvania P, 2001); American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics (Cambridge UP, 1992); Hart Crane: The Contexts of The Bridge (Cambridge UP, 1986).

Recommended Readings: Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, and Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life.
 

Session 1: Introduction

Harry Harootunian, “Some Thoughts on Comparability and the Space-Time Problem,” boundary 2 32.2 (2005)
Peter Hitchcock, The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form (Stanford UP, 2009), from chapter 1
 

Session 2: Medieval Time

Geoffrey Chaucer, Treatise on the Astrolabe (modernized version), ed. James E. Morrison, online, <http://www.chirurgeon.org/files/Chaucer.pdf>
Christine Chism, “Medieval Studies in the 21st Century: Arabic in the Medieval World,” PMLA 124.2 (March 2009)
Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Duke University Press, 2012), from chapter 1, “Introduction: How Soon is Now”

 

Session 3: Reformation Time

Michael Wigglesworth, from The Day of Doom, in Seventeenth-Century American Poetry, ed. Harrison T. Meserole (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1968)
Reinhart Koselleck, “Time and History,” in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner (Stanford University Press, 2002).
Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton UP, 2006)
 

Session 4: Enlightenment Time

Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote, ed. Amanda Gilroy and Wil Verhoeven (London: Penguin, 2006), Book 1, Chapters 1-7
Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1950), Part I, Prologue and Chapters 1
Srinivas Aravamudan, “The Return of Anachronism,” MLQ 62.4 (December 2001)
Helen Groth and Paul Sheehan, “Introduction: Timeliness and Untimeliness,” Textual Practice 26.4 (2012)
 
 

Session 5: Victorian Time

George B. Vashon, “Vincent Ogé,” in Julia Griffiths (ed.), Autographs for Freedom (Auburn, New York: Alden Beardsley and Co., 1854). Online: <http:://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhle/012/vincent%20ogé%20.doc>
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. Angus Calder (London: Penguin, 1965), Chapters 1-3
Daylanne K.English, Each Hour Redeem: Time and Justice in African American Literature (U of Minnesota Press, 2013), Introduction
Sharon Marcus, “Same Difference? Transnationalism, Comparative Literature, and
Victorian Studies.” Victorian Studies 45, no. 4 (Summer 2003)
John Bowen, “Time for Victorian Studies?,” Journal of Victorian Culture 14.2 (2009)
 

Session 6: Antipodean Time

Joseph Furphy, What is Life?: Being Certain Extracts from the Diary of Tom Collins (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2013)
Robert Dixon, “A Nation for a Continent: Australian Literature and the Cartographic Imaginary of the Federation Era,” Antipodes 28.1 (June 2014)
 

Session 7: Feminist Time

Adrienne Rich. An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991 (Norton, 1991)
Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time.” In The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Blackwell, 1986)
Robyn Wiegman, “On Being in Time with Feminism,” MLQ 65.1 (March 2004)
 

Session 8: Planetary Time

Film. Quentin Tarantino, dir., Django Unchained (2012)
Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernism: Provocations on Modernity across Time Columbia University Press, 2015), from Chapter 2
Paul Giles, “Obama, Tarantino and Transnational Trauma,” in Obama and Transnational America, ed. Alfred Hornung (Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016)
Ursula K. Heise, “What Does The Comparative Do? Globality, Difference, and the Intercultural Turn in Ecocriticism,” PMLA 128.3 (May 2013)

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Reine Meylaerts, "Multilingualism, Translation and World Literature"

The idea of World Literature implies a questioning of the spatial, national, and also linguistic boundaries that have traditionally defined separate (monolingual and national) literatures. Both texts and authors are more often than not multilingual in themselves. This fact also affects translation as the main channel of literary transfer in the world literary space. Literary translation doesn’t so much take place in between monolingual literatures but rather within multilingual literatures. Studying multilingualism in/and translation thus becomes a privileged way to understand World Literature. This seminar will focus on how the complex relations between multilingualism and translation contribute to creating literature, in mutual exchange, resistance, interpenetration. We will also focus on how translingual poetics, creative interference, multilingual writing, and self-translation blur the boundaries between writing and translating, between literatures and cultures; on how hybrid languages create translation effects in the text; and on how the act of writing and reading multilingual literary texts can be seen as an ongoing translation process between the languages and cultures involved. 

Reine Meylaerts is Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at KU Leuven where she teaches courses on European Literature, Comparative Literature and Translation and Reine MeylaertsPlurilingualism in Literature. She was director of CETRA (Centre for Translation Studies; https://www.arts.kuleuven.be/cetra) from 2006-2014 and is now board member. Her current research interests concern translation policy, intercultural mediation and transfer in multilingual cultures, past and present. She is the author of numerous articles and chapters on these topics (https://lirias.kuleuven.be/items-by-author?author=Meylaerts%2C+Reinhilde%3B+U0031976) She is also review editor of Target. International Journal of Translation Studies. She was coordinator of 2011-2014: FP7-PEOPLE-2010-ITN: TIME: Translation Research Training: An integrated and intersectoral model for Europe. She is former Secretary General (2004-2007) of the European Society for Translation Studies (EST) and Chair of the Doctoral Studies Committee of EST.

Seminar 1: World Literature and Translation

  • D'haen, T. 2012. “World Literature and Translation” in: The Routledge Concise History of World Literature. Routledge Concise History of Literature Series, London and New York: Routledge.
  • Casanova, Pascale. 2005. “The fabric of the universal” in The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Harvard UP.
 

Seminar 2: World Literature and (Un)translatability

  • Apter. E. 2013. “Untranslatables: A World-System” in Against World Literature. On the Politics of Untranslatability. London/New York: Verso.
  • Toury, G. 2012. “Translations as facts of a ‘target’ culture: An assumption and its methodological implications” in Descriptive Translation Studies – and beyond. Revised edition. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
 

Seminar 3 : Translation and Multilingualism in Literature

  • Meylaerts, R. 2012. “Multilingualism as a challenge for Translation Studies”. In: Millan-Varela C., Bartrina F. (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies. Routledge.
  • Shakespeare, Henry V. Ed. by H.M. Hulme. London: Longman.
 

Seminar 4: Translation and Multilingualism in Literature

  • Taylor-Betty, J. 2013. “Protean mutations: James Joyce's Ulysses.” In Multilingualism in modernist Fiction. Palgrave MacMillan.
  • Joyce, Ulysses, Chapter “Oxen of the sun”. With a forew. by Morris L. Ernst and the decision of the US District Court rendered by John M. Woolsey. New York: Vintage. 1961.

 

Seminar 5: Cities in Translation

  • Simon, Sherry. 2012. Cities in Translation. Intersections of Language and Memory. New York: Routledge.
  • Meylaerts, R. 2014. “Transferring the city – Transgressing borders. Translation, bilingual writing and selftranslation in Antwerp (1850-1930).” Translation Studies 7:2.
 

Seminar 6: Self-Translation and the politics of translation

  • Hokenson, J.W. and M. Munson. 2007. The Bilingual Text. History and Theory of Literary Self-translation. Manchester, UK, and Kinderhood, NY (USA), St. Jerome Publishing, 2007.
  • Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. 1982. Devil on the Cross. Translated from the Gikuyu by the author. Ch. 1-3. London: Heinemann.
 

Seminar 7: Translingual poetics and Cultural Translation

  • Wilson, Rita. 2011. “Cultural mediation through translingual narrative.” Target 23:2.
  • Saro-Wiwa, Ken. 1994. Sozaboy. A novel in rotten English. 1st edition. Longman. Ch. 1-4.
 

Seminar 8: Scenographies of Translation and Transfictional Writing

  • Arrojo, Rosemary. 2014. “The power of fiction as theory: some exemplary lessons on translation from Borges’s stories” In: Klaus Kaindl, Karlheinz Spitzl, Transfiction: research into the realities of translation fiction. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Hasak-Lowy, Todd. “The task of this translator”. In: The task of this translator. Orlando: Harcourt Books.

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Mitsuyoshi Numano, "Somewhere in Between: Boundaries, Resonances, and Interactions in Time and Space"

This seminar aims at exploring literary phenomena typically taking place “in between” in world literature. Special attention will be paid to Japanese Literature (which is torn by the attraction of the West and the centripetal orientation toward the traditional), Russian literature (which is located between the West and the East), and East European literature (which is located between Western Europe and Russia). No special knowledge of those languages is required, but some bilingual handouts will be provided for those participants who know Japanese, Russian, or Polish.

The topics for this seminar will include: “From the Beautiful World to the Ambiguous World” (shifting borders of modern Japanese literature confronted by the West), “Resonances through time and space” (Japanese Medieval literature and contemporary Russian postmodern fiction), “Interactions between staying put and crossing over” (translingual and émigré writers from Japan, Russia, and the U.S.), “What is lost and not lost in the translation of Polish/Japanese poetry and Haiku,” a comparison of Russian and Japanese manners of storytelling, a comparison of visions of utopia, dystopia, the fall, and Haruki Murakami as world literature.

By exploring these topics an discussing some of the representative texts in detail, we will try to have an idea about how rich the creative output can be in these “contact zones” in between and what kind of literary resonances occur through time and space. We hope that it will make your scope of modern and contemporary world literature wider and give you an opportunity to rethink the center-periphery dichotomy.

Mitsuyoshi Numano is Professor of the Department of Contemporary Literary StMitsu Numanoudies and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, The University of Tokyo. He is currently the chairperson of the Japan Council for Russian and East European Studies, and a member of the Science Council of Japan. He has widely written (basically in Japanese, but sometimes also in English, Russian, and Polish) on Russian and Polish literature, and contemporary Japanese literature. As a literary critic, he also contributes review articles regularly to major Japanese newspapers and literary magazines. Among his books are: The World is Made of Literature: An Introduction to World Literature through Dialogues with Contemporary Writers, 3 vols. (2012-15), From/Toward World Literature: Collected Literary Criticism 1993-2011 (2012), On Utopian Literature (2003, Yomiuri Literary Award), On Literature in Exile (2002, Suntory Academic Award). He served as one of the co-editors of the Iwanami  Introduction Series of Literature in 14 vols. (2002-2005). He is also known as a literary translator, and has translated, among others, Nabokov’s The Gift, Lem’s Solaris, and poetry by Brodsky, Milosz, Szymborska, and Baranczak from Russian and Polish into Japanese.

Session 1: From the Beautiful World to the Ambiguous World

  • Two Nobel lectures: Yasunari Kawabata, “Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself” and Kenzaburo Oe, “Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself”
  • Soseki Natsume, “My Individualism”
  • Kenzaburo Oe, “The Clever Rain Tree”
  • Milan Kundera,“The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes” (from The Art of the Novel)
  • Kojin Karatani, Selections from Origins of Modern Japanese Literature
  • Irmela Hijiya-Kirschneraeit, “On Bookstores, Suicides, and the Global Marketplace: East Asia in the Context of World Literature”

Session 2: Resonances through Time and Space

  • Victor Pelevin, Selections from Buddha’s Little Finger (Chapaev and the Void)
  • Selections from The Tales of Ise (Ise Monogatari)
  • Nikolai Gogol, “The Nose”
  • Ryunosuke Akutagawa, “The Nose”
  • David Damrosch, “Reading across Cultures” (From How to Read World Literature)
 

Session 3: Interaction between “Staying Put” and Crossing Over

  • Ian Hideo Levy, “One of the Guys” (from A Room Where The Star-Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard)
  • Yoko Tawada, Selections from “Saint George and the Translator”
  • Vladimir Nabokov, Brief excerpts from The Gift and Lolita
  • Sergei Dovlatov, “The Colonel Says I Love You” (from Ours)
  • George Steiner, “Extraterritorial”
  • Joseph Brodsky, “The Condition We Call Exile” (from Grief and Reason)

Session 4: What Is Lost and not Lost in Translation: The Cases of Japanese and Polish Contemporary Poetry and Haiku

  • Selected Poems by Shuntaro Tanikawa, Czeslaw Miłosz, and Wisława Szymborska
  • Selected Haiku by Basho (A mini workshop for translating haiku will be held within the session. Every participant is encouraged to provide her/his own translation of Basho’s famous frog haiku into her/his native language.)
  • Haruo Shirane, “Beyond the Haiku Moment: Basho, Buson and Modern Haiku Myths”
  • Hiroaki Sato, Selections from One Hundred Frogs: From Renga to Haiku to English

Session 5: A Matter/Manner of Story Telling: Comparing the Russian ‘Skaz’ and the Japanese ‘Rakugo’

  • Nikolai Gogol, “The Overcoat”
  • Selected Pieces of “Rakugo” (Japanese traditional performing art of comic monologue; audio-visual materials are available)
  • Boris Eikhenbaum, “How Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ Is Made”
  • Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”
  • Vladimir Nabokov, Selections from Nikolai Gogol
 

Session 6: Visions of Utopia and Dystopia

  • Evgeny Zamyatin, Selections from We
  • Karel Čapek, Selections from R.U.R
  • Ryunosuke Akutagawa, “Kappa”
  • Lu Xun, “The Diary of a Madman”Bruno Schulz, “The Street of Crocodiles”
  • Stanisław Lem, Selections from Solaris (For comparison, a small fragment of the Tarkovsky film based on the novel will be also screened)
  • Darko Suvin, Selections from Metamorphoses of Science Fiction
 

Session 7: Visions of Fall and Confinement

  • Anton Chekov, Selections from The Cherry Orchard, “The Bet”
  • Osamu Dazai, Selections from The Setting Sun
  • Masuji Ibuse, “The Salamander”
  • Linda Hutcheon, Selections from
    A Theory of Adaptation

Session 8: Is Haruki Murakami a World Author?

  • Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
  • Haruki Murakami, “Samsa in Love” and “The Super-Frog Saves Tokyo”
  • Vladimir Nabokov, Selections from the chapter on The Metamorphosis in Lectures on Literature
  • David Damrosch, Selections from “Kafka Comes Home” (in What Is World Literature?)
  • Jay Rubin, Selections from Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words

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Gisèle Sapiro, CNRS and EHESS, Paris: "How Do Literary Works Cross Borders (or Not)?"

Since the mid-19th Century, translation has become the main channel for the transfer of a text from one culture to another. The canon of world literature is composed of translated texts. However, the circulation of literary works in translation does not happen randomly. It is characterized by asymmetry, inequality, and the hegemony of certain languages. The seminar will explore different models for thinking this phenomenon: unequal exchanges (Casanova), flows of translation and world system theory (Heilbron), cultural transfers and polysystem theory (Even-Zohar), field theory and the economy of symbolic goods (Bourdieu). Three types of factors determining the circulation of literary works will be examined: economic, political and cultural. Attention will be paid to variations in time and space (including the communist and the postcolonial contexts) and to the role of agents: publishers, translators, critics, and other importers of foreign literature. Finally, norms of translation depend on the target culture. How do they shape the reception of the translated texts?

Gisèle Sapiro is Professor of sociology at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales and Research director at the CNRS. Her interests include the sociology of intellectuals, of literature and of translation. She is the author of La Guerre des écrivains, 1940-1953 (Fayard, 1999; English transl. The French Writers’ War, Duke UP, 2014), La Responsabilité de l’écrivain. Littérature, droit et morale en France (Seuil, 2011), Sociologie de la littérature (La Découverte, 2014). She has also (co-)edited Pour une histoire des sciences sociales (Fayard, 2004), Pierre Bourdieu, sociologue (Fayard, 2004), Translatio. Le marché de la traduction en France à l’heure de la mondialisation (CNRS Editions, 2008), Les Contradictions de la globalisation éditoriale (Nouveau Monde, 2009), L’Espace intellectuel en Europe (La Découverte, 2009), Traduire la littérature et les sciences humaines : conditions et obstacles (DEPS-Ministère de la Culture 2012), Sciences humaines en traduction (Institut français-CESSP, 2014). She currently runs the European Project INTERCO-SSH, assessing the state of the Social Sciences and Humanities in Europe and seeking to outline future pathways for cooperation across disciplinary and national boundaries.

Session 1: The World Republic of Letters: a hierarchized space

  • Pascale Casanova, 2005. “World Literary Space”, in The World Republic of Letters, translated by M. B. DeBevoise.

Session 2: Translated literature in the reception space

  • Itamar Even-Zohar, 1990. “The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem.” Poetics Today vol. 11, n° 1: 45-52.

  • David Bellos, 2011. “Translating Literary Texts,” in Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything. Penguin and Faber, chap. 27.

Session 3: Flows of translations: center and periphery

  • Johan Heilbron, 1999. “Towards a Sociology of Translation: Book Translations as a Cultural World-System,” European Journal of Social Theory vol. 2, n° 4: 429-44.
  • Lawrence Venuti, 1998. “Globalization,” in The Scandals of Translation. Towards an ethics of difference, London-New York, Routledge, chap. 8, 158-189.

Session 4: The structure of the publishing field and the role of importers

Session 5: Norms of translation

  • Gideon Toury, 1995. “The Nature and Role of Norms in Translation,” in Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 53-69.

  • G.H. McWilliam, 1972. “Translator’s introduction”, in Giovanni Boccacio, The Decameroun, Penguin Books, 25-43.

  • Giovanni Boccacio, 1972, The Decameroun, Penguin Books, preface and tenth story of the third day, 45-47 and 314-323.

  • Lydia Davis, 2010. « A Note on the Translation » from « Introduction », in Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary. Provincial Ways, Viking, XXIII-XXV.

    Session 6: The translator’s habitus

  • Daniel Simeoni, 1998. “The Pivotal Status of the Translator’s Habitus.” Target 10: 1, 1-39.

  • Rakefet Sela-Sheffy, 2005. “How to Be a (Recognized) Translator: Rethinking Habitus, Norms, and the Field of Translation.” Target 17:1, 1-26.

  • Christine Brooke-Rose, “Between”, in The Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus, Carcanet Press, 2007.

  • A Conversation with Christine Brooke-Rosey Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 1989, vol. 9.3.

    http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/a-conversation-with-christine-brooke-rose-by-ellen-g-friedman-and-miriam-fuchs/

    Session 7:  The meaning of translation: reception and strategies of appropriation

  • Pierre Bourdieu, 1999. “The Social Conditions of the International Circulation of Ideas.” English trans., in Bourdieu, a Critical Reader, ed. R. Shusterman, Wiley-Blackwell, 220-228.

  • André Malraux, 1952. “A preface for Faulkner’s Sanctuary,” (1933). English Transl. Yale French Studies, n°10, 92-94.

  • Jean-Paul Sartre, “On The Sound and The Fury: Time in The Work of Faulkner,” (1939) English Transl. http://drc.usask.ca/projects/faulkner/main/criticism/sartre.htm

Session 8: The circulation of texts in postcolonial contexts

  • Pascale Casanova, 2005. “The Tragedy of Translated Men”, The World Republic of Letters, translated by M. B. DeBevoise, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, chap. 9

  • Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, 1986. “The Language of African Literature,” in Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature, chap. 1.

  • Edouard Glissant, 1999. “Poetic Intention” (1997), in Denis Hollier and Jeffrey Mehlman eds. Literary Debate. Texts and Contexts, NY: The New Press.

  • ‘Abdellatîf La’bî, 1999. “Prologue to the review Souffle” (1966), in Denis Hollier and Jeffrey Mehlman eds. Literary Debate. Texts and Contexts, NY: The New Press.

  • Assia Djebar, 1999. “The White of Algeria” (1993), in Denis Hollier and Jeffrey Mehlman eds. Literary Debate. Texts and Contexts, NY: The New Press.

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Mariano Siskind, "Cosmopolitanism and Its Discontents"

The concept of cosmopolitanism, as well as the cosmopolitan cultural practices and displacements realizing its historical content, constitute the structural ground of world literary formations and imaginaries. But because they are historically and culturally determined, cosmopolitan desires often differ and produce conflicting world-mappings. In other words, when invoking cosmopolitanism, whose cosmopolitanism are we talking about? This seminar explores the tensions, affirmations, contestations and discontents at the center of a possible conceptual genealogy of ethical and political discourses of marginal cosmopolitanism, with special emphasis in the literary articulations in narrative and poetry produced in Latin America and other peripheries of the world.Mariano Siskind
Mariano Siskind is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He teaches nineteenth and twentieth century Latin American Literature with emphasis on its world literary relations, as well as the production of cosmopolitan discourses and processes of aesthetic globalization. He is the author of over two dozen academic essays and of Cosmopolitan Desires. Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America (Northwestern University Press, 2014). He has edited Homi Bhabha's Nuevas minorías, nuevos derechos. Notas sobre cosmopolitimos vernáculos (2013) and Poéticas de la distancia.Adentro y afuera de la literatura argentina (Norma, 2006) (together with Sylvia Molloy). His new book, Latin American Literature and the Great War: On the Globality of World War I will be published by Routledge in 2016. 

Session 1: Normative Classic Cosmopolitanism

  • Immanuel Kant, “Idea of a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose”
  • Pauline Kleingeld, “The country of world citizens” and “Kant’s cosmopolitanism and current philosophical debates” (in Kant and Cosmopolitanism. The Philosophical Ideal of World Literature 14; 177197).
  • Ulrich Beck, “A cosmopolitan Manifesto”. Derrida “On Cosmopolitanism”

Session 2: The cultural politics of cosmopolitanism (again)

  • Martha Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism”
  • A.K. Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots” (in For Love of Country?)
  • Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World

Session 3: Marginal cosmopolitanism, or what is the world?

  • Bruce Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms”
  • Linda Zerill, “This Universalism that is Not One”
  • Jorge Luis Borges, “El escritor argentino y la tradición”
  • Roberto Bolaño, “Mauricio ‘The Eye’ Silva”.

Session 4: Figuring the world (out): Jorge Luis Borges

  • “The Aleph”, “The Congress”, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, “Kafka and his precursors”, “On Exactitude in Science”

Session 5: Cosmpolitanism and its discontents

  • Craig Calhoun, “The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travellers: Towards a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism” (in Debating Cosmopolitics)
  • K.A. Appiah, “Cosmopolitan patriots” (in For Love of Country?)
  • Homi Bhabha, “Vernacular Cosmopolitanism”
  • Teju Cole, Every Day is For the Thieve: Fiction (novella)

Session 6: The foreigner, the immigrant and the question of cosmopolitan hospitality

  • Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (chapters 1 and 9)
  • Jacques Derrida, “Step of Hospitality/No Hospitality [Pas d’Hospitalité] and “Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility” (in Questioning Ethics. Debates in Contemporary Philosophy)
  • Gish Jen, “In the American Society”
  • Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory

Session 7: Crises of Cosmopolitanism: War

  • Immanuel Kant, “On perpetual peace”
  • Susan Sontag, Regarding the pain of others
  • Judith Butler, “Torture and the ethics of photography: Thinking with Susan Sontag” (in Frames of War)
  • Aleksander Hemon, “A coin” (in The Question of Bruno)

Session 8: Grounding the world, worlding the local in documentary films

  • Tony Bennett, “The exhibitionary complex”
  • “The World” (Dir. Jia Zhangke, 2004)
  • “Nostalgia de la luz” (Dir. Patricio Guzmán, 2010)
  • Xudong Zhang, “Market Socialism and Its Discontents: Jia Zhangke’s Cinematic Narrative of China’s Transition in the Age of Global Capital”
  • Yingjing Zhang, “The Glocal City of the Transnational Imaginary”
  • Denilson Lopes: “Global Cinema, World Cinema”

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 Jing Tsu, "Multi-Scale Literary Studies"

The vibrancy of world literature studies raises a basic methodological question: What do we do with the ever cumulating literary samples in the world?  If any text can find a sympathetic or dialogic echo across space and time, does that mean everything is connected—and thus nothing really connects?  This seminar addresses these concerns by proposing a “multi-scale” interdisciplinary approach to old and new conceptions of flexible literary spaces, from Area Studies to any variety of diaspora and –phone literatures.  Apart from looking at how large-scale literary studies open up new venues for geographically and nationally restricted fields, this seminar evaluates how transregional and Area Studies can better integrate with Comparative and World Literatures by bringing its own interdisciplinary queries to bear on the conversation.  Drawing examples from Sinophone diaspora—from Hong Kong to Europe, China to North America, Macau to Cuba, Malaysia to Taiwan, etc.—we will consider, and possibly invent, tools to address the ongoing changes that many literary fields currently face.  Topics include “literary governance,” "linguistic nativity," sound and script, comparative morphology, script and camouflage, place and affect, literary systems, technologies of writing, and bilingualism.  Authors include Adam Smith, Lu Xun, William Dwight Whitney, Zhang Guixing, Wang Zhenhe, Dung Kaicheung, Lin Yutang, Hugo Schuchardt, Ha Jin, Chen Jitong, D’Arcy Thompson, Xi Xi, Abbot Thayer, W.K. Wimsatt, Henri Lefebvre, Edward S. Casey, Doreen Massey, and José Marti.

Jing Tsu is Professor of Modern Chinese Literature in the Department of East Asian LanJing Tsuguages & Literatures at Yale University.  Her disciplinary and research areas include Diaspora and Sinophone studies, Area Studies, Comparative Literature, and History of Science. She is author of Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora (Harvard 2010), Failure, Nationalism, and Literature: The Making of Modern Chinese Identity, 1895-1937 (Stanford 2005), and coeditor of Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays (with David Der-wei Wang; Brill 2010) and Science and Technology in Modern China, 1880s-1940s (with Benjamin A. Elman; Brill 2014).  She has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (Harvard), the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford), and is currently at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), where she is working on a new book, The Alphabetic Mind in Chinese.

Session 1: Sympathy

Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (excerpts)
Martha Nussbaum, "Compassion: The Basic Social Emotion"
Lu Xun "A Warning to the People"
 

Session 2: Affect

W.K. Wimsatt, "The Affective Fallacy"
Ruth Leys, "The Turn to Affect" (excerpts)
Lin Shu, 1905 Preface to Chinese translation of Uncle's Tom Cabin & Author's Postscript
The Cuba Commission ReportA Hidden History of the Chinese in Cuba (excerpts)
José Marti, "A Chinese Funeral"
 

Session 3: "Linguistic Nativity"

William Dwight Whitney, Oriental and Linguistic Studies (excerpts)
Hugo Schuchardt, "The Lingua Franca"
Lin Yutang, "In Defense of Pidgin Chinese"
Ha Jin, "The Language of Betrayal"
 

Session 4: Place

Edward S. Casey, "Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does It Mean to Be in the Place-World?" 
Nigel Thrift, "Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect"
Xi Xi, My City (excerpts)
 

Session 5: Space

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (excerpts)
Doreen Massey, "Power-Geometry and the Progressive Sense of Place"
Chen Yingzhen, "Mountain Path"
Chen Jitong, 1898 conversation with Zeng Pu on "world literature" (shijie de wenxue)
 

Session 6: Morpholog

D'Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form (excerpts)
Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees (excerpts)
Dung Kai-Cheung, Atlas (excerpts)
 

Session 7: Adaptation

Zhang Guixing, My South Seas Sleeping Beauty (excerpts)
Jing Tsu, "The Elephant in the Room," from Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora (excerpts)
Abbott Thayer, "The Law Which Underlies Protective Coloration"
 

Session 8: From Area to Scale: "Literary Governance"

Immanuel Wallerstein, "What Cold War in Asia? An Interpretive Essay"
Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline (excerpts)
Neil Smith, "Remapping Area Knowledge: Beyond Global/Local"
William Nelson Fenton, "Integration of Geography and Anthropology in Army Area Study Curricula"
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