| June 25-July 6, 2012 |
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David Damrosch, Director of the Institute for World Literature, Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA Paulo Horta, Assistant Professor, New York University, Abu Dhabi 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 (Bakhtin, Etiemble, Earl Miner, Moretti, Apter, Spivak and others), and will test these theories against a variety of literary cases, including comparisons of: Du Fu and Wordsworth, Molière and Chikamatsu, Gogol and Lu Xun, Kafkaand Lispector, Wole Soyinka and Caryl Churchill. __________________________________________________________________________ |
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Martin Puchner, Byron and Anita Wien Professor of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA Literature of Capitalism While political and literary criticism has long contemplated the relation between literature and socialism, the same is not true of capitalism.And yet, literature has tried to capture the spirit of capitalism, fuelling its fantasies, contemplating its effects, and chronicling its crises. The seminar asks how literature, in particular dramatic literature, has engaged capitalism in its most spectacular form. Core readings by Franklin, Goethe, O'Neill, Ibsen, Brecht, Miller, and Mamet and background readings by Smith, Marx, Arrighi, and Debord will be complemented by texts presented by participants in order to gauge the global dimensions of the literature of capitalism. __________________________________________________________________________ |
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Ileana Orlich, Professor of Romanian, English and Comparative Literature, Arizona State University Cultural Translations and Dramatic Transcreations: Politics and Society in the Modern and Contemporary Theatre Traditional theatre defines fictional worlds and the characters that inhabit them. But theatrical productions and their ideas travel too, occupying different physical and metaphorical spaces in other cultures and thus redefining the concept of cultural translation and the language of politics. The staging of "Caligula" as a subversive commentary against totalitarian rule, or of Shakespeare’s "Richard III" as a veiled protest against Stalin, calls for an examination of a new theatre and for a critical consideration of the re-positioning of classical theatre in the location of culture and politics. The transcreation of classical models such as Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Brecht offers an array of flirtations with ideological taboos and a repositioning of the classical repertoire in the new post-communist and post-colonial societies. __________________________________________________________________________ |
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Djelal Kadir, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature, Pennsylvania State University, USA When Literature Meets the World The eight sessions of this two-week unit of the 2012 Institute for World Literature examine the relationship between literature and the world through certain “primary texts” in dialogue with a number of theoretical/critical statements. In these literary texts––brief and manageable for the occasion, and drawn broadly from varying historical epochs, genres, and literary traditions––a world-engendered literature anticipates its own worldliness. In our readings we see how these literary texts foreshadow the epistemic and institutional constructs that now define a research field and discipline we call World Literature. The textual evidence indicates that the “primariness” of primary texts consists in literature’s perennial anticipation of our most sophisticated critical discourses, including the intricate web we call world literature and its multiple modalities as concept, as phenomenon, as practice, and as pedagogy: Session I. Primal Scenes; Session II. Vicissitudes of Difference––Diverse Conception, Common Fate; Session III. Performative Turns; Session IV. Counterfactual Facts––The Textual Corpus; Session V. World Systems; Session VI. Cosmopolitanism, Cosmo-police, Cosmicomics; Session VII. Globalization, Planetarity, Counter-discourse; Session VIII. Istanbul as World Literature, Or What Auerbach Missed. __________________________________________________________________________ |
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Bruce Robbins, Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University, USA Comparative Cosmopolitanisms The concept of cosmopolitanism, long associated with Western universalism, has now been pluralized. The so-called “new” cosmopolitanism of the last two decades bestows that old honorific on a great variety of transnational experiences and collectivities, both Western and non-Western, both elite and subaltern. The great question left unanswered by this momentous shift is the value of these plural cosmopolitanisms. If they differ from the old, single, normative cosmopolitanism, what aesthetic and/or political norms do they embody? This seminar proposes to examine in comparative perspective several discursive lines of cosmopolitan thinking and writing. One is the discourse of national self-critique, as in Tolstoy’s account of the Russian conquest of the Caucasus in Hadji Murat or Haruki Murakami’s account of Japanese atrocities in Manchuria inWind-Up Bird Chronicle. Another is the commodity recognition scene, where distant labor is recognized in a present commodity, as in Zola’sNana, Virginia Woolf’s "The Docks of London," or Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place. Another, more literary line, combining cosmopolitanism in space with cosmopolitanism in time, will draw from world texts (by Rushdie, Pamuk, Eugenides, Chabon, and others ) influenced by the epic prolepsis ("Many years later...") in the first sentence of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. __________________________________________________________________________ |
| July 9-20, 2012 |
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Murat Belge, Professor, Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey Westernization in Turkish and Russian Fiction Turkey and Russia were the two societies that had to come to a confrontation with the “necessity” of “Westernization,” as it was called at the time, mainly because they were the closest to the “West.” In both cases, the decision to Westernize was a state prerogative and the state had to educate a new intelligentsia to carry out the project. This new intelligentsia was torn between positions of support and opposition vis-à-vis the state which is reflected in the literature they produced as well. Works by Turkish and Russian authors, including Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Turgeniev, Tanpınar, and Pamuk will be studied in English translation. __________________________________________________________________________ |
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David Damrosch, Director of the Institute for World Literature, Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA 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 (Bakhtin, Etiemble, Earl Miner, Moretti, Apter, Spivak and others), and will test these theories against a variety of literary cases, including comparisons of: Du Fu and Wordsworth, Molière and Chikamatsu, Gogol and Lu Xun, Kafkaand Lispector, Wole Soyinka and Caryl Churchill. __________________________________________________________________________ |
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Aamir Mufti Associate Professor, UCLA, USA Orientalism and World Literature World literature arose at the culmination (and as a consolidation) of the early, “heroic” period of the history of modern philology. As a critical concept, therefore, it must be understood to be inseparable from the concept of Orientalism, Edward Said’s designation for the emergent system of knowledge practices that sought to render the world for the first time as an ensemble of cultures of writing, many newly “discovered” to extend back historically into antiquity. This second age of discoveries in the history of modern imperialism, which has even been described as a second Renaissance, produced far-reaching transformations across the field of culture in the West and subsequently in the colonized societies themselves, which saw the emergence of bourgeois intelligentsias schooled in Orientalist knowledge of “their” own traditions. Orientalism was thus the means of assimilation of widely diverse cultures of writing into the European cultural system. It isthese asymmetries of modern culture that “world literature” both embodies and conceals from view. We will read works by Herder, Goethe, Marx and Engels, Tagore, Schwab, Auerbach, Said, Gourgouris, Pamuk, Rushdie and Salih. __________________________________________________________________________ |
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Jale Parla, Professor of Comparative Literature, Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey Fictions of Metamorphosis: Classical, Modern, Postmodern Metamorphosis as a spontaneous, abrupt, arbitrary, liminal, and unaccountable experience of radical transformation never failed to appeal to the literary imagination since the time of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which the Roman writer retold mythology by reorganizing it around that theme. In this seminar we shall look into how the theme of metamorphosis gets charged with new signifying economies from one historical epoch to another. The course will begin with the discussion of selections from Ovid’s metamorphoses and will continue by investigating the literary executions of metamorphosis as they relate to adjacent areas of literature, such as psychology (with special reference to Jung, Freud, Lacan); philosophy (with special reference to self, identity, and agency); language (with special reference to stylistic strategies of exploiting the denotational and connotational aspects of language,puns, nonsense words, indeterminacies of meaning); grotesque (with special reference to corporeal disfigurations, dismemberment, disembodiment); and genre (with special reference to magical realism). Primary texts include selections from Ovid, Metamorphoses, Carroll, Alice books; Gogol, The Nose; Coetze, Michael K ; Tekin, Berji-Kristin Garbage Tales; either Shelley,Frankenstein or Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Nabokov, lecture on Kafka, whose Metamorphosis will be available to read online in advance of the summer session. __________________________________________________________________________ |
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Paulo Horta, Assistant Professor, New York University, Abu Dhabi A Thousand and One Thousand and One Nights This seminar will center on translations, adaptations, and rewritings of Alf Laylah wa Laylah, The Thousand and One Nights, from the pioneering French translation (1704-17) by the orientalist Antoine Galland, who had begun his researches into “oriental tales” while French attache in Istanbul. This seminar will discuss the subsequent circulation and constant reworking of the Nights in Europe and then back in the Middle East, with particular attention to issues of translation theory and practice and to discussions of orientalism and responses to it and the present status of the Night in world literature . In addition to selections from the Nights, readings will include essays and fiction works by Borges, Said, Mahfouz, Djebar, and others.
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