2013 Seminars

June 24 - July 4, 2013

Susan Bassnett, Professor of Comparative Literature, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick University

World Literature and Translation Studies

This seminar includes a mixture of theoretical and methodological texts on translation (essays by Walter Benjamin, Octavio Paz, Andre Lefevere, James Holmes and others), tested against examples of literary translation, and literature concerned with themes of linguistic and cultural translation, including work by E. M. Forster, Jhumpa Lahiri, and John Crowley’s 2003 novel The Translator.

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Helena Buescu, Professor of Comparative  Literature at the Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon

Doing Things in World Literature

The starting point of this seminar is the realization that there are a number of different actions and events that seem to recur in a variety of different literatures around the world. Among these we will single out: 1) constructing heroes; 2) plots and plotting; 3) loving; 4) making worlds. Yet, these phenomena are differently elaborated in different cultures and literatures. In this seminar we will investigate how some of these literatures may enter into dialogue over a common set of phenomena. The comparative grounding of World Literature is therefore a theoretical position that the work in the seminar must also interrogate. Literary works to be dealt with include selections from: Ancient Egypt; the Maya; oral texts from Africa; the Bible; Sophocles; T’ang Dynasty poetry; Dante; Machiavelli; Camões; Racine; Alfred de Musset; Dostoyevsky; and Murakami Haruki.

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David Damrosch, Director of the Institute for World Literature and Ernest Bernbaum Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University

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.

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Theo D'haen, Chair of English and American Literature at Leuven University (Belgium) and Emeritus Professor of English and American Literature at Leyden University (Netherlands)

World Authors/World Literature

Starting from seminal essays by “world” authors, we will relate evolving ways of thinking about world literature to a number of primary texts. At the end of the seminar participants should have a good grasp of how some of the most important driving literary forces of the modern era have looked at world literature and of theorizations of world literature over the past 200 years or so, as well as of how such theorizations give us perspective on actual readings of primary texts. Readings in Herder, Goethe, Lu Xun, Tagore, Auerbach, Moretti, Kundera, Calvino, García Márquez, Lahiri, Walcott, and others.

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Djelal Kadir, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University

When Literature Meets the World

The eight sessions of this two-week unit of the 2013 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 examine 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––processes we shall explore through critical works by Lu Chi, Herder, Heidegger, Said, Apter, Moretti, and others, and fictions by Aristophanes, Homer, Marvell, Borges, Kawabata, Murakami, and others.

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Nirvana Tanoukhi, Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison

The Scale of World Literature

This seminar engages the decisive shift in humanistic analysis since the late 1990s, in response to the rise of globalization studies, from the study of cultural migration as it registers in challenges and ruptures with nation-states and national traditions, toward a new interest in the conceptualization of culture and study of cultural forms on the “world-scale.” To understand this shift, we will examine various conceptualizations of scale as a way of exploring possible paths to a scale-sensitive critique of cultural contexts and literary forms.

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Lawrence Venuti, Professor of English, Temple University

Translation Theory and Practice: Instrumental vs. Hermeneutic Models

Although the history of translation theory and practice has been distinguished by a range of concepts and strategies, two approaches have recurred so frequently as to be considered dominant models. The first can be called instrumental, treating translation as the reproduction or transfer of an invariant contained in or caused by the source text, whether its form, its meaning, or its effect. The second can be called hermeneutic, treating translation as the inscription of an interpretation, one among varying and even conflicting possibilities, so that the source text is seen as variable in form, meaning, and effect. This seminar will explore the continuing pertinence of these models for the study and practice of translation by examining the work of various theorists and commentators, including Jerome, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Eugene Nida, Gideon Toury, Antoine Berman, and Jacques Derrida. The discussions will be grounded in analyses of translations into and out of English from a variety of humanistic genres and text types, including the lyric poem, prose fiction, the screenplay, and philosophy. Attention will be given to various theoretical concepts, including equivalence, norms, and ethics, as well as the fundamental relationship between theory and practice.

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July 8 - July 17, 2013

David Damrosch, Director of the Institute for World Literature and Ernest Bernbaum Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University

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.

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Theo D'haen, Chair of English and American Literature at Leuven University (Belgium) and Emeritus Professor of English and American Literature at Leyden University (Netherlands)

 World Authors/World Literature

Starting from seminal essays by “world” authors, we will relate evolving ways of thinking about world literature to a number of primary texts. At the end of the seminar participants should have a good grasp of how some of the most important driving literary forces of the modern era have looked at world literature and of theorizations of world literature over the past 200 years or so, as well as of how such theorizations give us perspective on actual readings of primary texts. Readings in Herder, Goethe, Lu Xun, Tagore, Auerbach, Moretti, Kundera, Calvino, García Márquez, Lahiri, Walcott, and others.

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Wai Chee Dimock, William Lampson Professor of English & American Studies at Yale University 

Recycling the Epic

Classical epic poetry developed from early song cycles and then was recycled around the ancient Mediterranean world, setting forth plot lines and emblematic scenes that resurface in world literature today, across a range of genres and media. Beginning with the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, we move on to explore the unbundling and rebundling of these epics in lyric poetry, novels, film, and TV series.

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Djelal Kadir, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University

When Literature Meets the World

The eight sessions of this two-week unit of the 2013 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 examine 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––processes we shall explore through critical works by Lu Chi, Herder, Heidegger, Said, Apter, Moretti, and others, and fictions by Aristophanes, Homer, Marvell, Borges, Kawabata, Murakami, and others.

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Stephen Owen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University

The Problem of the Premodern

“World literature” makes universal claims, but serious issues divide a roughly defined “modern” literature, in which some basic premises are shared across national or cultural inflections, and premodern literature, where families of literatures have no common historical ground or very little common historical ground. We will begin with some of the standard pedagogic models (“great books,” shared “themes,” a queue of specialists), considering their virtues and failings. Then, for most of the session, we will consider alternative approaches, both in terms of their intellectual integrity and the practicality of their pedagogy.

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Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Associate Professor of comparative literature at Aarhus University

Enchantment, Authenticity and World Literature

World literature is often praised for promoting intercultural understanding and for widening the reader’s outlook on the world. But what if the international success of a literary work relies on the reader misunderstanding certain of its features and elements? What if a lack of contextual knowledge and cultural intimacy creates space for other responses, which generate fascination and enable works to enter and remain in international literary circulation? Are there works that would not be as influential if readers were not able to suspend their beliefs, and imagine that others enjoyed a more enchanted relationship with the universe? The course will explore across a number of genres and continents how the attribution of authenticity and enchantment is a strong and highly-influential mechanism in the circulation of world literature.

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Karen Thornber, Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature; Chair, Regional Studies East Asia, Professor, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University

World Literature and Environmental Crises

Environmental degradation occurs everywhere on the planet, with a temporal and geographic scope unsurpassed by any other pressing global concern; environmental crises more than any other phenomena impel us to consider our lives and responsibilities in planetary terms. Since its beginnings, literature – and world literature in particular – has mediated interactions between people and nature. Yet even though the fields of world literature and environmental criticism (ecocriticism) both have burgeoned in recent years, few scholars have bridged the two. Accompanied by key readings of ecocritical theory, this seminar engages with world literature from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Oceania that is environmentally cosmopolitan (reaching out to the broader world by taking up ecodegradation beyond a single time or place, whether explicitly or implicitly). In so doing, we explore the possibilities not only of incorporating environmental consciousness into the study of world literature, and into the field of comparative literature more generally, but also for creating a more globally informed ecocriticism.