July 7-17

World Cinema, Dudley Andrew

Parallel with the growth of World Literature studies the past three decades has been the growth of an academic industry of world cinema studies. “World Cinema” crops up in the titles of dozens of books and countless articles. In our two weeks together our aim will be to get a grip on the “dimensions” of this area, first by interrogating the spatial terms it has encouraged: i.e. films and movements are labeled national, international, transnational, regional, world, global. And they are studied through methods that refer to maps, atlases, zones, and networks. These terms readily yield to more historical approaches that want to account for at local movements, transnational influences, general flows and specific restraints. But what should really count pedagogically is to assist powerful and productive “encounters” with films from anywhere. And so our discussions will be fueled by films that exemplify or befuddle the terms used to “place” them. We will focus on ‘New Waves’ as movements that spread differently in the 60s, the 80s and 90s, and in the new century if they still spread at all. Asian cinemas will be our focus   You will be asked to watch a feature film in the evening before each session, or to have seen these films quite recently. Secondary readings will include a few that let us consider the extent to which issues in World Cinema are similar to or distinct from those in World Literature. Among these are questions of the canon, of translation (subtitles), and of institutions such as prizes, festivals, agents, and criticism.

James Tweedie’s new book, The Age of New Waves Art cinema and the staging of Globalization  provides continuity for us, and it is well worth purchasing, though the key selections from the book will also be available in pdf. .You can watch the films listed on the syllabus before July 7 on your own or see them as a group in the evening prior to our discussion. The City University local organizers have arranged for a mini-theatre (limited capacity: 15) where the screenings will take place in the evenings at 7.30pm, once the IWL events for that day have ended.

Dudley AndrewDudley Andrew is the R. Selden Rose Professor of Film and Comparative Literature at Yale. Before moving to Yale in 2000, he taug h t f or thirty years at the Univ. of Iowa directing the dissertations of many illustrious film scholars. He began his career with three book s commenting on film theory, including the biography of André Bazin, whose thought he continues to explore in the recent What Cinema Is!, and the edited volumes Opening Bazin, and A Companion to Francois Truffaut. Soon his translation of Bazin’s writings on the New Media of the 1950s will appear.   Andrew’s interest in aesthetics and hermeneutics led to Film in the Aura of Art, 1984, and his fascination with French film and culture resulted in Mists of Regret (1995) andPopular Front Paris (2005), co-authored with Steven Ungar. Currently completing Encountering World Cinema, his teaching and research take up 1) questions of World Cinema/literature, such as translation and adaptation, 2) issues in 20th century French intellectual life, especially theories of the image, and 3) French cinema and its literary and philosophical relations.

 Session 1:  Where are we in the Discipline?

  • D.Andrew, “Atlas of World Cinema” in Denison, Remapping World Cinema (Wallflower, 2006)
  • N. Durovicova, Vector, Flow, Zone: Towards a History of Cinematic Translatio” in Durovicova, World Cinema, Transnational Perspectives (Routledge 2011)
  • M. Hansen “Vernacular Modernism,” in Durovicova, World Cinema, Transnational Perspectives
    Films: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 

Session 2:  Encountering Cinema; encountering Hong Kong

  • David Bordwell, “Made in Hong Kong” from Planet Hong Kong (Harvard U Press, 2000)
  • David Desser, “Hong Kong Film and the New Cinephilia” in Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema (Duke: 2006)
  • Adrian Martin, “An Encounter with Hong Kong Style in Contemporary Action Cinema” InHong Kong Connections
    Films: Chungking ExpressPeking Opera Blues 

Session 3: What Time is it There?

  • Tanizaki, Junichiro, “The Tumor with a Human Face” in Lamarre (ed.) Shadows on the Screen(Univ. of Michigan Press, 2005)
  • D. Andrew, “Time Zones and Jetlag” in Durovicova, World Cinema Transnational Perspecitves
  • Asada, Akira, “Infantile Capitalism and Japan’s Postmodernism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 87 (3).
    Films : UgetsuRingu 

Session 4: Islands in a Sea of cinema (Taiwan, Quebec, Ireland)

  •  From James Tweedie, The Age of New Waves (Oxford Univ. Press, 2013).
    Films: Dust in the Wind; The Crying Game [or City of Sadness] 

Session 5: Transnational Contagion

  • D. Andrew, “Is Cinema Contagious? Transnationalism and Korea” Cinema & Cie 20 (‘Winter 2014)
  • JungBong Choi, “Of Transnational-Korean Cinematrix,” Transnational Cinemas vol 3, no. 1 (2012), 3-4.
    Films: The Host; Three-Iron 

Session 6: An International Language?

  • Amresh Sinha, “The Use and Abuse of Subtitles” from Ballfour, Subtitles: on the Foreignness of Film (MIT, 2004).
  • Michael Raine, “From Hybridity to Dispersion: film subtitling as an adaptive practice.”
  • Sheldon Lu, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Bouncing Angels: Hollywood, Taiwan, Hong Kong” in S.Lu Chinese-Language Film (U of Hawaii Press, 2005).
  • C. Klein, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: a Diasporic Reading,” Cinema Journal (Summer 2004).
    Film: YiYi 

Session 7: China: core and periphery

  • From James Tweedie, The Age of New Waves.
  • Rey Chow, “Not One Less, Fable of Migration” in Chris Berry Chinese Films in Focus (British Film Institute, 2003).
  • Sheldon Lu, “Chinese Film Culture at the End of the 20th c. Not One Less” in S. Lu Chinese-Language Film.
    Films: Old WellNot One Less 

Session 8: Ubiquity and Insignificance: 21st c. media formations

  • From James Tweedie, The Age of New Waves. 
  • D. Andrew: “Beyond and Beneath the Map of World Cinema” in S. Dennison (ed) World Cinema at SOCINE (Sao Paulo: Papirus, 2013).
    Films: The WorldThis is Not a Film 

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World Authors/World Literature, Theo D'haen

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, Rushdie, Lahiri, Walcott, and others.

Theo D’haenTheo D’haen has studied in Belgium, the U.S.A., and France, and is the Chair of English and American Literature at Leuven University (Belgium) and Emeritus Professor of English and American Literature at Leyden University (Netherlands). He has published widely on literatures in European languages, primarily on postmodernism and postcolonialism, and also on popular genres such as crime fiction. His books include The Routledge Concise History of World Literature(2011), Liminal Postmodernisms: The Postmodern, the (Post)Colonial and the (Post)Feminist (1994),(Un)writing Empire (1998), Contemporary American Crime Fiction (2001), How Far Is America From Here? (2005), and Cultural Identity and Postmodern Writing (2006), and he is co-editor of World Literature: A Reader (2012) and of The Routledge Companion to World Literature (2011).

Session 1: Poetry World

  • Johann Gottfried Herder, “Results of a Comparison of Different Peoples’ Poetry in Ancient and Modern Times”
  • J. W. Goethe, “On World Literature” Poems by Rumi, Hafiz, Khayyam, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Swift, Shelley, Goethe, Dickinson, Yeats, Auden, Larkin, and the Classical Chinese Anthology
  • David Damrosch, “What is World Literature” (Selection)

Session 2: “Folk” World

  • Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm, “Preface” to the 3rd Edition of the Fairy Tales; “Little Red Riding Hood”
  • Sarah Orne Jewett, “A White Heron”
  • Bruno Bettelheim, “Life Divined from the Inside” and “Little Red Riding Hood,” both from The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy tales.

  • George Steiner, "A Footnote toWeltliteratur" 

Session 3: "New" World

  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet”
  • Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” (1855 version)
  • Lu Xun, “Waiting for a Genius,” “Diary of a Madman”
  • Fritz Strich, “World Literature and Comparative Literary History”

Session 4: Classic World

  • Italo Calvino, “Why Read the Classics?”
  • Homer, Iliad, Transl. Robert Fitzgerald, Bk 18, ll. 478-705 (end) or Robert Fagles, Bk. 18, ll. 479-710 (end)

  • W. H. Auden, “The Shield of Achilles”
  • Jorge Luis Borges, “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,”
  • Jorge Luis Borges, “The Immortal”
  • Erich Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur” 

Session 5: Love World

  • Rabindranath Tagore, “World Literature”
  • Rabindranath Tagore, “Vision” 
  • Rudyard Kipling, “Beyond the Pale,” from Plain Tales from the Hills 
  • Jhumpa Lahiri, “Sexy” (from The Interpreter of Maladies
  • Mo Yan, a story from Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh 
  • Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature”

Session 6: "Minor" World

  • Milan Kundera, “World Literature”
  • Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis”
  • Paul van Ostaijen, “Sirens”
  • Haruki Murakami, “A Poor-Aunt Story,” from Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman 
  • Georg Brandes, “World Literature”
  • Horace Engdahl, “Canonization and World Literature: The Nobel Experience”

Session 7: Fiction World

  • John Barth, “The Literature of Exhaustion” 
  • John Barth, “The Literature of Replenishment” 
  • John Barth, “Dunyazadiad”
  • Tales of The Thousand and One Nights, transl. N. Dawood 
    (Penguin), “Prologue/Epilogue” or The Arabian Nights, transl. Husain Haddawy
    (Norton), “Prologue/Translator’s Postscript”

  • Mariano Siskind, “The Globalization of the Novel and the Novelization of the Global: A Critique of World Literature”

Session 8:Other World

  • Derek Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” “A Far Cry from Africa," “The Ruins of a Great House,” “Map of the New World,”“The Sea is History”

  • Salman Rushdie, “Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies,” from East, West; “Imaginary Homelands,” from the eponymous collection; “The New Empire Within Britain,” ibid.

  • Pascal Casanova, “Literature as a World”
  • Elleke Boehmer, “The World and the Postcolonial”

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World Literature and Modern Chinese Literature: parallels, counterpoints, and cross-currents, Leo Ou-fan Lee

Modern Chinese Literature was born out of a cultural movement to reach out to the world, and the very concept of “world literature” (shiji wenxue) was formulated in the May Fourth period to spearhead efforts in literary creativity and cultural production. This seminar seeks to rethink the European concept of world literature (first formulated by Goethe) in a modern Chinese context by focusing on a number of key movements, trends, literary figures and texts in the first part of the twentieth century across the continents of Asia and Europe. In so doing it hopes to re-open the question of “cosmopolitanism” (together with its counterpart, nationalism) as a meaningful problematique in dealing with world literature.

This seminar hopes to renegotiate the concept of world literature from a modern Chinese perspective. The modern Chinese texts and sources are juxtaposed with modern European texts and sources to form a series of inter-connected narrative strands. The format of the seminar combines lecture and discussion, oral presentations and short written papers by participants. Whenever feasible, local guests from Hong Kong (writers, scholars, and artists) will be invited to join the class. While knowledge of Chinese is welcome, it is not required, since all materials will be read in English and English translation.

Leo Ou-fan LeeLeo Ou-fan Lee was born in China and educated in Taiwan and the United States, where he received his Ph. D. in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard (1970). He taught at Dartmouth, Princeton, Indiana, Chicago, UCLA and Harvard. In 2004 he took early retirement and returned to Hong Kong, where he is currently the Sin Wai Kin Professor of Chinese Culture at he Chinese University of Hong Kong. His major publications in English include: The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers(1974), Voices from the Iron House: A Study of Lu Xun (1987), Shanghai Modern (1999), and City between Worlds: My Hong Kong (2008). He has also published about 20 volumes of essays of cultural criticism in Chinese.

Session 1: “World literature” in Chinese eyes: Introduction

  • Selections from Goethe on world literature.
  • Zheng Zhenduo, “A View on the Unification of Literature” (1922).

Session 2: World Literature as “New Knowledge”

  • Rabindranath Tagore, “World Literature.”
  • Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature” and “More Conjectures.”
  • David Damrosch, “From the Old World to the Whole World.”
  • Shu-Mei Shih, “Global Literature and Technologies of Recognition.”

Session 3: Lu Xun’s Writing and Its Reception Today

  • Lu Xun, “Diary of a Madman,” “The True Story of Ah Q,” “Preface to the Nahan collection”; from Wild Grass: The Shadow’s Leave-taking,” ”Dead Fire,” “Tombstone Inscriptions.”

Session 4: Specters of Comparison: Lu Xun and European Literature

  • Nicolai Gogol, “The Dairy of a Madman.”
  • Charles Baudelaire, Twenty Prose Poems.
  • Walter Benjamin, selections from Berlin Childhood around 1900.

Session 5: Leftwing Cosmopolitanism: Three Images of Shanghai

  • Andre Malraux, selections from Man’s Fate; “Afterword” to The Conquerors.
  • Mao Dun, selections from Midnight.
  • Yokomitsu Reiichi, Shanghai , Chapters 1-2, 16, 33-35.

Session 6. War, Revolution, and Literature: Paris-Moscow-Shanghai

  • Continued discussion of Malraux, Mao Dun, and Reiichi.
  • Dai Wangshu, poems and translations.
  • W. H. Auden, “In Time of War: A Sonnet Sequence.”
  • Katerina Clark, from Moscow the Fourth Rome: ”World Literature”/World Culture” and “The End of the Popular Front.” 

Session 7: The Politics of Translation: Kafka

  • Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis, “”The Judgment,” ”A Country Doctor.”
  • Wang Wen-hsing, from Family Catastrophe.
  • David Damrosch, “Kafka Comes Home.”

Session 8: The Politics of Translation: Bei Dao

  • Bei Dao, selections from The August Sleepwalker and from The Rose of Time.
  • Stephen Owen, “What Is World Poetry?” and “Stepping forward and Back: Issues and Possibilities for “World Poetry’.”
  • Concluding discussion of cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and globalization.

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Translation in Asia: Theories, Practices, Histories, Ronit Ricci

Translation is a pivotal human activity that allows for the transmission and circulation of stories, religion, and various forms of knowledge across geographical and cultural boundaries. In Asia, great cultural and linguistic diversity has resulted in variegated and complex ways in which people have theorized and practiced translation, from ancient times to the present. Examining the histories of particular translation traditions and the works they have produced teaches us much about contacts, influence, cultural and political expansion, subversion and creative expression.

This course will consider various translation traditions across Asia, with a focus on South and Southeast Asia. It will examine these traditions from a comparative perspective, seeking to highlight how different societies, in different places and periods, conceptualized translation and practiced it. A central theme of this inquiry will be the relationship between religion and translation as it took shape in Asia, through an examination of the history and practice of translation in Islam, Christianity and Hinduism.

Ronit RicciRonit Ricci is an associate professor at the Australian National University's School of Culture, History and Language. Her teaching and research interests include translation studies, alphabet histories, Javanese and Malay Islamic literary traditions, manuscript culture in Java, and historical and literary representations of exile in colonial Asia. Her book, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia, published by the University of Chicago (2011), won the Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies and the AAR's Best First Book in the History of Religions Award.

Ronit is currently engaged in a research project titled The Sri Lankan Malays: Islam, Literature and  Diaspora across the Indian Ocean.

Session 1: Introduction: thinking about translation

  • A.L Becker, “Introduction” and “Silence Across Languages” in Beyond Translation: Essays Towards a Modern Philology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.
  • George Steiner, “The Hermeneutic Motion”, in Lawrence Venuti, ed. The Translation Studies Reader (Routledge, 2000).
  • Jeremy Munday, “Translating the Foreign: the (In)visibility of Translation”, in Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications (London: Routledge, 2001).

Session 2: Translation as a universal practice? Terminologies of translation across cultures and languages

  • Theo Hermans, “Cross-Cultural Translation Studies as Thick Translation,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 66.3 (2003).
  • Judy Wakabayashi, “A Japanese Perspective on the Universalism vs. Particularism Debate,” in Marilyn Gaddis Rose, ed., Beyond The Western Tradition (Binghamton: State University of New York, 2000).
  • The following chapters from Ronit Ricci and Jan van der Putten (eds.), Translation in Asia: theories, practices, histories (Manchester: St. Jerome, 2011).
  • Peter Friedlander, “Before Translation?”
  • Torsten Tschacher, “Commenting Translation: Concepts and Practices of Translation in Islamic Tamil Literature”

Session 3: Perspectives on translation in/from India

  • A.K. Ramanujan. “On Translating a Tamil Poem”, in R. Warren, ed., The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field (Northern University Press, 1989).
  • G. Gopinathan, “Ancient Indian Theories of Translation: A Reconstruction”, in Beyond the WesternTradition.
  • Sheldon Pollock, "Philology, Literature, Translation," in Enrica Garzilli, ed. Translating, Translations, Translators from India to the West. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).
  • A.K. Ramanujan, Velcheru Narayan Rao and David Shulman, eds. and tras., When God is a Customer: Telugu Courtesan Songs by Ksetrayya and Others (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Session 4: Perspectives on translation in/from the Indonesian - Malay World

  • A.L Becker, “Giving Distance Its Due (On Mutual Translatability)”, in L. Bilmes, A.C Liang and W. Ostapirat, eds., Twenty First Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on Discourse in Southeast Asian Languages (Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society, 1995).
  • Ronit Ricci, “On the Untranslatability of ‘Translation:’ Considerations from Java, Indonesia. Translation Studies 3.3, (September 2010).
  • Haslina Haroon, “Early Discourse on Translation in Malay: The Views of Abdulah bin Abdul Kadir Munsyi,” in Ricci and van der Putten, eds. Translation in Asia: theories, practices, histories (Manchester: St. Jerome, forthcoming 2011).

Session 5: Translation and Christianity in Asia

  • “Translators and the Spread of Religions”, in Jean Delisle and Judith Woodsworth (eds.) Translators Through History (Montreal: University of Ottawa, 1995).
  • Vicente Rafael, “Confession, Conversion and Reciprocity in Early Tagalog Colonial Society,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 29.2 (1987).
  • Saurabh Dube, “Colonial Registers of a Vernacular Christianity: Conversion to Translation,” Economic and Political Weekly 39.2 (January 2004).
  • Abraham Wasserstein and David Wasserstein, “Introduction” and in The Legend of the Septuagint: from classical antiquity to today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Session 6: Translation and Islam

  • A.L Tibawi, “Is the Qur’an Translatable?”, The Muslim World 52 (1962).
  • Fazlur Rahman, “Translating the Qur’an”, Religion and Literature 20.1 (Spring 1988).
  • James W. Morris, “Qur’an Translation and the Challenges of Communication: Toward a ‘Literal Study-Version of the Qur’an,” Journal of Qur’anic Studies2.2 (2000).
  • Peter G. Riddell, “Translating the Qur’an into Indonesian Languages”, forthcoming in H. Chambert-Loir and M. Zaini-Lajoubert, eds., Translation in Indonesia and Malaya (Paris: l’Ecole Francaise d’Extreme-Orient).
  • Maria Rosa Menocal, “The Culture of Translation”, in Words Without Bordershttp://wordswithoutborders.org/article/the-culture-of-translation.

Session 7:  The Ramayana across languages and genres: Hinduism, epics, translation

  • The following chapters from Paula Richman, ed. Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
  • Paula Richman, “Introduction: The Diversity of the Ramayana Tradition.” 
  • A.K. Ramanujan, “Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation.”
  • A.L Becker and Ronit Ricci, “What Happens When You Really Listen: On Translating the Old Javanese Ramayana,” Indonesia 85 (April 2008).
  • Stuart Blackburn, “Creating Conversations: The Rama Story as Puppet Play in Kerala.”
  • Tony K. Stewart, “In Search of Equivalence: Conceiving Muslim-Hindu Encounter through Translation Theory,” History of Religions 40. 3 (2001).
  • Watch the film Sita Sings the Blues http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/watch.html

Session 8:  Script change and/as translation

  • Ilker Ayturk, “Romanization in Comparative Perspective,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Series 3, 20.1 (2010).
  • Ilker Ayturk, “Script Charisma in Hebrew and Turkish: A Comparative Framework for Explaining Success and Failure of Romanization,” Journal of World History 21.1 (2010).
  • David Damrosch, “Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and the Formation of World Literature,” Modern Language Quarterly 68.2 (2007).
  • O. Hegyi, “Minority and Restricted Uses of the Arabic Alphabet: The Aljamiado Phenomenon,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 99.2 (1979).

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From Comparison to World Literature: Readings and Conceptual Issues, Zhang Longxi

In his conversation with J. P. Eckermann, Goethe spoke of the advent of “the epoch of world literature” in talking about his reading experience of a Chinese novel in translation, and the idea of Weltliteratur since Goethe has always implied the transcendence of European or any other national or regional tradition of literature and culture, and also the importance of literary translation. Theoretically speaking, the tension between two opposite forces has always resided in Weltliteratur as a concept, which stands poised between the local and the global, national specificities and cosmopolitan claims to literary universality. While going beyond national literary traditions, comparative literature has national literature as its basis and has been largely limited to comparisons within the European tradition. In contrast, world literature today definitely transcends Eurocentrism and takes into consideration the contribution of literary translation and its efficacy. At the same time, there are still conceptual issues that need to be fully explored before we may acquire a truly global or planetary perspective, beyond the ethnocentric or nationalistic tendencies almost inherent in all literary traditions, in the study of world literature. This seminar will discuss such conceptual and methodological issues in relation to readings of literary texts from different parts of the world in translation, and explore these issues informed by the consciousness of our own historicity, our understanding of national, comparative, and world literature and literary theories, and our sense of the relevance of world literature to our own time.

Zhang LongxiZhang Longxi is Chair Professor of ComparativeLiterature and Translation at the City University of Hong Kong. He is a member of the Executive Council of the International Comparative Literature Association, an elected foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities and of the Academia Europaea. He has published widely in both English and Chinese, and his English book publications include The Tao and the Logos: Literary Hermeneutics, East and West(Duke, 1992), Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (Stanford, 1998), Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (Cornell, 2005), Unexpected Affinities: Reading across Cultures (Toronto, 2007), and From Comparison to World Literature (SUNY, forthcoming 2014).

Session 1: The Cosmopolitan Vision of Goethe’s Weltliteratur

  • Johann Peter Eckermann, Selection of Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, trans. John Oxenford, rev. ed. (London: George Bell & Sons,1883).
  • David Damrosch, “Goethe Coins a Phrase,” from What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
  • Fred Dallmayr, “West-Eastern Divan: Goethe and Hafiz in Dialogue,” from Dialogue Among Civilizations: Some Exemplary Voices (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

Session 2: National and Comparative Literature

  • Harish Trivedi, “The Nation and the World: An Introduction,” in Harish et al (eds.), The Nation across the World: Postcolonial Literary Representations (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007).
  • Claudio Guillén, “Weltliteratur,” from The Challenge of Comparative Literature, trans. Cola Franzen (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1993).
  • Zhang Longxi, “Crossroads, Distant Killing, and Translation: On the Ethics and Politics of Comparison,” in Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman (eds.) Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).

Session 3: Debating World Literature 1

  • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, from The Communist Manifesto, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
  • Aijid Ahmad, “The Communist Manifesto and ‘World Literature’,” Social Scientist 29:7-8 (Jul.– Aug. 2000).
  • Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, from Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures (London: Continuum, 2008).
  • Frank Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (Jan.- Feb. 2000).

Session 4: Debating World Literature 2

  • Pascale Casanova, “Literature as a World,” New Left Review 31 (Jan.-Feb. 2005).
  • Alexander Beecroft, “World Literature without a Hyphen: Towards a Typology of Literary Systems,” New Left Review 54 (Nov.-Dec. 2008).
  • Aamir Mufti, “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures,”Critical Inquiry 36:3 (Spring 2010).

Session 5: Dreams, Interpretations, and World Literature

  • Shakespeare, from The Merchant of Venice, Act II, scene 1, scene VII, scene IX; Act III, scene II.
  • Sigmund Freud, “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” in Collected Paper, 5 vols. (New York: Basic Books, 1959).
  • Qian Zhongshu, “God’s Dream,” from Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts, Stories and Essays, ed. Christopher G. Rea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

Session 6: Utopia in World Literature

  • Krishan Kumar, from Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).
  • Aziz Al-Azmeh, “Rhetoric for the Senses: A Consideration of Muslim Paradise Narratives,” in The Times of History: Universal Topics in Islamic Historiography (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007).
  • Zhang Longxi, from Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).

Session 7: The Challenge of Translation

  • David Young (trans.), Five Tang Poets: Wang Wei, Li Po, Tu Fu, Li Ho, Li Shang-yin (Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College Press, 1990).
  • A. C. Graham (trans.), Poems of the Late T’ang (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965).

Session 8: Discussion and Tentative Conclusions

This will be a general discussion session for participants to take advantage of their different backgrounds and experiences to raise questions and issues of their own interest concerning world literature and literary studies in general, and try to come to some conclusions not just of the seminar itself, but of our understanding of world literature and how best to move forward for its further development in our learning, teaching, and research.