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2018 University of Tokyo

Our 8th IWL session took place at the University of Tokyo at the beautiful Hongo Campus from July 2 through July 26, 2018, in collaboration with the Department of Contemporary Literary Studies, Faculty of Letters（現代文芸論研究室). Our four-week program included a total of ten two-week seminars taught by leading names in world literature today, together with outstanding guest lectures and the opportunity for participants to share their work in colloquia, as well as panels on publishing and the job market. The program was supplemented by outings and cultural events to build community beyond the boundaries of the formal sessions. Our participants had the chance to examine critically the latest challenges of this comprehensive and rapidly developing field, from its theoretical concepts and the history of the discipline to its forms of practice today embedded in a world market. 

 

  • Christopher Bush, Northwestern University
  • Pheng Cheah, University of California at Berkeley
  • David Damrosch, Harvard University
  • Ursula Heise, UCLA
  • Mitsuyoshi Numano, University of Tokyo
  • Katharina Piechocki, Harvard University
  • Jing Tsu, Yale University
  • Delia Ungureanu, University of Bucharest
  • Zhang Longxi, City University of Hong Kong

2018 IWL Flyer

 

Click here to download our 2018 IWL flyer.

Our program included also several plenary lectures offered by our faculty. Our guests were all noteworthy figures who have made major contributions to world literature and to the discipline of comparative literature, challenging and redefining from different perspectives the boundaries and key issues of classical and modern philology, literary theory and criticism. 

In addition to attending seminars, our participants gave a paper or presented a work in progress or a recent project within one of our eight colloquia groups organized around broad themes: World Literature and Production, World Literature and Circulation, World Literature and Translation, Postcolonialism and World Literature, World Cinema and World Literature, Premodern Literature and World Literature; Politics, Poetics and World Literature. Meeting once each week with their peers under the leadership of one of our postdoc or faculty participants, they had the opportunity to share their work with their peers, receive valuable feedback from scholars all over the world working on similar topics, and develop new projects including future ACLA seminars.

Our participants’ work benefited from using the resources of the General Library and of the Library of the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology/Faculty of Letters on the Hongo Campus.

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