July 8-18

Ankhi Mukherjee, “What Is a Classic? The Aesthetics of Postcolonial and World Literature”

“A classic is a work that comes before other classics; but those who have read other classics first immediately recognise its place in the genealogy of classics,” writes Italo Calvino in Why Read the Classics? Calvino's musings depict the contemporary world as “banal and stultifying,” in the throes of a definitional crisis, upon which a classic bestows not only form and purpose but self-understanding. It is unsurprising that the question of the classic brings together the disciplines of world and postcolonial literary studies, with their mutual commitment to canon revision and perfectible value criteria, the longevity and transportability of great books, and to everchanging negotiations and relays between the local, national, global, and planetary.

In this seminar, we will examine a key dimension of the question of the classic in postcolonial and world literature that is often overlooked: aesthetics. While postcolonial literature is often seen as political – not beautiful, anti-style, didacticism unmitigated by ambivalence or purposelessness – world literature’s translational drive is seen as too motivated for the unthinking “distribution of the sensible” Rancière identified in the aesthetic mode. We will challenge some of these assumptions in this course, looking at acts of literature as well as critical debates mobilising postcolonial and world literature which use the classic/classics to rethink the gap between the aesthetic and the political, feeling, understanding, and debating, the autonomy of art and the heteronomy of reading publics. Questioning the constitutive aesthetic of the classic from the perspective of transversal and transregional world literary studies today is also a reappraisal of its implication in “geontopower” (Elizabeth Povinelli’s term), extractivist and exploitative forms of liberal governance that separate life from non-life, sovereign from governable subjects, the value-charged Western canon from the black and indigenous bodies rendered inanimate therein.

Ankhi Mukherjee is Professor of English and World Literatures at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wadham College. Her most recent book Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor (Cambridge UP, 2021) won the Robert S. Liebert Award, established jointly by the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center and the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine for outstanding scholarship in the field of applied psychoanalysis. Her second book, What Is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon (Stanford UP, 2014), was awarded the British Academy Prize in English Literature in 2015. Mukherjee’s other publications include Aesthetic Hysteria: The Great Neurosis in Victorian Melodrama and Contemporary Fiction (Routledge, 2007), and the edited collections, A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture (Wiley, 2014), and After Lacan (Cambridge UP, 2018). She has published extensively in peer-reviewed literary journals and sits on the editorial boards of several international ones. She has been a research fellow of the British Academy, Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University, and the John Hinkley (Visiting) Professor at Johns Hopkins. Mukherjee is one of 150 world-renowned academics chosen to share their pioneering research on a new educational website and app titled "EXPeditions." Her recent projects include a co-edited volume, Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum (Cambridge UP), which will be published in 2023, and A Very Short Introduction to Postcolonial Literature, forthcoming in Oxford University Press's prestigious VSI series.

Session 1: World Literature as Anti-Colonial Rupture

• Rabindranath Tagore, “World Literature”
• Rabindranath Tagore, “The Components of Literature” and “The Significance of Literature"
• Supriya Chaudhuri, “Which World, Whose Literature?”

Session 2: Aesthetics, Politics, Value

• John T. Kirby, “The Great Books,
• James English, “Prizes and the Politics of World Culture”
• Sarah Brouillette, “Unesco’s Collection of Representative Works"

Session 3: What Is a Classic?

• T. S. Eliot, “What Is a Classic?”
• J. M. Coetzee, “What Is a Classic?”
• Ankhi Mukherjee, “What Is a Classic? International Literary Criticism and the Classic Question”

Session 4: Ruins Lesson

• Derek Walcott, “Ruins of a Great House”
• Maryse Condé, selections from Windward Heights
• Maryse Condé in interview with Emily Apter, “Crossover Texts/Creole Tongues”

Session 5: Ephemeral Effects, Diaspora

• Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World, Faber, 1986 (advance reading)
• Ishiguro, “Crooner”
• Rebecca Walkowitz, “Ishiguro’s Floating Worlds”

Session 6: The Question of Beauty

• Zadie Smith, On Beauty
• Zadie Smith, “Love, Actually”

Session 7: Black Matter as Text and Subtext

• Toni Morrison, “Black Matters”
• Teju Cole, “Black Body"
• Claudia Rankine, “Weather”

Session 8: Planetary World Classics

• Abdulrazak Gurnah, “The Wood of the Moon”
• Alexis Wright, selections from The Swan Book: A Novel
• Isabel Hofmeyr, “Universalizing the Indian Ocean”

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Jahan Ramazani, "Poetry and/as World Literature"

Although the novel has dominated much of the attention in studies of world literature, poetry is arguably more fully global, with long and rich histories in cultures and languages across the world. In this seminar, we will explore some of the rewards of, and impediments to, approaching poetry as world literature. The seminar will begin with an overview of concepts of, and recent developments in, the study of world literature. We will take up the debates about the translatability and untranslatability of world literature in relation to poetry, including issues of code-switching and multilingualism. We will consider how forms and genres of poetry, such as the elegy, the ghazal, and the sonnet, travel or take shape transnationally and transhistorically. We will tease apart varieties of the concept of the poem as world in relation to theories of literary world-making. We will study exemplary poems in relation to theoretical and historical debates around globalization. We will closely read postcolonial poetry from the global South as world poetry. And we will examine how poetry responds to the world-imperiling challenge of climate change. Stimulated by critical and theoretical texts, our discussions will reflect on poetry written in various languages, mostly modern and contemporary poems in English from around the world..

Jahan Ramazani, University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of Poetry in a Global Age (2020); Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres (2014); A Transnational Poetics (2009), winner of the Harry Levin Prize of the ACLA for the best book in comparative literary history (2008 to 2010); The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (2001); Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (1994), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime (1990). He is the editor of “Poetry and Race,” a special of New Literary History (2019), and of The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry (2017); a co-editor of the most recent editions of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (2003) and The Norton Anthology of English Literature (2006, 2012, 2018, 2024); and an associate editor of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012). Elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016, he is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEH Fellowship, a Rhodes Scholarship, the William Riley Parker Prize of the MLA, and an honorary doctorate from Aalborg University, Denmark.

Session 1: Varieties of World Literature

• Debjani Ganguli, Introduction to The Cambridge History of World Literature 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Session 2: Poetry, Translatability, and Untranslatablity

• Ezra Pound, from How To Read, in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968).
• Roman Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987).
• David Connolly, “Poetry Translation,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker (New York: Routledge, 1998).
• David Damrosch, from What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
• Paul Ricoeur, from On Translation, trans. Eileen Brennan (London: Routledge, 2006).
• Horace, Ode 1.5, in Odes and Epodes, ed. and trans. Niall Rudd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
• Li Bai and Ezra Pound, “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” “Lament of the Frontier Guard,” in Cathay: A Critical Edition, ed. Timothy Billings (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019).
• Rumi, Ghazal 1759, in Say Nothing: Poems of Jalal al-Din Rumi in Persian and English, trans. Iraj Anvar and Anne Twitty (Washington, DC: Morning Light Press, 2008).
• Christian Morgenstern, “Das aesthetische Wiesel,” in The Gallows Songs: Christian Morgenstern’s Galgenlieder,” trans. Max Knight (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966).
• T. S. Eliot, “Mélange Adultère de Tout,” in The Poems of T. S. Eliot, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015).
• Agha Shahid Ali, “Arabic” and “In Arabic,” in Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).
• Mai Der Vang, “Mother of People without Script,” Afterland (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2017).

Session 3: Global Poetic Forms and Genres

• Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature” and from “More Conjectures,” in Distant Reading.
• Edward Hirsch, “Elegy,” in How To Read a Poem (New York: Harcourt, 1999).
• excerpts of global elegiac poetry in Edward Hirsch, Gabriel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014).
• Poem: Sa‘di’s elegy for his son, with translations and commentary by Ahmed Sudi, Joseph von Hammer, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
• F. D. Lewis, “Ghazal,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed., ed. Roland Greene, Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, and Paul Rouzer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
• Poems: Agha Shahid Ali, “Tonight,” in Call Me Ishmael Tonight, 82-83; Patricia Smith, “Hip-Hop Ghazal,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/49642/hip-hop-ghazal; Evie Shockley, “where you are planted,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55669/where-you-are-planted
• T. V. F. Brogan, L. J. Xillman; C. Scott; J. Lewin, “Sonnet,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed., ed. Roland Greene, Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, and Paul Rouzer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
• Poems: Gwendolyn Brooks, “the rites for cousin vit,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51983/the-rites-for-cousin-vit; Terrance Hayes, “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/143917/american-sonnet-for-my-past-and-future-assassin-598dc83c976f1; Agha Shahid Ali, “Postcard from Kashmir,” https://www.jstor.org/stable/23005779; Billy Collins, “American Sonnet,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=37394

Session 4: Poetry’s Worlding of the World

• M. H. Abrams, “Types and Orientations of Critical Theories,” in Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Theory (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989).
• W. H. Auden, Secondary Worlds (New York: Random House, 1968).
• Ayesha Ramachandran, The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
• Pheng Cheah, from What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
• Eric Hayot, “Does Poetry Make Worlds?,” in Ganguly, ed., The Cambridge History of World Literature.
• Eva Zettelmann, “Apostrophe, Speaker Projection, and Lyric World Building,” review of Theory of the Lyric by Jonathan Culler, Poetics Today 38, no. 1 (2017).
• Wallace Stevens, “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain” and “The Planet on the Table,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America–Penguin Random House, 1997).
• Margaret Atwood, [“you fit into me”], in Selected Poems: 1965-1975 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976.
• K. Ramanujan, “Alien,” in The Collected Poems of A. K. Ramanujan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995.
• Patience Agbabi, “Prologue,” in Transformatrix (Edinburgh: Payback Press–Canongate, 2000).

Session 5: Globalization: Theory, History, Poem

• Paul Jay, Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010).
• Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
• Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Contamination,” in Cosmopolitanism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).
• Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Globalization: A Short History, trans. Dona Geyer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
• Poem: T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, https://wasteland.windingway.org/  

Session 6: Postcolonial Poetry as World Poetry (1)

• Stefan Helgesson, “Postcolonialism and World Literature: Rethinking the Boundaries,” interventions, vol. 16, no. 4..
• Headnotes and poems from The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry 3^rd ed., ed. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), vol. 2:
• Derek Walcott, “A Far Cry from Africa,” “The Sea Is History", “The Schooner Flight
• Kamau Brathwaite, “Wings of a Dove,” “Calypso,” 548-49, “Ogun," “Stone."
• Louise Bennett, “No Lickle Twang,” “Dry-Foot Bwoy,” “Colonization in Reverse,” “Jamaica Oman,” "Jamaica Language."
• Lorna Goodison, “On Becoming a Mermaid,” “Guinea Woman,” “Nanny,”  “Annie Pengelly."

Session 7: Postcolonial Poetry as World Poetry (2)

• Okot p’Bitek, from Song of Lawino.
• Christopher Okigbo, from “Heavensgate”: [“Before You, Mother Idoto”], [“Dark Waters of the Beginning”], [“Bright”] [“I Am Standing above the Noontide”], “Come Thunder.”
• K. Ramanujan, “Self-Portrait,” “Elements of Composition,” “Alien,” “Extended Family,” “Chicago Zen,”  “Foundlings in the Yukon,” “Where Mirrors Are Windows: Toward an Anthology of Reflections.”
• Agha Shahid Ali,“Postcard from Kashmir,” “The Dacca Gauzes,”  “I See Chile in My Rearview Mirror,” “The Country without a Post Office,” 894-96, “Lenox Hill.”

Session 8: A World Imperiled: Poetry and Climate Change

• Margaret Ronda, Remainders: American Poetry at Nature’s End (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018).
• Seamus Heaney, “Höfn”; Peter Reading, “Clockwise (from the bottom),”; Patience Agbabi, “ECO2nomics”; Vahni Capildeo, “The Book of Dreams/Livre de Cauchemars,” VI; Pascale Petit, “Rainforest in the Sleep Room”; Simon Armitage, “Ark”; Ed Roberson, “To See the Earth Before the End of the World,” “asked what has changed”; Craig Santos Perez, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier”; Jorie Graham, “Dawn 2040”
• Video poem: Rise, directed by Dan Lin, poem written and narrated by Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Aka Niviâna (Dan Lin Media, 2018), https://350.org/rise-from-one-island-to-another/#poem

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Galin Tihanov, "Exilic Writing and the Making of World Literature"

This course is about the centrality of exile and exilic writing in the making of world literature. Not only is writing about exile a specific mode of producing a particular version of the world; it is also a way of thinking about movement, mediations, transfers, and boundaries. Crucially, exile is one of the foundational discourses of modernity that interrogates memory, identity, and language. Today’s notion of world literature is inseparable from a transnational and cosmopolitan perspective, which is intimately – and in a characteristically contradictory manner –linked to exilic experiences and the practice of exilic writing. In this course, we will analyse artefacts (literature, but also some paintings, two texts which fall in the genre of “philosophy of history”, a play, and a film) by European, Indian, Japanese, and American authors in order to begin to think about how exile and exilic writing have been inscribed in the very notion of world literature with which we work today.

Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He has held visiting professorships at universities in Europe, North and South America, and Asia. He is the author of six books, including The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond (Stanford UP, 2019) which won the 2020 AATSEEL Prize for “best book in literary studies”. Tihanov has been elected to the British Academy (2021) and to Academia Europaea (2012). He serves on the Executive Board of the Institute for World Literature at Harvard University and as Honorary Scientific Advisor to the Institute of Foreign Literatures, CASS, Beijing; he is also Past President of the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory. His current work is on world literature, cosmopolitanism, and exile.

Session 1: Exotopy and Inbetweenness

• Verse selections from the Bible (Psalm 137, “By the rivers of Babylon…”); Ovid, “Tristia” and “Ex Ponto”; and Agha Shahid Ali, “When on Route 80 in Ohio”, in Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate, ed. A. Kumar, New York: Routledge, 2004.
• Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000, Ch. 17, “Reflections on Exile” (1984).
• Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees”, in H. Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, New York: Grove, 1978.
• Giorgio Agamben. "We Refugees", Symposium, 1995, No. 49 (2).
• Paulo Bartoloni, On the Cultures of Exile, Translation, and Writing. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2008.

Session 2: Memory and the Languages of Exile

• Viewing of selected paintings by Marc Chagall
• Marc Chagall, My Life, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.
• Benjamin Harshav, Marc Chagall and the Lost Jewish World, New York: Rizzoli, 2006.
• Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin, Lonodn: Heinemann, 1957, Ch. 1.
• Bryan Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, London: Vintage, 1993.

Session 3: Exilic Cosmopolitanism

• Eugene Ionesco, The Bald Prima Dona, in: Ionesco, Plays, Vol. 1, trans. Donald Watson, London: Calder, 1958.
• Eugene Ionesco, Notes and Counter-Notes, trans. Donald Watson, London: Calder, 1964.
• David Damrosch, “Auerbach in Exile”, Comparative Literature, 1995, 47, No. 2.
• Galin Tihanov, “Why Did Modern Literary Theory Originate in Central and Eastern Europe? (And Why Is It Now Dead?)”, Common Knowledge, 2004, Vol. 10, No. 1.

Session 4: Exilic Anti-Cosmopolitanism

• Nikolai Trubetskoi, “Europe and Mankind”, in Nikolai Trubetzkoy, The Legacy of Genghis Khan, Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1991.
• Petr Savitskii, “A Turn to the East”, in Exodus to the East. Forebodings and Events: An Affirmation of the Eurasians, Idyllwild, CA: Charles Schlacks, 1996 [originally published in Russian, 1921].
• N. Riasanovsky, “The Emergence of Eurasianism”, in Exodus to the East. Forebodings and Events: An Affirmation of the Eurasians, Idyllwild, CA: Charles Schlacks, 1996.

Session 5: The Affective Economy of Exile

• Krzysztof Kieslowski, Three Colours: White (1994).
• Emma Wilson, Memory and Survival: The French Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski, Oxford: Legenda, 2000.
• Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, New York: Harvester & Wheatsheaf, 1991.

Session 6: De-Romanticizing Exile

• Mori Ogai, “The Boat on the River Takase”, in The Historical Literature of Mori Ogai, ed. R. Bowring et al., Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1977, Vol. 1 (The Incident at Sakai, and Other Stories).
• Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, trans. Ralph Parker, London: Penguin, 1963.
• Galin Tihanov, “Narratives of Exile: Cosmopolitanism Beyond the Liberal Imagination”, in Whose Cosmopolitanism? Critical Perspectives, Relationalities and Discontents, ed. N. Glick Schiller and A. Irving, New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2015.

Session 7: Homecomers and Boomerangs

• Milan Kundera, Ignorance, trans. Linda Asher, London: Faber & Faber, 2002.
• V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River, London: Penguin, 1979.
• Fiona Doloughan, “The myth of the great return: memory, longing and forgetting in Milan Kundera's Ignorance”, in: Creativity in Exile, ed. Michael Hanne, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004.

Session 8: Reflective Epilogue

In this session, we build upon our discussions of the texts in Weeks 1-7 to revisit the centrality of exile in the making of world literature as a concept and practice. Questions of language, memory, identity, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism – and how they relate to one another – are once again in the spotlight, this time with the purpose of drawing some tentative conclusions while engendering a productive uncertainty about the epistemological status of these notions.

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Delia Ungureanu, "The Undiscovered Country: Visionaries of Another World"

Delia Ungureanu  is Associate Director of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature and associate professor of literary theory in the Department of Literary Studies at the University of Bucharest. She is the author of Time Regained: World Literature and Cinema (2021), From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature (2017), and Poetica Apocalipsei: Războiul cultural în revistele literare românești (1944–1947) (The Poetics of Apocalypse: The cultural war in Romanian literary magazines, 1944-1947, 2012). She has published essays on the transmedial world circulation of ideas and the global spread of surrealism. She has co-edited special issues of the Journal of World Literature on "Romanian Literature in Today's World" (2018, with Thomas Pavel), on the legacy of Pascale Casanova (2020, with Gisèle Sapiro), and on world literature and world cinema (2021, with Michael Wood).

Session 1: The revolutionary power of soliloquies, or How to out time back into joint

• Shakespeare, Hamlet. The soliloquies.
• Greg Doran, Hamlet, RSC production, 2009.
• “Interpreting Shakespeare: An Interview with Gregory Doran.” February 13, 2013, theoxfordculturereview.
• Martin Puchner, “Teaching Worldly Literature.”
• Andrei Tarkovsky on Hamlet from Time within Time.

Session 2: Our Future World Is in the Past. Masculine Writing, Feminine Vision: Shakespeare in Purgatory

• Hamlet, Gravediggers scene.
• Kenneth Branagh, All Is True.
• Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own. Selections.
• David Damrosch, “Worlds” from Comparing the Literatures .

Session 3: The revolutionary power of exile and (near-) death experiences (I)

• Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot. Selections.
• Fyodor Dostoevsky, selections from A Writer’s Diary. Vol. I: 1873-1876.
• Akira Kurosawa, Hakuchi (The Idiot), 1951.
• Joseph Frank, from Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years: 1865-1871.
• An account of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by a survivor, “Fire in the Sky.” In The Penguin Book of Hell.
• Pascale Casanova, from The World Republic of Letters.

Session 4: The revolutionary power of exile and (near-) death experiences (II)

• Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot. Selections.
• Fyodor Dostoevsky, selections from A Writer’s Diary. Vol. I: 1873-1876.
• Andrzej Wajda, Nastazja (1994), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMnLyEByq7g&t=2961s
• Andrzej Wajda, “Artist as Politician: An Interview”.
• Takashi Wada, “Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot” .
• Virginia Woolf, The Russian Point of View and On Cinema.

Session 5: Solitude and the Birth of Revolutionary Ideas: The Androgynous Mind

• Virginia Woolf, Orlando. Selections.
• Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway. Selections.
• Mircea Cărtărescu, Gemini. Selections.
• Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own. Selections.

Session 6: Is there life after the death camps? Surviving through storytelling, the End of the World, and a New Life

• Dante,The Divine Comedy. Selections.
• Primo Levi, “The Canto of Ulysses.” In If This Is a Man.
• Viktor Frankl, selections from Experiences in a Concentration Camp [Auschwitz] or Man’s Search for Meaning.

Session 7: “There is no gate, no lock, no bolt, that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” The illuminating power of solitude: from a room of one’s own to the prison cell

• Ahmet Altan, I Will Never See the World Again. Selections.
• Ahmet Altan, “I prefer prison to exile”. Interview, 2021.
• Montaigne, “On Solitude.” Selections.
• Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1928). Selections.

Session 8: Voyaging in my mind’s eye: Postman Ferdinand Cheval, the visionary of another world

• Nils Tavernier, L’Incroyable Histoire du Facteur Cheval (2019). (film)
• André Breton, Facteur Cheval (poem).
• André Breton, The Automatic Message.
• Seneca, Letter 88 and Letter 90.

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Karen Van Dyck, "Diaspora, Multilingualism, Translation"

Moving between different languages and alphabets is a constitutive aspect of the diasporic experience. To remember or forget the mother tongue, to mix up two or more languages, to transcribe one writing system onto another are all modes of negotiating geographical displacement. This seminar will approach world literature from the perspective of comparative diaspora studies and translation studies. Readings will be from literary texts that address journeys between places and languages, as well as from scholarship on diaspora and translation that has emerged over the past two decades, focusing on the central issue of language in relation to migration, exile, and imagined community. Case studies consider how any consideration of diaspora requires an exploration of  overlapping languages, literatures, and cultures, entailing a confrontation with multilingualism, creolization and the problem of translation. Writers and translators include Olga Broumas, C.P. Cavafy, Kay Cicellis, Patrick Chamoiseau, Juno Diaz, Xiaolu Guo, George Seferis, Mehmet Yashin, and Louis Zukofsky. Theorists and commentators include Walter Benjamin, Rey Chow, Frantz Fanon, Vicente Rafael, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o.

Karen Van Dyck is the Kimon A. Doukas Chair of Modern Greek Language and Literature in the Classics department at Columbia University. Her research focuses on issues of translation, migration, and gender. The founding director of Hellenic Studies at Columbia, she has also been a member of the Institute for Research on Women, Sexuality and Gender, the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society, the Institute for Ideas & Imagination, and the Istanbul and Athens Global Centers. Her books include the study Kassandra and the Censors: Greek Poetry since 1967 (Cornell UP, 1998), the anthology Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry (Penguin Books, 2016), and translations of Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke’s poetry, The Scattered Papers of Penelope (Graywolf, 2009), and of Margarita Liberaki’s novel Three Summers (New York Review Books, 2019). She was among the co-editors of The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present (Norton, 2010). Her work has been supported by agencies such as the ACLS, the Fulbright, the NEA, and the American Academy in Rome. 

Session 1: Beginning with O, the O-mega

• Olga Broumas, “Artemis,” Beginning with O .
• C. P. Cavafy, “Ithaki” [Ithaca], translated by Rae Dalven, George Economou and Stavros Deligiorgis, Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, Christina Lazaridi, Evan Jones, John Mavrogordato, Daniel Mendelsohn, Desmond O’Grady, George Vlassopoulos.
• Sherry Simon, “NO MAN’S LAND: The step-mother tongue and the Dead Zone, Cyprus”.
• Lawrence Venuti, “Introduction: Conditions of Possibility” and “How to Read a Translation.”
• Recommended:: Brent Hayes Edwards, “Langston Hughes and the Futures of Diaspora.”

Session 2: Comparative Diasporas and Translation

• Kay Cicellis, “Translation”.
• Walter Benjamin, “The Translator’s Task.”
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Politics of Translation."
• Recommended: Rey Chow, "Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience."

Session 3: Multilingualism, Diglossia and the Language Question

• Yannis Psycharis, “Cabinet de lecture" and excerpts from My Journey.
• Alexandros Papadiamantis, “The American.”
• Edward Said, “Intellectual Exiles: Expatriates and Marginals.”
• Recommended: Hannah Wirth Nesher, “Afterword” to Call it Sleep by Henry Roth.

Session 4: Empire and the Inequality of Languages

• George Seferis, “Me ton tropo tou G. S.” 
• Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “What is a Minor Literature?”  
• Frantz Fanon, “The Negro and Language.”
• Recommended: Karen Van Dyck, “Xenitia, the Nation, and Intralingual Translation."

Session 5: Orality, Literacy and Language Learning

• Xiaolu Guo, selection from I am China.
• Thanasis Valtinos, “The Book of Andreas Kordopatis: First Part, America.”
• Karen Van Dyck, “Migration, Translingualism, Translation.”
• Recommended: Vicente Rafael, “Translation, American English, and the National Insecurities of Empire.”

Session 6: Transliteration and Indigenization

• Amos Tutuola, selections from The Palm-Wine Drinkard.
• Irini Spanidou, "A Crow" and "Bitch" from God’s Snake.
• Chinua Achebe, “English and the African Writer.”
• Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, “The Language of African Literature.”
• Recommended: Michael C. Onwuemene, “Limits of Transliteration: Nigerian Writers' Endeavors toward a National Literary Language."

Session 7: Annotation and Creolization

• Sotiris Dimitriou, selections from May Your Name Be Blessed.
• Patrick Chamoiseau, selections from Texaco.
• Juno Diaz, selections from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
• Chantal Zabus, “The Ancestor of Relexification.”
• Recommended: Glenda R. Carpio, “Migrant Aesthetics.”

Session 8: Homophony and Radical Translation

• Olga Broumas, selected poems and translations, Rave and Eros, Eros, Eros.
• Harryette Mullen, “Sapphire’s lyre styles.”
• M. NourbeSe Philip, selections from Zong!
• Catullus, #56 and #70.
• Jazra Khaleed, “Fuck the Armageddon” and other translations from Austerity Measures.
• Recommended: Charles Bernstein, “Breaking the Translation Curtain: The Homophonic Sublime.”