July 13 – 23

Thomas Claviez, Conceptualizing Cosmopolitanism and World Literature: A Critical Survey

Our seminar will focus upon a critical reading of what will be exclusively theoretical texts. Ever so often, critical concepts that are currently "fashionable" on the intellectual marketplace are appropriated and used in a rather unreflected manner – be it some philosophical giant, such as Immanuel Kant, or a "famous" researcher that dominates the contemporary scene. With the help of a few guiding questions for each of the texts read, the seminar will try to create a critical awareness about the presuppositions, the argumentation, and the implied consequences these approaches entail. This is indispensable in order to know where these texts can lead you as far as readings go, and where the blind spot and unreflected biases are that any theoretical approach entails. As both the concepts of Cosmopolitanism and World Literature revolve around a main binary – that between sameness and difference – we will try to locate instances where these binaries appear, and how they are being designated and used for the purpose at hand. This seminar, thus, is geared toward students/scholars who want to question current – and their own – assumptions about canonized texts within the debates of Cosmopolitanism and World Literature, and to find out more about the connections between the two.

Thomas seminar 2023

Thomas Claviez is Professor for Literary Theory and Co-Director of the Center for Global Studies (CGS) at the University of Bern, where he is responsible for the MA program “World Literature.” He is the author of Grenzfälle: Mythos – Ideologie – American Studies (1998) and Aesthetics & Ethics: Moral Imagination from Aristotle to Levinas and from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to House Made of Dawn (2008), and the co-author, with Dietmar Wetzel, of Zur Aktualität von Jacques Rancière (2016). He is the editor of The Common Growl (2016) and The Conditions of Hospitality: Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics on the Threshold of the Possible (2015). He has also co-edited several volumes: “Mirror Writing”: (Re-)Constructions of Native American Identity (2000) (with Maria Moss), Theories of American Studies/Theories of American Culture, REAL-Band Nr. 19 (2003) (with Winfried Fluck), Neo-Realism: Between Innovation and Continuation, special issue of Amerikastudie /American Studies (2004) (with Maria Moss), Aesthetic Transgressions: Modernity, Liberalism, and the Function of Literature (2006) (with Ulla Haselstein and Sieglinde Lemke), and Critique of Authenticity (2020) (with Britta Sweers and Kornelia Imesch). He has published widely on issues of community, recognition, literary theory, and moral philosophy. Among his most recent essays are: “A Critique of Authenticity and Recognition” (Critique of Authenticity, 2020), “Neorealism, Contingency, and the Linguistic Turn” (Humanities, 2019), “Where Are Jacques and Ernesto When You Need Them? Rancière and Laclau on Populism, Experts and Contingenc” (Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2019), “Melville, Whitman, and Metonymy: Towards a New Poetics of Community” (Textual Practice, 2019), “A Metonymic Community? Toward a Poetics of Contingency” (The Common Growl, 2016), and “Traces of a Metonymic Society in American Literary History” (American Studies Today, 2015).

PART I: COSMOPOLITANISM

Session 1: The History of Cosmopolitanism

Session 2: The Birth of Nationalism

  • Johann Gottfried Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind. Trans. T.O. Churchill.
  • Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities.

Session 3: Liberal Interpretations of Cosmopolitanism: The Problem of Universalism

  • Martha C. Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism.”
  • Judith Butler, “Universality in Culture.”
  • Martha C. Nussbaum, “Reply.”
  • Ulrich Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision. Trans. Ciaran Cronin.

Session 4: Whose Cosmopolitanism? Cosmopolitanism and the Other

  • Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being. Trans. Alphonso Lingis.
  • Emmanuel Levinas,  Ethics and Infinity. Trans. Richard A. Cohen.
  • Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Trans. Mark Dooley & Michael Hughes.

Session 5: Alternative Communities – Alternative Stories?

  • Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community. Trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, Simona Sawhney.
  • Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community.  Trans. Michael Hardt.

PART II: WORLD LITERATURE

Session 6: Origins of World Literature: Goethe to Auerbach

  • Erich Auerbach, “The Philology of World Literature.” Trans. Jane O. Newman.
  • Pheng Cheah, “What is a World? On World Literature as World-Making Activity.” 

Session 7: World Literature or the World of Literature? Hegemonic and Modernist Approaches

  • Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature.”
  • Franco Moretti, “More Conjectures.”
  • Jessica Berman, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community. 

Session 8: Travellin' Books

  • David Damrosch, What Is World Literature?
  • David Damrosch, “Script Worlds, Writing Systems, and the Formation of World Literature.” 

David Damrosch, "Globalization and Its Discontents"

This seminar will trace the problematic of global world literature over the course of the modern period, looking at the rise of capitalist markets, the shifting of centers, peripheries, and semi-peripheries, and the interplay of empires and broader global frameworks in the age of (semi-)global English. Works by Molière, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, James Joyce, Higuchi Ichiyo, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Clarice Lispector, Eileen Chang, Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Ang Lee will be explored in light of debates over world literature and globalization from Goethe and Auerbach to contemporary scholars including Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti, Emily Apter, Shu-mei Shih, and the Warwick Research Collective.

David 2022

David Damrosch is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University and Chair of the Executive Committee of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature. His books include What Is World Literature? (2003), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007), How to Read World Literature(2d. ed. 2017), and Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age (2020). He is the general editor of the six-volume Longman anthologies of British Literature and of World Literature, editor of World Literature in Theory (2014), and co-editor of The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature, and of two collections in Chinese, Theories of World Literature (2013) and New Directions in Comparative Literature (2010).

Proto-globalization

Session 1: World Literature(s)/Weltliteratur(en)

  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, from Conversations with Eckermann
  • Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett, “World-literature”
  • Erich Auerbach, “Philology of World Literature”
  • Selections from Apuleius, Hafiz, and Goethe

Session 2: Comparing the Incomparable

  • Marcel Detienne, “Constructing Comparables”
  • Sheldon Pollock, "Comparison without Hegemony"
  • Molière, from The Bourgeois Gentilhomme
  • Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Love Suicides at Amijima

Shifting Centers:

Session 3: Peripheries and Semi-peripheries

  • Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature” and “More Conjectures”
  • Critiques of Moretti by the Warwick Research Collective
  • Higuchi Ichiyo, “Separate Ways”
  • James Joyce, “The Sisters,” “Eveline”
  • Clarice Lispector, “Happy Birthday”

Session 4: Provincializing Europe

  • Pascale Casanova, “Literature, Nation, and Politics”
  • Oswald de Andrade, “The Anthropophagist Manifesto”
  • Jorge Luis Borges, “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” “Pierre Menard”
  • Julio Cortázar, “Axolotl”
  • Clarice Lispector, “The Fifth Story”

Translation in the Global Market

Session 5: The Uneven Playing Field

  • Georg Brandes, “World Literature”
  • Jorge Luis Borges, “The Translators of the 1001 Nights”
  • Emily Apter, “Untranslatables: A World System”
  • Selections from translations of The Thousand and One Nights

Session 6: Making a World Author

  • Stephen Owen, “What Is World Poetry?”; “Stepping Forward and Back”
  • Selections from Wu Cheng’en, Bei Dao, and Mo Yan

Born Global

Session 7: The Politics of Global English

  • Gillian Lane-Mercer, “Global and Local Languages”
  • Rebecca Walkowitz, from Born Translated
  • Salman Rushdie, “Chekov and Zulu”
  • Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Third and Final Continent”
  • Jamyang Norbu, from The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes

Session 8: From Shanghai to Hollywood

  • Eileen Chang, “Lust, Caution”
  • Ang Lee, Lust, Caution
  • Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution and Its Reception”

Stefano Evangelista, Writing Cosmopolitanism: World Literature, World Citizenship

The word cosmopolitanism derives from the ancient Greek for ‘world citizenship’. In modern times, it has come to denote the aspiration to transcend the political, cultural and linguistic boundaries of the nation, in order to envisage oneself instead in relation to a global community. This seminar aims to provide a critical investigation of the cosmopolitan ideal and its intersections with world literature. We will address different ways in which cosmopolitanism has been theorised, debated, practised, attacked and defended, and how ideas of world citizenship have shaped literary texts. We will explore cosmopolitanism’s complex and sometimes fraught relationship with ideas of nationalism and globalisation, and how it is affected by gender and social identities. Texts covered by the seminar range from Immanuel Kant’s foundational philosophical writings to the present.

Stefano Evangelista 2

Stefano Evangelista is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Oxford University. He specialises in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century literature, with a particular interest in word-image relations, the reception of European classical antiquity, and the translation and transnational mobility of literary texts. His publications include British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (2009) and Citizens of Nowhere: Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle (2021). He is currently the recipient of an Einstein Visiting Fellowship at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where he leads a project on literary cosmopolitanism in Berlin ("Boundaries of Cosmopolis") together with Professor Gesa Stedman.

Session 1: World Literature, World Citizenship

  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "On World Literature." Trans. John Oxenford.
  • Immanuel Kant, "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose." Trans. Rob Lucas.
  • Zhang Longxi, "The Challenge of Writing a World Literary History."

Session 2: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism

  • Kwame Anthony Appiah, "Cosmopolitan Patriots."
  • Rabindranath Tagore, "Nationalism in India."
  • Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas.

Session 3: World Capitals 1 (Paris)

  • Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life." Trans. Jonathan Mayne.
  • Walter Benjamin, "Paris, Capital of the nineteenth Century." Trans. Edmund Jephcott.
  • Pascale Casanova, "Literature as a World." Trans. David L. Palter.

Session 4: World Capitals 1 (Berlin)

  • Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin.
  • Franz Hassel, Walking in Berlin. Trans. Amanda DeMarco.
  • Yasemin Yildiz, "Berlin as a Migratory Setting."

Session 5: National Writers and World Authorship

  • Horace Engdahl, "Canonization and World Literature: The Nobel Experience."
  • Fedor Dostoevsky, "Pushkin Speech." Trans. Sona Stephan Hoisington and Walter Arndt.
  • Haruki Murakami, "Akutagawa Ryūnosuke: Downfall of the Chosen."

Session 6: Cosmopolitanism and Nostalgia

  • C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Trans. Evangelos Sachperoglou.
  • Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday. Trans. Anthea Bell.
  • Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands.

Session 7: The Love of Strangers

  • Georg Simmel, "The Stranger." Trans. Kurt H. Wolff.
  • Lafcadio Hearn, "A Street Singer."
  • Katherine Mansfield, "The Little Governess."

Session 8: Precarious Identities

  • George Eliot, Daniel Deronda.
  • Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, "The Handkerchief." Trans. Glenn W. Shaw.

Francesca Orsini, The Magazine and World Literature

Much of the debate on world literature has revolved around anthologies and book series, or else the curriculum and teaching of world literature courses (e.g. Mani's Recoding World Literature, Damrosch’s Teaching World Literature). Yet in many places and for many readers, exposure to literatures from other parts of the world largely took place through magazines. It was in magazines that foreign texts and writers first appeared, and were reviewed and discussed. And while scholarship (like Boulson’s Little Magazine, World Form) has focused on avantgarde little magazines and their networks, this course will consider a wider range of “thick” and “little,” literary, commercial, and middlebrow magazines, and ask: What kind of experience of world literature do magazines create? Which of the different versions of world literature—the world's classics; the best of X literature; the latest and contemporary; literatures of similar political affiliation—does each of these magazines convey? Does their reliance on short forms—the review, the short note, the poem, the story, flash fiction, abridgements, etc.—and on fragmentary, serendipitous, and sometimes token offerings produce a specific experience of world literature? And how is such an experience different from the more systematic ambition of the book series and the course? The course aims to: offer conceptual tools and practical examples for the study of magazines; expand our discussion on world literature to consider the crucial role of magazines; and analyse particular configurations, visions, and experiences of world literature that different magazines produce. Participants will be encouraged to explore magazines in the languages they work with. You may want to watch some of the Magazine and World Literature webinars (which has more visual examples).

Francesca 2

Francesca Orsini is a literary historian interested in bringing a located and multilingual perspective to Indian literary history and world literature. She is the author of The Hindi Public Sphere (2002), Print and Pleasure (2009), and East of Delhi: Multilingual literary culture and world literature (2023), and the editor of, among others, Love in South Asia: A Cultural History (2006), Hinglish Live (2022, with Ravikant), and The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form (2022, with Neelam Srivastava and Laetitia Zecchini). She co-edits with Debjani Ganguly the series Cambridge Studies in World Literatures and Cultures, and with Whitney Cox the forthcoming Cambridge History of Indian Literature. She is Professor emerita of Hindi and South Asian Literature at SOAS, University of London, and a Fellow of the British Academy.

Session 1: How to Study Periodicals? 

  • Eric Boulson, “Introduction,” Little Magazine, World Form.
  • Michel Hockx, “The Collective Author and the Horizontal Reader: Aesthetic dimensions of literary journals.”
  • Caroline Levine, “Forms, Literary and Social."

Case studies:

Session 2: Europe, Orientalism, and World literature

  • Francesca Orsini, “Present Absence: Book circulation, Indian vernaculars and world literature in the nineteenth century.”
  • David Damrosch, “Hugo Meltzl and “the principle of polyglottism.”

Case studies:

Trübner’s American & Oriental Literary Record (1865-69) pdf to be circulated

Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum (1879) on Internet Archive

search for William Jones in German magazines

Session 3: Cut & Paste in journals

  • Isabel Hofmeyr & Derek R. Peterson, “The Politics of the Page: Tracking Print Culture in African Studies.”
  • Francesca Orsini, “World literature, Indian views, 1920s–1940s.”
  • Margery Sabin, “Ramanand Reviewed.” 

Case study:

The Modern Review (1909-) on Internet Archive

Session 4: Modernist Magazines

  • Eric Boulson, Little Magazine, World Form.
  • Stefan Helgesson, "The little magazine as a world-making form: Literary distance and political contestation in southern African journals."

Session 5: Magazines and planned world literature (Soviet Russia, China, GDR)

  • Venkat Mani, "The Reading Nation: World Literature in the Postwar GDR."
  • Paola Iovene, “Translation Zones: Anticipating World Literature in Socialist China.”

Case study:

Der Bücherkarren, 1958 .

Session 6: Cold War, Decolonization, and Afro-Asian Literatures

  • Hala Halim, “Lotus, the Afro-Asian Nexus, and Global South Comparatism”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 32.3 (2012).
  • Peter Kalliney, “Indigeneity and Internationalism: Soviet Diplomacy and Afro-Asian Literature.”

Case study:

 Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings (1967–1991).

Session 7: World literature as a special issue

  • Francesca Orsini, "World Literature as a Special Issue”, Journal of World Literature 8.2 (2023).
  • Jennifer Dubrow, “Looking East: Japan, Saqi, and the World of Urdu Modernism in 1930s South Asia”.

Case studies:

Sarika and Saqi (in Urdu).

 

Session 8: From Print to Online

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.

GalinTihanov

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. Tihanov is the author of seven books, including The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond (Stanford UP, 2019) which won the 2020 AATSEEL Book Prize for “best book in literary studies”. World Literature in the Soviet Union (ASP, 2023), of which Tihanov is the lead editor, received the 2024 AATSEEL Book Prize for “best edited multi-author scholarly volume”. He 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, as well as on the advisory boards of universities and foundations in the United States, China, Germany, and other countries. 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…”). ESV Standard version, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%20137&version=ESV
  • Ovid, “Tristia” and “Ex Ponto". Trans. Arthur Leslie Wheeler.
  • Agha Shahid Ali, “When on Route 80 in Ohio.”
  • Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile.”
  • Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees.”
  • Giorgio Agamben. "We Refugees." Trans. Michael Rocke.
  • Paulo Bartoloni, On the Cultures of Exile, Translation, and Writing. 

Session 2: Memory and the Languages of Exile

  • Viewing of selected paintings by Marc Chagall.
  • Marc Chagall, My Life. Trans. David. Williams.
  • Benjamin Harshav, Marc Chagall and the Lost Jewish World. Trans. Barbara Harshav and Benjamin Harshav.
  • Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin.
  • Bryan Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years.

Session 3: Exilic Cosmopolitanism

  • Eugène Ionesco, The Bald Prima Dona. Trans. Donald Watson.
  • Eugène Ionesco, Notes and Counter-Notes. Trans. Donald Watson.
  • David Damrosch, “Auerbach in Exile.”
  • Galin Tihanov, “Why Did Modern Literary Theory Originate in Central and Eastern Europe? (And Why Is It Now Dead?).”

Session 4: Exilic Anti-Cosmopolitanism

  • Nikolai Trubetskoi, “Europe and Mankind.” Trans. Anatoly Liberman.
  • Petr Savitskii, “A Turn to the East.” Trans. Ilya Vinkovetsky.
  • N. Riasanovsky, “The Emergence of Eurasianism.”

Session 5: The Affective Economy of Exile

  • Krzysztof Kieslowski, Three Colours: White (film).
  • Emma Wilson, Memory and Survival: The French Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski.
  • Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves.

Session 6: De-Romanticizing Exile

  • Mori Ogai, “The Boat on the River Takase.” Trans. Edmund Skrzypczak.
  • Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Trans. Ralph Parker.
  • Galin Tihanov, “Narratives of Exile: Cosmopolitanism Beyond the Liberal Imagination.”

Session 7: Homecomers and Boomerangs

  • Milan Kundera, Ignorance. Trans. Linda Asher.
  • V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River.
  • Fiona Doloughan, “The myth of the great return: memory, longing and forgetting in Milan Kundera's Ignorance”.

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.

Delia Ungureanu, The Undiscovered Country: Visionaries of Another World

Over the past thirty years, world literature scholars have attempted in various ways and with different theoretical instruments – from comparative literature to sociology, translation and postcolonial studies – to conceptualize the “world” in their object of study and discipline. While writers have often portrayed “the way of the world” as it is, and scholars have mapped the worldly circulations of works, other artists and scholars have been concerned “not to describe the world but to change it,” as Pheng Cheah says in his book What Is a World? (2016). Using Martin Puchner’s notion of world literature as revolutionary literature that can change the world, together with Pascale Casanova’s concept of revolutionary periphery and the exception that changes the stake of the game, this seminar will look at world writers and film makers who have sought to portray a world yet to come -- possible worlds that aim at correcting, expanding, or radically changing the world as we know it. We often think of world-changing movements as collective, but revolutionary ideas are often born in solitude, whether by dreamers, visionaries, exiles, political prisoners, or people on the margins of their society. As Harold Bloom argues, it’s the soliloquy that holds the revolutionary power to change the world.

Using primary works from early modernity to the present, this seminar will examine visionary literature and films that seek to restore, rebuild, correct or expand our notion of the world. We will learn that visionaries look into the past, as well as into the future: from Hamlet’s prison house that becomes a world of surveillance in Greg Doran’s contemporary film of Hamlet; from Dostoevsky’s exile and near-death experiences that reverberate in Akira Kurosawa’s postwar Japan and Andrzej Wajda’s post-Communist Poland, from Primo Levi and Viktor Frankl’s Auschwitz memoirs, from Mircea Cărtărescu’s dream world born during the worst hours of Romanian Communism, from Erdogan’s prisons in Ahmet Altan’s survival essays, or from a secluded corner in provincial France that brings the world home in Facteur Cheval’s construction of the Ideal Palace. Our readings and films will be framed with theoretical works by Pascale Casanova, David Damrosch, Martin Puchner, and Andrei Tarkovsky, as well as with essays by Montaigne, Woolf, and André Breton, and Seneca’s letters.

 

Delia July 2025

Delia Ungureanu is Executive 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).

 

Epigraph: Shakespeare, Sonnet XXVII.

Recommended advance reading: Mircea Cărtărescu, Gemini. 

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. Trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair.

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. Trans. Alan Myers.
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky, selections from A Writer’s Diary. Vol. I: 1873-1876. Trans. Kenneth Lantz.
  • 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. Trans. Scott G. Bruce.
  • 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. Trans. Alan Myers.
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky, selections from A Writer’s Diary. Vol. I: 1873-1876. Trans. Kenneth Lantz.
  • Andrzej Wajda, Nastazja (1994), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMnLyEByq7g&t=2961s
  • Andrzej Wajda, “Artist as Politician: An Interview”. Trans. Michael Kott.
  • 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. Trans. Julian Semilian.
  • 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

(Dai Dudu, Li Tiezi, Zhang An, Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante)

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

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. Trans. Yasemin Çongar.
  • Ahmet Altan, “I prefer prison to exile”. Interview, 2021.
  • Montaigne, “On Solitude.” Selections. Trans. M.A. Screech.
  • 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. Trans. Antony Melville.
  • Seneca, Letter 88 and Letter 90. Trans. Margaret Graver and A.A. Long.