July 12 – 22

Nina Beguš, Artificial Humanities: Languages and Fictions of AI

What can literature teach us about artificial intelligence, and how does AI change our understanding of literature and literary methods? This seminar introduces artificial humanities as an approach to studying AI through literary interpretation, cultural criticism, and the history of technology. We will examine how narratives shape ideas about intelligence and humanity, and how language-generating machines reopen longstanding questions about authorship, imitation, and meaning.

Debates in world literature scholarship are particularly useful to approach global, linguistic, and cultural dimensions of large language models. What happens when literary works become training data and circulate through language models? How do models reproduce or rearrange literary canons, and what forms of linguistic and cultural difference resist their representations? Moving between imagined intelligences and actual language technologies, we will consider these questions through fiction, experimental writing, and scholarship.

Nina Beguš is a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, where she leads the artificial humanities research group, including funded projects on AI and narration, latent spaces of culture, and rethinking language. She also directs the Epistemic Cycles lab at Long Now. Her book, Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI, explores how literature, history, and art can deepen our understanding of AI and its development. She is the editor of the volume First Encounters with AI: Writers on Writing, the special issue on AI for the Journal of World Literature, and the Artificial Humanities book series at the University of Exeter Press.

Guangchen Chen, The Collector, the Total Library, and World Literature

Throughout world history, there have been repeated attempts to gather all books into a total library. Shall we imagine this as a prototype of world literature? Whether as an actual institution, a fantastical hypothesis, or a metaphor, it provides ample opportunities to reimagine world literature. First, the total library tests the temporal and spatial limits of our knowledge. Second, the total library’s taxonomic principles can be considered against debates about national, linguistic, and genre boundaries in world literature. Third, promising to be an all-inclusive system, the total library nonetheless contains strange internal glitches and anomalies that unsettle the stability and validity of said system. Last but not least, in real-life politics, the total library makes censorship so much easier. It is worth mentioning that Hangzhou is one of the historical sites of the monumental Total Library of the Four Treasuries 四庫全書. In today's digital world, the total library takes a sinister turn: mega databases give censors omnipresent power while Anthropic operated "Project Panama" to destructively scan millions of books to feed Claude.

One powerful counterforce to the total library is the collector, a solitary and curious figure singled out by Walter Benjamin. To "collect" is to facilitate understanding ("legō" means both "to collect" and "to read") by the sheer act of putting disparate things side by side ("co-"). The modern collector was born out of the ruins of antiquity, whose unprocessed fragmentariness is constitutive of modernity. In this sense, the collector is a figurative troubadour who sings against the grain of a grand march towards totalization. Right now, this march is being accelerated by digital technology, which threatens to obliterate the analogue medium altogether. The collector's anachronistic attachment to materiality provides an alternative to this seemingly inevitable destiny.

Reading Benjamin's Arcades Project alongside works by Jorge Borges, Umberto Eco, T. S. Eliot, Bohumil Hrabal, Lu Xun, Ng Kim Chew, Ezra Pound, Salman Rushdie, Daniel Spoerri, and Tom Stoppard, this seminar examines the diverse possibilities of a world literary (non)system as represented by the solitary collector and the total library. Theoretical discussions about taxonomy, totalization, and world-systems will be balanced with tactile study of collecting, book history, library theory, and a special consideration of quotation as a form of literary collecting.

Guangchen Chen 陳廣琛 is Assistant Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at Emory University. His research is situated in the intersection of literary, material, and musical cultures. He is the author of Collecting Antiquity in Modern China: Artifacts and Their Afterlives (the University of Chicago Press, 2026; Chinese translation forthcoming with Beijing SDX Sanlian Shudian). Current book projects include a monograph on how Chinese music was imagined in Europe through the lens of Chinese artifacts, and Fu Lei and Fou Ts’ong: An Epistolary Biography, which features the long-awaited English translation of Fu Lei's Family Letters (傅雷家書). His scholarship has appeared in CLEAR, Études Chinoises, MCLC, and West 86th, among others. He was a receipient of the Cotsen Fellowship in the Society of Fellows at Princeton, the Global Humanities Junior Fellowship at Freie Universität Berlin, and the Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship at Harvard.

Debjani Ganguly, World Literature and the Catastrophic Imagination

In Ian McEwan’s latest novel, What We Can Know, set it in 2119, a literature professor contemplates a scorched world and declares that only works of literature can offer knowledge and salvation. “Amid the disasters,” the professor avers, “world literature produced its most beautiful laments, gorgeous nostalgia, eloquent fury – and those masterpieces, so we promised, we would study together.” Indeed, world literature is no stranger to the catastrophic imagination. Writers throughout history have given form and language to existential anxieties that catastrophes bring to the fore.

While humans typically adapt to substantial changes in their habitats over time, sudden and systematic destruction of their worlds by climate disasters, pandemics, genocides, nuclear accidents, tyrannical political systems, and technologies such as the atom bomb, leaves them unmoored in unprecedented ways. The rift in one’s psychic apparatus ramifies across political and moral realms. Traversing the arc from the nuclear era to our age of cataclysmic global warming and the rise of generative artificial intelligence gives the idea of catastrophe a new existential intensity. Existential risks are distributed unevenly across the planet, and across human and nonhuman lives. How might world literature help us understand this differential impact of catastrophes while holding on to an ecumenical world view? How might literary works help us visualize possible futures in the age of technological immersion and climate change?

This course will gather works from the early 19th century to our contemporary era, written in the face of unimaginable crises. It will explore expressive modes such as the post-apocalyptic, the messianic, the tragic, the elegiac, the speculative, and the realist, in these works. Novelists and poets may include Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Cormac McCarthy, Ruth Ozeki, Christa Woolf, Kamila Shamsie, James George, Frank Schatzing, Kim Stanley Robinson, Franny Choi, and Craig Santos Perez. We will read short excerpts from philosophical works by Immanuel Kant, Walter Benjamin, Karl Jaspers, and Jean Luc Nancy. We will also engage with the work of literary critics such as Frank Kermode, John Berger, Anna Brickhouse, Ursula Heise, Eva Horn, Jahan Ramazani, and Roy Scranton.

Debjani Ganguly is Director of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature and Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She also holds a research professorship in Literature at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at ACU Melbourne. Her research specialties include modern and contemporary literatures in English, world literature, history and theory of the novel, postcolonial studies, literature and technology, and planetary humanities. She is the author of This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (2016) and Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity (2005), and the editor of the two-volume The Cambridge History of World Literature (2021). Her latest monograph, Catastrophic Modes and Planetary Realism, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She is the general editor with Francesca Orsini of the monograph series, Cambridge Studies in World Literature. Debjani has held visiting professorships at Cambridge University, Oxford University, University of Chicago, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and University of Michigan. She is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Australian Academy of Humanities. Over the course of two decades, she has served on executive councils, advisory boards, review committees, and fellowship committees of several institutions including the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), the Modern Languages Association (MLA), the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA), the Trinity Long Room Hub (Dublin), the Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory (Bologna), the American Academy of Berlin, Society for the Humanities (Cornell), and the Cogut Humanities Institute (Brown).

Ou Rong, Interart/Intermedial Studies: History and Comparison

This seminar provides a historical and comparative exploration of interart and intermedial studies, focusing on the relationships among literature, visual arts, music, and other forms of artistic expression. It examines how different cultures have conceptualized artistic boundaries, correspondences, and interactions, tracing the development from classical theories of the interart poetics to contemporary approaches to intermediality. Through comparative perspectives, the seminar investigates how artistic forms communicate, transform, and generate meaning across different media.

The first part of the seminar examines the classical and modern traditions of Western interart poetics. It introduces foundational discussions of artistic relationships through Aristotle’s Poetics, Leonardo da Vinci’s On Painting, and Lessing’s Laocoön, followed by modern reflections on artistic autonomy and correspondence in works by Irving Babbitt, Clement Greenberg, and Étienne Souriau. The seminar then turns to classical Chinese interart poetics, exploring the interaction of poetry, music, painting, and calligraphy through major texts such as “On Music” of The Book of Rites, LU Ji’s The Art of Writing, ZHONG Rong’s The Critique of Poetry, LIU Xie’s The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, YAN Yu’s Canglang’s Remarks on Poetry, and WANG Guowei’s Notes on Ci Poetry in the Human World.

The seminar further explores contemporary Western developments in interart and intermedial studies, with particular attention to theories of ekphrasis and intermediality. Key theoretical contributions on ekphrasis by Murray Krieger, James Heffernan, W. J. T. Mitchell, Tamar Yacobi, Claus Clüver, and Liliane Louvel are examined alongside broader theories of intermediality proposed by Irina Rajewsky, Werner Wolf, Lars Elleström, and Jørgen Bruhn. These approaches introduce concepts such as intermediality, transmediality, heteromediality, remediation, and media modalities, providing new frameworks for understanding interactions among artistic media.

The final part of the seminar considers contemporary Chinese scholars’ contributions to interart and intermedial studies, including research on writing, painting and calligraphy, literary anthropology, auditory narrative, performativity, and general narratology. By placing Western and Chinese theoretical traditions and contemporary development in dialogue, the seminar aims to rethink the relationship between artistic forms, media transformations, and aesthetic experience. It encourages participants to reflect on how interart and intermedial perspectives can contribute to comparative aesthetics, literary studies, and broader theories of artistic communication.

OU Rong holds a PhD in English Language and Literature from Shanghai International Studies University, and is currently professor of Comparative Literature and Transcultural Studies and dean of the School of International Education & Kharkiv Institute, Hangzhou Normal University, China. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, the University of California at Berkeley, Linnaeus University and SOAS of London University. Her research interests are in modern and contemporary Anglo-American literature, East-West literary relations, interart poetics and intermedial studies. She has published books and articles on David Lodge, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, William Faulkner, D. H. Lawrence, F. R. Leavis, Raymond Williams, Raphael Rossetti, William Morris, etc. Her recent publications include Museum of Words: European and American Interart Poetcis (Peking University Press, 2022), two chapters in The Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) and A Transcultural History of Art: On Images and Their Doubles (as leading translator, Springer, 2025).

Session 1: Classical Tradition of Western Interart Poetics

Aristotle, Poetics
Horace, Art of Poetry
L. B. Alberti, On Painting
Leonardo da Vinci, On Painting
G. E. Lessing, Laocoön, An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry

Session 2: Modern Tradition of Western Interart Poetics

Irving Babbitt, The New Laocoön
Clement Greenberg, Towards a Newer Laocoön
Étienne Souriau, Correspondence of the Arts

Session 3: Classical Chinese Interart Poetics I

Xunzi, “On Music,” The Book of Rites
LU Ji, The Art of Writing
ZHONG Rong, The Critique of Poetry
LIU Xie, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons

Session 4: Classical Chinese Interart Poetics II

YAN Yu, Canglang's Remarks on Poetry
WANG Guowei, Notes on Ci Poetry in the Human World
OU Rong, “Embodied Intermediality in Classical Chinese Poetics”

Session 5: Contemporary Western Interart Studies

Murray Krieger, “Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry; or Laocoön Revisited”
James Heffernan, “Introduction,” Museum of Words
W. J. T. Mitchell, “Ekphrasis,” Picture Theory
Claus Clüver, “Rethinking Ekphrasis”

Session 6: Contemporary Western Intermedial Studies

Tarmar Yacobi, “Pictorial Model and Narrative Ekphrasis”
Liliane Louvel, “Types of Ekphrasis”
S. P. Scher, “Notes toward a Theory of Verba Music”
Siglind Bruhn, “A Concert of Painting: ‘Musical Ekphrasis’ in the Twentieth Century”
Daniel Albright, “Metamorphasis,” Panaesthetics

Session 7: Contemporary Western Intermedial Studies

Claus Cluver, “Intermediality and Interart Studies”
Irina Rajewsky, “Transmediality, Intertextuality and Remediation”
Werner Wolf, “(Inter)mediality and the Study of Literature”
Jørgen Bruhn, The Intermediality in Narrative Literature
Lars Elleström, The Modalities of Media

Session 8: Contemporary Chinese Interart/Intermedial Studies

OU Rong, “An Overview of Interart/Intermedial Studies in China”
ZHAO Xianzhang, “On Calligraphy and Images”
HE Chengzhou, “Performance and Performativity: A Transcultural Dramatic Perspective”
YE Shuxian, “The Fourfold Evidence Method and Literary Anthropology”　
LONG Diyong, “Classical Architecture and Chinese Narrative Tradition”
ZHAO Yiheng, Preface, General Narratology

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. 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 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.