June 28 – July 8

Michael Ka-chi Cheuk, Scandal and World Literature

How do scandals shape world literature? This seminar explores the role of scandal, understood here as public challenges to the legitimacy of literary recognition, in exposing the standards used to judge literature and questioning the authority of those who apply them. Using the Nobel Prize in Literature as a focal point, we examine how the world’s most prestigious and controversial literary honor becomes a site where writers, institutions, and publics across linguistic and national boundaries contest literary value and negotiate cultural differences. Readings and cases include fiction, historical memory, transmedial art, and singable translation. Extending these discussions to generative AI, we ask how disputes over authorship and originality unsettle the standards through which literature gains recognition across cultures. The seminar concludes with a comparative workshop in which participants test this account of scandal through cases from their own research.

Michael Ka-Chi Cheuk is Assistant Professor in English and Comparative Literature at Hong Kong Metropolitan University. He is the author of The Social Life of the Nobel Prize in Literature (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026) and host of the podcast The Cultural Life of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He also writes regularly on world literature, popular culture, and generative AI for the Hong Kong Economic Journal.

Session 1: Scandal and World Literature

• Cheuk, Michael Ka-Chi. “Introduction: Of Scandals and Social Life.” In The Social Life of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
• English, James F. “The Nobel and the Price of Prestige in the 21st Century.” Journal of World Literature.

• Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Sartre on the Nobel Prize.” Translated by Richard Howard. The New York Review of Books. 

   

Session 2: Scandal, Prestige, Literary Celebrity

• Källstrand, Gustav. “The Image of the Nobel Prize.” Public Understanding of Science.
• Sneis, Jørgen, and Carlos Spoerhase. “The Nobel Roll of Honor: Comparing Literatures and Compiling Lists of Nobel Laureates in the Early Twentieth Century.” Orbis Litterarum.

• The Wife. Directed by Björn L. Runge, written by Jane Anderson. 

   

Session 3: Scandal and Cosmopolitan Ideals

• Burns, Lorna. “World Literature and the Problem of Postcolonialism: Aesthetics and Dissent.” In The Work of World Literature.
• Cheah, Pheng. “World against Globe: Toward a Normative Conception of World Literature.” New Literary History.

• “The Nobel Laureates of Literature: An Olympic Gathering–Panel Discussion I, April 24, 1995.” The Georgia Review.

   

Session 4: Scandal and Nation 

• Engdahl, Horace. “A Nobel Sensibility.” World Policy Journal.
• Shih, Shu-mei. “Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition.” PMLA.

• Mo Yan. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (Selected chapters). Translated by Howard Goldblatt.

   

Session 5: Scandal and the Laureate

• Braun, Rebecca. “Fetishising Intellectual Achievement: The Nobel Prize and European Literary Celebrity.” Celebrity Studies. 
• Lovell, Julia. “Introduction: Diagnosing the Complex.” In The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature. 

• Gao, Xingjian. ‘The Man Who Questions Death’. In Gao Xingjian Escape & The Man Who  Questions Death, translated by Gilbert Fong.

   

Session 6: Scandal and the Boundaries of Literature

• Bradley, Adam. “Rhyme.” In The Poetry of Pop.
• Neumann, Birgit. ‘Intermedial Negotiations: Postcolonial Literatures’. In Handbook of Intermediality: Literature-Image-Sound-Music. 
• Dylan, Bob. “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

• Qin, Jun. ‘Blowin in the wind (答案在風中飄蕩) 中文可唱版’.

   

Session 7: Generative Taste: Scandals of Literary Judgment in the Age of AI

• Adut, Ari. “Transgression in Art and Its Effects.” In On Scandal: Moral Disturbances in Society, Politics, and Art.
• Weatherby, Leif. “Introduction: AI between Cognition and Culture.” In Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism.

• Commonwealth Foundation. “2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize Update.” 

   

Session 8: Rethinking Scandal and World Literature: A Comparative Workshop

• Cheuk, Michael Ka-Chi. “Epilogue: Of Secrecy and Solidarity.” In The Social Life of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
• Tenngart, Paul. “Looking Ahead: The Survival of the Prize.” In The Nobel Prize and the Formation of Contemporary World Literature.
• Comparative Workshop: Participants examine controversies from their own research to assess how scandals challenge literary value and authority in world literature.

Suradech Chotiudompant, Engaging with the Real in World Literature

Can literature represent the world as it is, or does literary form inevitably shape our understanding of the real?

Realism has long occupied a central yet contested position in world literature. Often understood as a literary mode that offers a seemingly transparent representation of the world, it nevertheless raises fundamental questions about the relationship between literature and reality. This seminar explores these questions by tracing the development of realism from nineteenth-century Europe, through the fantastic and magical realism of the twentieth century, to literary experiments at the beginning of the twenty-first century in different parts of the world.

Beginning with the short fiction of such authors as Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola, the seminar will examine how nineteenth-century writers sought to capture the complexities of modern life while revealing the limitations of literary representation. It will then turn to the fantastic and magical realism through short stories by the likes of Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortázar, which unsettle the boundaries between reality and imagination. Moving into the early twenty-first century, we will consider how contemporary short fiction continues to challenge conventional notions of the real in a world influenced by shifting social norms, technological change, and political uncertainty, with examples from writers such as Ted Chiang and Han Kang.

By bringing these literary traditions into conversation with related theoretical approaches, the seminar invites participants to reconsider how literature represents, problematizes, and reimagines reality across cultural and historical contexts. Drawing on David Damrosch’s discussion of world literature as offering us “windows onto the world,” we will look into how such windows are framed and whether they are transparent or opaque. Ultimately, through the extended discussion on short fiction and its politics of representation, the seminar explores the changing relationship between the real and the literary in an increasingly complex and interconnected age.

Suradech Chotiudompant is Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature, Chulalongkorn University. His expertise spans world literature, postmodernism, and magical realism. As an author, he has published a comprehensive two-volume history of literary theory, tracing concepts from Plato to the 20th Century, a monograph on magical realism in the masterpieces of Gabriel García Márquez, and a collection of essays on the intricate relationship between literature and urban space. 

Beyond his publications, his academic work has maintained a strong international dimension. Following his tenure as a Harvard-Yenching Visiting Scholar in 2012–2013, he continued to deepen his collaboration with the institution. In 2023, he secured funding from the Harvard-Yenching Institute to lead an intensive joint training program on Asia in World Literature, bringing together international scholars and Harvard faculty to foster the next generation of literary scholars, particularly in Southeast Asia.

Paul Giles, Genealogies of American World Literature

This seminar will consider the intellectual scope and complexities associated with the academic study of American (U.S.) literature as a national, transnational or World Literature formation. There will also be some attention to institutional politics, how the subject was represented in different ways according to domestic agendas or international situations, from English departments in US colleges and universities through to Comparative Literature or area studies clusters in non-American venues across the world. Seminars will focus around thematic issues such as Religion, Indigeneity, Cosmopolitanism, Slavery, Immigration, Environment and Technology. Readings will include works by classic American authors (Anne Bradstreet, Benjamin Franklin, H. D. Thoreau), more recent figures (Richard Wright, Adrienne Rich, Claudia Rankine) and various foundational critical figures (Randolph Bourne, F. O. Matthiessen), as well as a range of later and contemporary scholars (Annette Kolodny, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Paul Gilroy, Wai Chee Dimock, Brian Russell Roberts, Donna Haraway).  

Paul Giles is Professor of English in the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, and an honorary professor at the University of Sydney. He has previously been Director of the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University, President of the International American Studies Association and President of the International Association of University Professors of English. He has published twelve monographs on literature and culture, including American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics (CUP, 1992); Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730-1860 (Penn, 2001); Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (Duke, 2002); Atlantic Republic: The American Tradition in English Literature (OUP, 2006); The Global Remapping of American Literature (Princeton, 2011); Antipodean America: Australasia and the Constitution of U.S. Literature (OUP, 2014); The Planetary Clock: Antipodean Time and Spherical Postmodern Fictions (OUP, 2021). His most recent book is Canonical Network Television: Critical Aesthetics and Cultural History, 1960-1999 (Routledge, 2026). He is also editor of the book series Anthem Studies in Global English Literatures.  

Shuangyi Li, Mediating World Literature: Space, Memory, Art

This seminar explores how we may understand world literature as literature’s different referential relations to the world as they are mediated through national and geographical space, personal and cultural memory, and visual art. It shifts the critical focus from conventional concerns of the relationship between literature and nation to the notion of the transnational, and then proposes to radically rethink the (trans)national conceptions and identifications of literature from the vantage point of geographical sites and spaces. Rather than viewing literature and culture through the boundaries and borders of the nation-state, we will explore how fluid geographical spaces, such as the desert, the ocean, and the cityscape, reshape our understanding of global networks, intercultural exchange and identity formation. In turn, we investigate how such sites are individually remembered and cross-culturally commemorated, in and through both fictional and non-fictional texts; and how our comparative critical reading of them also participates in the travelling, intervening, and making of cultural memory. Finally, we examine how creative writers productively engage with visual artwork in search of a new grammar, language, and expression to (re)capture the site-based transcultural imagination and becoming of a world that is both new and old.

We will draw on a range of critical texts, such as those by Theo D’haen, Jahan Ramazani, Bertrand Westphal, Robert Tally, Edouard Glissant, Pierre Nora, Michael Rothberg, Isabel Hofmeyr, John Njenga Karugia, Charne Lavery, Astrid Erll, Liliane Louvel, Birgit Neumann, and study extracts from transnational creative writers’ works, such as Sanmao’s Stories of the Sahara (1970s), Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea (2019), and Noo Saro-Wiwa’s Black Ghosts: A Journey into the Lives of Africans in China (2022), in relation to artists such as Zao Wou-Ki and Xu Bing. The selection of literary examples intentionally focuses on Africa-China literary and cultural relations. You are also encouraged to bring your own literary and artistic examples into seminar discussions.

Dr. Shuangyi Li is Senior Lecturer and MA Programme Director of Comparative Liteatures and Cultures at the University of Bristol. He is the author of two monographs: Proust, China, and Intertextual Engagement: Translation and Transcultural Dialogue (2017) (winner of International Comparative Literature Association [ICLA] Anna Balakian Book Prize 2019); Travel, Translation, Transmedia Aesthetics: Franco-Chinese Literature and Visual Arts in a Global Age (2021) (shortlisted for R. Gapper Book Prize 2022 hosted by the Society for French Studies). His current research focuses on Sino-African literary and cultural relations. He is the co-editor of Edinburgh Critical Studies in World Literature and Intermediality published by Edinburgh University Press, and book review editor of the ICLA's open-access house journal Recherche Littéraire / Literary Research published by Peter Lang. Originally from Chongqing, China, Shuangyi received his PhD at the University of Edinburgh in the UK, but has also studied or worked at L'Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, L'École Normale Supérieure (rue d'Ulm, Paris). Between 2017 and 2021, Shuangyi received an individual project research grant from the Swedish Research Council and completed his second monograph at Lund University. He has received prestigious international fellowships, including the Lorand Chair Intermediality 2026 at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium.

Haun Saussy, Translation, Adaptation, Recreation: The Mechanics of World Literature

“The same, but different”—such could be our motto as comparatists. The existence of “literal translations” is a phantom: translation always changes what it transfers, and the study of world literature leads us to ask, not what is lost, but what is added, by translation. 

A translator’s task is to recreate, using local materials, a text that originated in a different language (language being its material). The translated text addresses a different public, assumes a different context, speaks of different foods and smells. Thus a translation reaches a compromise between untranslatables; it is what US patent law calls a “reasonable facsimile.” Some theories of translation are uncompromising; under the sign of world literature, we can little afford such purism, and are liable to opt for pragmatic description of what a translator or adaptor has done rather than treat innovations as flaws.

As the continuum from translation to adaptation cuts across the archive and the theories of world literature, we can explore it through examples, each of which is “the same but different” as regards the others, but none of which exhaustively represent the whole. Catalogues of motifs in folklore, transpositions from medium to medium, translations and rewritings in another voice here offer perspectives on adaptive creativity.

Haun Saussy is University Professor at the University of Chicago, serving in the department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations and in the Committee on Social Thought. He is a past president of the American Comparative Literature Association and a vice-president of the International Comparative Literature Association. His work attempts to bring the methods and attitudes of comparative literature to bear on different periods, languages, cultures, and disciplines, without limitation to the humanities: in addition to publishing scholarship on literary and philosophical works, he has written on global health in dialogue with the late Paul Farmer. His current long-term project is editing a history of Asian literatures in relation to one another from the earliest evidence of writing to 1800.  
 

Session 1: Same?

• Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “Averroes’ Search”
• Viktor Shklovsky, from Theory of Prose
• Lawrence Venuti, from The Translator’s Invisibility

• Saussy, “Translating From Translations, As One Does”

   

Session 2: Different?

• Lin Shu 林紓, from Bali chahua nü yishi 巴黎茶花女遺事 (Dumas, La Dame aux Camélias)
• Yan Fu 嚴復, from Tianyan lun 天演論 (Huxley, Evolution and Ethics)

• Michael Gibbs Hill, from Lin Shu, Inc.

   

Session 3: In Sheep’s Clothing

• Matteo Ricci (利瑪竇), On Friendship 交友論, trans. and annot. Timothy Billings
• Philippe Couplet et al., trans., from Confucius Sinarum Philosophus
• Thierry Meynard, retranslation into English of the above

• Jacques Gernet, from China and the Christian Impact

   

Session 4: Whose Story Is It Anyway?

• Lev Tolstoy, Resurrection (1899), with adaptations by Henry Bataille, Shimamura Hōgetsu, and Yue Feng 岳楓 
• Pu Feng 蒲鋒, “Buduan fuhuo de Fuhuo” 不斷復活的《復活》from Xianxun jiu zongji: huayu wenyi dianying yuanliu kao 閒尋舊蹤跡—華語文藝電影源流考
• Heekyung Cho, Translation’s Forgotten History; Choi Hyaeweol, “Translated Modernity and Gender Politics in Colonial Korea”

• Susanna Lim, “Singing Katiusha: Tolstoy’s Resurrection in 1910s Korea”

   

Session 5: Reopening an Old Case Under New Auspices: Lun Xun’s “Diary of a Madman”

• Lu Xun 魯迅, Kuangren riji 狂人日記 (Diary of a Madman)
• Nikolai Gogol, “Zapiski sumasshedshego” (Diary of a Madman)

• Ma Xiaolu, “The Missing Link: Japan as an Intermediary in the Transculturation of the Diary of a Madman”

   

Session 6: Transposition

• James Joyce, Ulysses, episodes “Hades” and “Laestrygonians”

• Homer, Odyssey, books 10 and 11

   

Session 7: Make It New

• Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound, et al., Cathay
• Constantine Cavafy, selected poems
• Victor Segalen, from Stèles
• Lu Xun, from Gushi xinbian 故事新編 (Old Tales Retold)

• Wen Yiduo 聞一多, from Gudian xinyi 古典新義 (Ancient Classics Reinterpreted)

   

Session 8: The Scandal of the Translator-Author

• Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red; If Not, Winter

Zrinka Stahuljak, Commensurate Comparison: Comparing Past Worlds Globally 

Comparative literature has renewed itself in recent decades by becoming increasingly global, but the “global” has been conceived predominantly in spatial and contemporary terms: through circulation and translation, centers and peripheries, and efforts to rethink the geopolitical asymmetries that have structured literary comparison. Comparative literature, anthropology, and history have developed powerful methods for addressing the problems such comparison entails: relational and contactless comparison, the construction of comparables and partial connections, comparison across changing scales, controlled equivocation and untranslatability, analogy and dissimilar similitude, philological juxtaposition, connected and entangled histories, and critiques of anachronism and coevalness. Together, these approaches unsettle the assumption that comparison requires sameness, semantic equivalence, a stable scale, an encompassing category, or even historical connection. Yet they leave a particularly difficult problem unresolved: what makes comparison possible when its objects belong to different times and places, are not historically connected, and share no conceptual vocabulary capable of guaranteeing their comparability?  The seminar will pursue this problem through a recurring set of primary materials from medieval Europe, Māori Aotearoa, and Indigenous Australia, including textual and graphic descriptions of place, maps, itineraries, and songlines that are neither contemporaneous nor necessarily historically connected. Its wager is that comparison can produce relations between radically different worlds without presupposing the measure of their difference or similarity, and that the terms of comparison can themselves be transformed by the relation they make possible.

Thinkers and methods: Marcel Detienne; Shu-mei Shih; Alexander Beecroft; Marilyn Strathern; Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen; Jacques Rancière; Eduardo Viveiros de Castro; Emily Apter; Caroline Walker Bynum; Carlo Ginzburg; Erich Auerbach; Sanjay Subrahmanyam; Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann; Johannes Fabian; Zrinka Stahuljak. 

Zrinka Stahuljak is Director of the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature at UCLA. She works across early global, translation, and Indigenous studies, and AI in the humanities. She is author or co-author of seven books, including Les Fixeurs au Moyen Âge: histoire et littérature connectées (2021), Médiéval contemporain: pour une littérature connectée (2020), and Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature (2024). In recent years, her work has been recognized, among others, with a visiting professorship at the Collège de France (2018), a Guggenheim fellowship (2016), and membership at the Croatian Academy of Arts and Sciences (2020). In January 2025, she co-created the first UCLA Humanities AI-compiled textbook and taught the first AI-assisted class. Currently, she is the PI of an ongoing Mellon grant “Race in the Global Past Through Native Lenses” (2023-2028) and Guest Curator of an international exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, opening in June 2028 and dedicated to the artistic and literary phenomenon of chivalry in the wider Mediterranean world.

Session 1: Constructing Comparables

What makes heterogeneous things comparable, and what concepts do we supply in order to compare them? 

• Detienne, Marcel. Comparing the Incomparable. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Stanford.
• Giovanni di Fedanzola da Perugia. Descriptio Terrae Sanctae. Eds. Ugolino Nicolini and Renzo Nelli; English trans. John Boettcher.
• Hereford Mappamundi, ca. 1300: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hereford_Mappa_Mundi.jpg 
• Catalan Atlas, 1375 (Abraham Cresques workshop): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1375_Atlas_Catalan_Abraham_Cresques.jpg 
• Tuki Te Terenui Whare Pirau, map of Aotearoa/New Zealand, 1793: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_Zealand-Map-by-Tuki-1798.jpg 

• Seven Sisters Songline (Minyipuru/Kungkarangkalpa), Western and Central Desert Australia: selected publicly shared narrative and visual materials from the Indigenous-directed Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters project, https://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/songlines 

   

Session 2:  Relational Comparison and the Comparative Measure

How has contemporary comparative literature tried to decenter both the privileged comparator and the critical vocabulary of comparison? What remains of the common measure? 

• Shih, Shu-mei. “Comparison as Relation.” In Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, eds. Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman.

• Beecroft, Alexander. “Contactless Comparison.” In The Routledge Companion to Global Comparative Literature.

   

Session 3: Partial Connections 

Can heterogeneous objects be related without treating them as parts or instances of an encompassing whole? 

• Marilyn Strathern, Partial Connections. 

• Recommended: “Historical Critique." Optional background: “Complex Society, Incomplete Knowledge."

   

Session 4: Comparison Across Space and Time

What happens when neither spatial nor temporal proximity supplies the stable scale of comparison? When is temporal discontinuity a condition of comparison rather than an objection to it? 

• Holbraad, Martin, and Morten Axel Pedersen. “Planet M: The Intense Abstraction of Marilyn Strathern.” Anthropological Theory.

• Rancière, Jacques. “The Concept of Anachronism and the Historian’s Truth.” Trans. Noel Fitzpatrick and Tim Stott. In/Print.

   

Session 5: Controlled Equivocation: Translation without Equivalence 

What is translation if successful translation does not consist in discovering equivalent referents or concepts? 

• Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation.” Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America.

• Stahuljak, Zrinka. Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature.

   

Session 6: Untranslatability, Mediation, Comparison

Does non-equivalence terminate relation, protect difference, or become the condition through which translation and comparison proceed? 

• Apter, Emily. “No Good Paradigms! Untranslatability as Critical Praxis.” In The Routledge Companion to Global Comparative Literature, edited by Zhang Longxi and Omid Azadibougar.
• Stahuljak, Zrinka. Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature.

• Return to selected passages from Viveiros de Castro. 

   

Session 7: Comparing Past Worlds: Connection, Analogy, Juxtaposition

Who or what warrants a comparison of past worlds: historical actors, historical connection, genealogy, analogy, resemblance, or the analyst? What if comparison illuminates both terms without finally discovering a deeper common category or similitude? 

• Bynum, Caroline Walker. “Avoiding the Tyranny of Morphology; or, Why Compare?” History of Religions.
• Ginzburg, Carlo. “Family Resemblances and Family Trees: Two Cognitive Metaphors.” Critical Inquiry.
• Auerbach, Erich. “Philology and Weltliteratur.” Trans. Maire and Edward Said. The Centennial Review.

Recommended readings:  

• Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia.” Modern Asian Studies.

• Werner, Michael, and Bénédicte Zimmermann. “Beyond Comparison: Histoire croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity.” History and Theory.

   

Session 8: Commensurate Comparison 

Can comparison produce a relation without first establishing a common measure—and without allowing either comparandum, the analyst’s present, or a common temporal category to become one? 

• Stahuljak, Zrinka. “Commensurate Comparison: 1492 and the Early Global.” Forthcoming in Global Renaissances: Contours of a New Field, eds. Peter Burke, Gang Zhou, Sander Gilman, and Haun Saussy.
• Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. 
• Return to the full Fedanzola / Hereford Map / Catalan Atlas / Map of Tuki / Seven Sisters dossier.