June 29 – July 9

Mita Banerjee, Diagnosing Difference: Situating the Body in World Literature

What is the role of the body in world literature? Literature is peopled by unruly bodies, from Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame to Flannery O’ Connor’s protagonist in “Good Country People.” Literature defies fixed definitions of bodies (and minds) as deviant or different in terms of gender, age, race or (dis)ability. 

Differences can be diagnosed by medicine; they can be contained through legal parameters; and they can be rendered flat through statistics. Literary texts oppose to such fixed definitions through the notion of lived experience. Reading a literary text, we are drawn into the lives of others, whose particular circumstances may be vastly different from our own. Literature invites or urges us to imagine what it may feel like to be defined as “human cargo” under slavery, as deviant in terms of gender or sexuality, or as criminal in the act of migrating across borders.

In this seminar, we will explore the genres and aesthetic devices that literary texts use to oppose fixed definitions. Forms such as the eco-Gothic or the nuclear Gothic trace the impact of environmental damage on the human body; coming-of-age narratives explore how “different” identities take shape and playfully subvert definitions of “abnormality” in terms of gender, sexuality, or age. Finally, literature also defies categorization by crossing the boundary between human and non-human life by imagining what it may feel like to get to know, even fall in love with, an octopus.

Drawing on theoretical approaches about the “uses of literature” and delving into fields such as cognitive humanities, environmental humanities, medical humanities, and literature and science, we will look at literature and films from a wide variety of contexts. Exploring the work of Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, Shyam Selvadurai, James Baldwin, Michael Ondaatje and Cherie Dimaline, we will delve into the ways in which literature can help us to imagine different bodies “otherwise.” 

Mita Banerjee is Professor and Chair of American Studies at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at the University of Mainz, Germany. She is the author of seven monographs, including Color Me White: Naturalism/Naturalization in American Literature (Winter, 2013), Medical Humanities in American Studies (Winter, 2018) and Centenarians’ Autobiographies (De Gruyter, 2023). She is fascinated with the work that literature can do in other disciplines, from medical humanities to legal humanities and the sociology of race and ethnicity. At Mainz University, she is currently the director of the Gutenberg Research College (GFK) and is part of the Collaborative Research Center “Human Differentiation” (SFB 1482). From 2015-2023, she was co-speaker of the Research Training Group “Life Sciences, Life Writing: Boundary Experiences of Human Life between Biomedical Explanation and Lived Experience” (GRK 2015/2), which was funded by the German Research Foundation. 

Session 1: Medical Diagnosis and the Body         

• Rita Charon et al., “Introduction,” The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine.
• Danielle Spencer, “Diagnosis,” Metagnosis.
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-Paper.”
• Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient.

Session 2: Gender and the Body      

• Aslı Zengin, “The Cemetery for the Kimsesiz."
• Elif Shafak, selections from Ten Minutes and 38 Seconds in this Strange World.
• Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (Chapters 1 and 3).

Session 3: Bodies and Disabilities    

• Jennifer Bartlett, “Preface,” Beauty Is a Verb.
• Thomas Couser, excerpt from chapter “Crossing (Out) the Border: Autobiography and Physical Disability,” Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing.
• Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.
• Larry Eigner, “July 3 64.“
• Larry Eigner, “August 12 65.”  
• Flannery O’Connor, “Good Country People” 

Session 4: (Non-Human) Bodies and their Environment  

• Wolfe, Cary. "Human, all too human: “Animal studies” and the humanities."
• “The Octopus Teacher”, https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8e62u9
• Witi Ihimaera,  from The Whale Rider.
• Indra Sinha, from Animal’s People.

Session 5: Race and the Body          

• Patricia Williams, from The Alchemy of Race and Rights.
• May Ayim, “Blues in black and white.“ Trans. Anne V. Adams.
• May Ayim, “afro-german I”, “afro-german II." Trans. Anne V. Adams
• Raoul Peck, I am not your negro (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO2PsTnqgUE)
• Arundhati Roy, from The God of Small Things.

Session 6: Trauma and the Body     

• Theory: Kim TallBear, “Introduction: An Indigenous, Feminist Approach to DNA Politics,” Native American DNA.
• Toni Morrison, from Beloved.
• Cherie Dimaline, from The Marrow Thieves.

Session 7: Queer Bodies       

• Somerville, Siobhan. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies.
• Shyam Selvadurai, Funny Boy (“Pigs Can’t Fly”).
• David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly (Act 3).

Session 8: The Body and the Brain  

• Keen, “Contemporary Perspectives on Empathy, “ Empathy and the Novel.
• Henry James, from The Turn of the Screw.

Elleke Boehmer, Southern Imagining: how to read "south" and why it matters

Most of the world’s established literatures in the major world languages are arguably northern in their cultural orientation, and certainly in their conceptual focus. It is up for debate whether the idea of world literature itself is not a Global North construction holding an implicit northern geohistorical bias. Pascale Casanova in The World Republic of Letters allows as much: littérisation, or the process of achieving visibility in world letters, she contends, means escaping the "disinherited country" of the south, and gaining acceptance in the northern metropolis (95). Most works of world literature by southern authors emerge from those who have already made an educational or related migratory pilgrimage to northern institutions. Within this uneven geo-historical landscape, novels and poems emanating from contexts outside the Europe-US axis, will gain global legibility and hence acceptance largely by telling typical or recognisable national tales, while less iconic narratives do not circulate in the same way. So Australian novelist Peter Carey is accoladed for writing recognizable Australian stories, while the writing of Gerard Murnane, which can’t be categorized by the same formulae, has been, till recently, relatively overlooked.

This course will endeavor to turn the world of world literature upside down by drawing on the perceptual mechanisms of southern critics, authors and texts to raise the question of how best we read south. In a world in which dynamic cultural forces are invariably believed to come first and foremost from Europe or America, even if generated on the periphery (as in cases extending from Olive Schreiner to Janet Frame and beyond), the course considers how narrative and critical energies can be resituated in ways that privilege austral approaches. Such approaches also have a geo-planetary dimension, encouraging us to think at different scales and to destabilize the models in which the northern human has always been placed at the forefront of world history.

The course will stake out what might be considered an emergent area of world literature, involving writers who are from and also reflect on the far south. To some considerable extent, we will be discovering imaginary and perceptual vectors together. Given this, no prior knowledge of the field or topic is assumed.

Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford and Executive Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College. She is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Historical Society. She is an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, and an Extraordinary Professor in English at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Her work includes literary and cultural history, criticism and fiction. She is the author of Postcolonial Poetics (2018); Indian Arrivals 1870–1915: Networks of British Empire (2015; winner of the biennial ESSE prize 2016); Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920 (2002); Stories of Women (2005); and the field-defining Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (1995; second edition 2005). Her acclaimed biography Nelson Mandela in the prestigious Very Short Introduction series in 2008, was followed by an expanded second edition in 2023. Southern Imagining: a literary and cultural history of the Southern Hemisphere (Princeton), her seventh monograph, was published in late 2025. Elleke Boehmer’s fiction includes To the Volcano, and other stories (2019; commended for the Elizabeth Jolley Prize), her second collection of short stories, and The Shouting in the Dark (winner of the Olive Schreiner Prize 2018). Her sixth novel Ice Shock appeared in tandem with Southern Imagining. Her work has been translated into many languages, including German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, Thai and Mandarin. In 2024 she held the inaugural International Visiting Fellowship at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She is a member of the Netherlands Society of Letters and a Rhodes Trustee. She holds an honorary doctorate from Linnaeus University, Sweden. 

Session 1: Thinking with the South

• "The Song Cycle of the Moon Bone,. Trans. RM Berndt.
• Antjie Krog, "The Milky Way and the Stars."
• Paul Carter, chapters "Introduction: A Cake of Portable Soup" and ‘"An Airy Barrier."
• Alexis Wright,Carpentaria.

Session 2: Southern Theory

• Raewyn Connell, "Looking South."
• Aimé Césaire, André Breton, foreword and first pages extract from Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Trans.Clayton Eshleman & Annette Smith.
• Reading in advance of course: Samanta Schweblin, Distancia de rescate/Fever Dream. Trans. Megan McDowell.

Session 3: Pilgrimages north

• Benedict Anderson, "Creole Pioneers."
• Eduardo Galleano, Cedric Belfrage, from Open Veins of Latin America.
• Zoe Wicomb, "A Trip to the Gifberge."
• Elleke Boehmer, "To the volcano" and "Evelina."

Session 4: How Europe is Thinking Towards Africa

• Jean and John L. Comaroff, "Theory from the South."
• Bessie Head, "Looking for a Rain God’." "Kgotla", "The Collector of Treasures."
• Dambudzo Marechera, from "The Black Insider" and "Oxford, Black Oxford."

Session 5: Littérisation: directions

• Pascale Casanova, "The Fabric of the Universal." FromThe World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. Debevoise.
• Jorge Luis Borges, "El Sur," "The South." Trans. Andrew Hurley.
• Le Guin, "Sur." 

Session 6: Moving along margins                   

• Isabel Hofmeyr, "Customs and Objects on a Hydrocolonial frontier."
• Sujit Sivasundaram, "Travels in the Oceanic South."
• Ananda Devi, When the Night Agrees to Speak to Me. Trans. Kazim Ali.

Session 7: The Far South: Singular or plural

• Gerard Murnane, "The battle of Acosta nu."
• J.M. Coetzee, "Remembering Texas" and "Into the Dark Chamber."
• Gabeba Baderoon, "Hangklip."
• Elleke Boehmer, chapter 7, Keeping South: writing from here.

Session 8: Here, now, far south

• Jeanine Leane, Natalie Harkin, "The Strength of Us as Women: A Poetics of Relationality and Reckoning."
• Bill Manhire, "Zoetrope."
• Robert Sullivan, "Great North Road."
• Les Murray, "The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle."
• Charmaine Papertalk Green, "Nyarlu Malga" and "Etched in my mind."

Kader Konuk, Before the Law: Literature and Critical Legal Studies

Beginning with Franz Kafka’s Before the Law this seminar examines the intersections between law and literature. Participants will read critical legal texts alongside novels, plays, and parables to reflect upon what it means to stand before, within, and against the law. We will draw upon critical legal studies to analyze how literature portrays legal conflict, how it exposes law’s moral ambiguities, criticizes legal violence, and resists authoritarianism. After an introduction to the field of law and literature, participants will discuss how legal and literary cultures intersect in different national settings and gain insights into literature as a subject of legal battles, as exemplified in Judith Butler’s Who Owns Kafka? This seminar’s point of departure is the exilic, diasporic, dissident thinking of Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Bertolt Brecht, and Christa Wolf who wrote from their respective extraterritorial positions in Prague, New York, Los Angeles, and East Berlin. Readings include key passages from Kafka’s The Trial, Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, and Wolf’s Cassandra in order to discuss the productive intersections between critical legal studies and the study of world literature.

Kader Konuk is a comparatist with expertise in the literary and cultural history of migration and exile. She is professor of German literature at Technical University Dortmund. Between 2014–2023, she was professor of Turkish literary and cultural studies at University Duisburg-Essen and between 2001–2013 assistant professor and, subsequently, associate professor of comparative literature and German studies at the University of Michigan. In 2022, she was made honorary professor of the Research School of Humanities & Arts at the Australian National University. In 2017, she co-founded Academy in Exile, a third-party-funded fellowship program that has offered 87 scholars, journalists and artists at risk from 21 countries fellowships to resume their research in Germany. She currently serves on the board of the Consortium for Humanities Centers and Institutes. Kader Konuk published on ethnic and religious communities in the Ottoman Empire, Germany, and Turkey, and examines discourses, cultural practices, and disciplinary formations that are shaped by travel, migration, and exile. Her current work focuses on the intersections of literature and critical legal studies.

Session 1: Before the Law

• Franz Kafka, Before the Law. Trans. Mark Harman.
• Walter Benjamin, "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death." Trans. Harry Zohn.
• Liska, Vivian, "“Before the Law stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper comes a man…”: Kafka, Narrative, and the Law." 

Session 2: The Trial

• Franz Kafka, The Trial. Trans. Trans. Breon Mitchell.
• Pascale Casanova, Kafka, Angry Poet. Trans. Chris Turner.

Session 3: Judging

• Bertolt Brecht, The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Trans. Eric Bentley.
• Michael Freeman, "Truth and Justice in Bertolt Brecht."
• Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times.

Session 4: Witnessing

• Armin T. Wegner, “An Open Letter to the President of the United States of America, Woodrow Wilson, on the Mass Deportation of the Armenians into the Mesopotamian Desert.”
• Armin T. Wegner, Brief an Hitler = Letter to Hitler = Lettre À Hitler. Trans. into English Silvia Samuelli.
• Vanessa Agnew and Kader Konuk, “The Difficulties of Witnessing: Armin T. Wegner’s Lantern Slide Show on the Armenian Genocide.”

Session 5: Testimony

• Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem.
• Shoshana Felman, “Theaters of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial, and the Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust.” 

Session 6: The Courtroom

• Jonas Bens, “The Courtroom as an Affective Arrangement: Analysing Atmospheres in Courtroom Ethnography.”
• Judith Butler, “Who Owns Kafka?”

Session 7: The Rule of Law

• Latife Tekin, Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills.
• Nazan Üstündag, “Antigone as Kurdish Politician: Gendered Dwellings in the Limit Between Freedom and Peace.”
• Zeynep Alemdar, “‘Modelling’ for Democracy? Turkey’s Historical Issues with Freedom of Speech.” 

Session 8: Intersecting Critical Humanities and Critical Legal Studies

• Elizabeth S. Anker, and Bernadette Meyler, New Directions in Law and Literature.
• R. Buonamano, "Kafka and legal critique."
• Sara Dehm, “International Law at the Border: Refugee Deaths, the Necropolitical State and Sovereign Accountability.”

B. Venkat Mani, Tales of Unsettlement: Exile, Forced Migration, and Refuge in World Literature

We are living, once again, in times of forced migrations and refuge. At the end of 2024, 123 million human beings were forced to flee their homes due to persecution, violence, wars, or ethnic conflicts (UNHCR). Germany, which led the world in creating German-Jewish refugees during the National Socialist period became home to over a million refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, and many other nations in the twenty-first century. Many of them settled in Berlin, today home to one of the largest Turkish diaspora, migrants and refugees from around the world, as well as a space for cultural transformation of Europe. With its multilingual and multilocational creative and intellectual history, Berlin provides the perfect platform to think about stories of departure and arrival, plight and flight, fortitude and resilience. 

This seminar offers a comparative perspective on literatures of migration and refuge as world literature. In this seminar we will engage with a variety of texts and historical contexts in the twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries that led to the creation of exiles, migrants, and refugees. 

How do historical moments of forced migration and refuge impact our understanding of national and world literatures? How does an engagement with exilic and refugee figures broaden and deepen our comprehension of world literature? How do we understand the multilingual, polyphonic aesthetics of literary works that centralize forced migrations and refuge? Last, How does Berlin become the stage for understanding exile, migrations, and refuge on a global scale? These questions will serve as catalysts for our seminar, as we explore the position and ambition of the novel as part of contemporary literature. 

The aim of the seminar is threefold. First, by engaging with conceptual histories of the terms “exiles,” “migrants,” and “refugees,” we will develop a differentiated understanding of “willful” and “forced” migrations. Second, we will explore how focusing on “refuge” and “forced migrations” open up new modalities of tracing colonial histories of geo-cultural partitions, race relations, labor migrations, and cross-linguistic exchanges, thereby identifying hitherto uncharted ways of conceptualizing mono- and multilingualism in the 21st century. And finally, we will try to understand the multiple valences of the term “global”: as a perspective, process, and a unit of comparison. Literary works selected will include some Berlin based authors and texts read in comparison with those from the Global South.

B. Venkat Mani is Professor of German and World Literatures and Evjue Bascom Professor of Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Reimer Lüst Fellow (2025-26) at the German National Literary Archives (DLA-Marbach). Mani has published widely in many academic journals in the fields of World Literature, German Studies, Comparative Literature, South Asian Literatures, Migration and Refugee Studies, and Book- and Library Histories. He is the author of Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk (University of Iowa Press, 2007) and Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books (Fordham UP, 2017; winner of German Studies Association’s DAAD Prize and Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Best Book in German Studies 2018). Mani has edited or co-edited several volumes including Of Homes and Worlds: David Damrosch’s Comparative World Literatures (Journal of World Literature, 2024), “World Literature: Against Isolationist Readings” (German Quarterly, 2021), and A Companion to World Literature (Wiley Blackwell 2020). His public humanities essays can be read in in Inside Higher Ed, Telos, The Wire (Hindi), The Hindustan Times, and The Indian Express. He serves on the editorial board of Das Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft, and the advisory board of Cornell University Press’s series Signale  Mani is currently working on a monograph on refugees and the global novel.

Session 1: Exiles, Migrants, and Refugees: Conceptual Histories

• Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees.” The Jewish Writings.
• Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile.” Reflections on Exile and Other Essays.
• Nguyen, “On Being a Refugee, An American—and a Human Being.” In The Refugees.

Session 2: World Literature, Global History: Critical Approaches

• David Damrosch, “Emigrations.” Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age.
• Sebastian Conrad, “Introduction” to What Is Global History?

Session 3: Migration, Forced Migration, and Refugee Studies: Critical Approaches

• B. S. Chimni, “The Birth of a ‘Discipline’: From Refugee to Forced Migration Studies.”
• Vinh Nguyen, “Refugeetude: When Does a Refugee Stop Being a Refugee?”

Session 4: Tales of Unsettlement: The Stakes of World Literature

• Vinh Nguyen, “The Migrant Rain.” Brick, A Literary Journal 107 (Summer 2021): 47-53. * Republished in LitHub: https://lithub.com/to-mourn-with-no-grave-vinh-nguyen-on-the-double-loss-of-a-father/
• B. Venkat Mani, “Theorizing Unsettlement: Refugee Narratives as Literary Ration Cards.” In The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives.

Session 5: Colonial Legacies: Divided Lands

• Anuk Arudapragasam, A Passage North.
• Urvashi Butalia, “Return.” The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India.

Session 6: The Holocaust and Second World War: Berlin in Refugee Time and Memory

• Anita Desai, Baumgartner’s Bombay.
• Anna Seghers, Transit. Trans. Margot Bettauer Dumbo.

Session 7: Imperial Ambitions in the Present: Berlin as the Space for Scramble for Africa  

• Abdulrazak Gurnah, Afterlives. 

• Abdulrazak Gurnah, “From Zanzibar to Marbach: Schiller Lecture." 

Session 8: Cold Wars and War on Terror: Languages of Refuge

• Ariq Rahimi, Earth and Ashes.
• Hassan Blasim, “The Nightmares of Carlos Feuntes.” Trans. Jonathan Wright.

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.” Trans. Swapan Chakravorty.
• Rabindranath Tagore, “The Components of Literature” and “The Significance of Literature." Trans. Swapan Chakravorty.
• 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. Trans. Richard Philcox.
• 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.” 

Lawrence Venuti, What is Translation? Theory, Practice, Value

Although the history of translation theory and practice has been distinguished by a range of concepts and strategies, two approaches have recurred so frequently as to be considered dominant models. The first can be called instrumental, treating translation as the reproduction or transfer of an invariant contained in or caused by the source text, whether its form, its meaning, or its effect. The second can be called hermeneutic, treating translation as the inscription of an interpretation, one among varying and even conflicting possibilities, so that the source text is seen as variable in form, meaning, and effect. This seminar will explore the continuing pertinence of these models for the study, practice, and evaluation of translation by examining the work of various theorists, commentators, and practitioners from antinquity to the present. The discussions will be grounded in analyses of translations into and out of English from a variety of humanistic genres and text types, including the lyric poem, prose fiction, the screenplay, and philosophy. Attention will be given to various theoretical concepts, including equivalence, ethics, and untranslatability, as well as the fundamental relationship between theory and practice. At the end we will consider whether models of translation can illuminate other second-order practices, like film adaptation. Throughout we will be concerned with the centrality of translation to the study of world cultures in any media.

Lawrence Venuti, professor emeritus of English at Temple University, is a translation theorist and historian as well as a translator from Italian, French, and Catalan. He is the author of The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (1995; 2nd ed., 2008), The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (1998), Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice (2013), and Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic (2019). He has also edited Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (1992), The Translation Studies Reader (4th ed., 2021), and Teaching Translation: Programs, Courses, Pedagogies (2017). His translations include, most recently, J. Rodolfo Wilcock’s collection of real and imaginary biographies, The Temple of Iconoclasts (2014), I.U. Tarchetti’s Fantastic Tales (2020), and Dino Buzzati’s novel The Stronghold  (2023) and The Bewitched Bourgeois: Fifty Stories (2025).

Session 1: The Dominance of Instrumentalism and the Theory of World Literature

• Alejandro Chacoff, “Solitaire.” 

• Eliot Weinberger, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei.

• Pascale Casanova, “Consecration and Accumulation of Literary Capital: Translation as Unequal Exchange.” Trans. S. Brownlie.

• Emily Apter, From “Untranslatables: A World System.”

Session 2: The Rise of Instrumentalism in Antiquity

• [Zhi Qian?], From the Preface to the Sutra of Dharma Verses. Trans. Haun Saussy.

• Jerome, “Letter to Pammachius.” Trans. Kathleen Davis.

• Al-Jāḥiẓ,  From The Book of Living Beings. Trans. James E. Montgomery.

• Case Study: Livius Andronicus, fragments from the Odissia. Trans. David Camden.

Session 3: The Invariant and Cultural Assimilation

• Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt, Prefaces to Tacitus (1640) and Lucian (1654). Trans. Lawrence Venuti.

• Eugene Nida, “Principles of Correspondence.”

• Lin Shu, Paratexts to A Record of the Black Slaves’ Cry to Heaven. Trans. R. David Arkush, L.O. Lee, and M. G. Hill.

• Case Study: Extract from Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” trans. Alan Bass, andextracts from Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics, trans. William Weaver.

Session 4: The Hermeneutic Model of Translation

• Friedrich Schleiermacher, “On the Different Methods of Translating.” Trans. Susan Bernofsky. 

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Translations.” Trans. Sharon Sloan.

• Case Study: Charles Baudelaire, “The Cat,” trans. Joanna Richardson, and extract from Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman, Annie Hall, Spanish trans. José Luis Guarner.

Session 5: Style as Interpretation in Modernist Translation

• Ezra Pound, “Guido’s Relations.”

• Qu Qiubai and Lu Xun, “An Exchange on Translation.” Trans. Chloe Estep.

• Jorge Luis Borges, “The Translators of The One Thousand and One Nights.” Trans. Esther Allen.

• Case Study: Catullus 56 and 70. Trans. Peter Whigham, Celia and Louis Zukofsky, and Charles Martin.

Session 6: The Translator’s Agency in Social Formations

• Itamar Even-Zohar, “The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem.”

• Gideon Toury, “The Nature and Role of Norms in Translation.”

• André Lefevere, “Mother Courage’s Cucumbers: Text, System and Refraction in a Theory of Literature” 

• Case Study: Italian Publishing Statistics; Carlo Lucarelli’s review of Edward Bunker’s No Beast So Fierce and Stefano Bortolossi’s Italian translation, Come una bestia feroce.

Session 7: Translation Ethics and Cultural Innovation

• Antoine Berman, “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign.” Trans. Lawrence Venuti.

• Stephanie McCarter, “Ovid’s Calisto and Feminist Translation.”

• Case Study: I. U. Tarchetti, Fantastic Tales and Fosca, trans. Lawrence Venuti, and reviews from The New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review.

Session 8: Translation and Second-Order Practices--Film Adaptation

• Christopher Orr, “The Discourse on Adaptation.” 

• L. Venuti, “Translation, Adaptation, Critique.”

• Michelangelo Antonioni, dir., Blow-Up.

• Julio Cortázar, “Las babas del diablo” and“Blow-Up.” Trans. Paul Blackburn.