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July 16-26

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 Damrosch is Director of the Institute for World Literature andDavid D Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA. A past president of the American Comparative Literature Association, he has written widely on comparative and world literature. His books include What Is World Literature? (2003), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007), and How to Read World Literature (2009). He is the founding general editor of the six-volume Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004), editor of Teaching World Literature (2009), co-editor of The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature(2009), and co-editor of a recent collection, Xin fangxiang: bijiao wenxue yu shijie wenxue duben [New Directions: A Reader of Comparative and World Literature] (Peking U. P., 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”
  • 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”
  • Shu-mei Shih, “Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition”
  • 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”

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Ursula Heise, "Science Fiction and the Imagination of Planetary Futures"

This seminar will focus on science fiction as a genre with historical roots and current impacts that reach far beyond the Anglo-American realm with which it is often associated. We will explore when and under what conditions science fiction and its cousin, speculative fiction, arise in different regions, including East Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, and how these genres have spread across the media of novel, graphic novel, short story, TV serial, feature film, animated film, and video game. The literary, analytical, and theoretical readings will focus on how the futures of planet Earth and of different communities on Earth are envisioned. What utopian and dystopian visions of future social orders do these works hold out, and how do they engage with socioeconomic inequality? How are human individuals and communities reimagined as posthuman in the encounter with aliens, animals, or machines?  What role do biology, ecology, and technology – especially digital technologies and biotech – play in these visions? We will particularly emphasize recurrent narrative templates for the imagination of planetary futures that distinguish traditions of science fiction in and across national and regional literatures. 

Ursula K. Heise teaches in the Department of English and at the Institute of the Environment and SustainabilityUrsula Heise at UCLA. Her research and teaching focus on contemporary literature; environmental culture in the Americas, Western Europe and Japan; narrative theory; media theory; literature and science; and science fiction. Her books include “Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism” (Cambridge University Press, 1997), “Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global” (Oxford University Press, 2008), “Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur” (After Nature: Species Extinction and Modern Culture, Suhrkamp, 2010), and “Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species” (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Heise is the Managing Editor of “Futures of Comparative Literature: The ACLA Report on the State of the Discipline” (Routledge, 2017), and co-editor, with Jon Christensen and Michelle Niemann, of “The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities” (2017). She is editor of the bookseries “Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment’ with Palgrave-Macmillan and co-editor of the series “Literature and Contemporary Thought” with Routledge. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and served as President of ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment) in 2011.

Session 1: Science Fiction-Histories and Theories

  • Fredric Jameson, "Progress vs. Utopia, or, Can We Imagine the Future?"
  • Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds.
  • Ursula K. Heise, "The Invention of Ecofutures".
  • Chen Qiufang, “The Torn Generation: Chinese Science Fiction in a Culture in Transition".
  • Anamata Future News 1: Year 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kdfjX9KHMQ&t=21s

Short Survey Lecture: British and American Science Fiction

Session 2: Planetary Nature

Short Survey Lecture: East European Science Fiction

Session 3: Planetary Cities

Short Survey Lecture: Chinese Science Fiction

Session 4: Cyberspace and Virtual Globality

Short Survey Lecture: African Science Fiction

Session 5: Imperialism and Resistance

Short Survey Lecture: Latin American Science Fiction
Session 6: Posthuman Futures: Robots, Cyborgs, Androids

  • Karel Čapek, R.U.R.
  • Rosaleen Love, “The Total Devotion Machine".
  • Mamoru Oshii, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence.
  • William Gibson, “Googling the Cyborg".

Short Survey Lecture: Australian and New Zealand Science Fiction

Session 7: Biofutures

  • Abe Kobo, "Program Card 2" (Sections 23-26) and "Interlude" from Inter Ice Age Four [第四間氷期, Dai-Yon Kampyōki.
  • Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl.
  • Gerardo Sifuentes, "Future Perfect".
  • Anamata Future News 9: 2405
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2uUHh8x8_4 

Short Survey Lecture: Japanese Science Fiction

Session 8: Climate Futures

  • Amitav Ghosh, “Stories” from The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable.
  • Nghiem-Minh Nguyen-Vo, Nước / 2030 [2014 | film; 98 mins.
  • Anamata Future News 10: Year 2499

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbnHvVaTvNc [4mins; New Zealand]

Short Survey Lecture: Utopia, Optopia, Dystopia

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Katharina Piechocki, “Rethinking World Literature through Cartography and the Spatial Turn”

What is the impact of space, geography, and mapping on the study of world literature? By bringing cartography and the spatial turn in dialogue with world literature this seminar asks: what can be gained when literary texts and classics of world literature are read “cartographically,” with an emphasis on the tension between narrative and spatial imaginary? How does the question of scale—one of cartography’s main keywords—emerge as one of world literature’s principal challenges? How does the spatial turn not only reevaluate modes of visualization and strategies of mapping, but also redirect world literature? This seminar discusses maps and texts (theoretical and primary) from Antiquity to the 21stcentury, with an emphasis on the early modern period, when cartography first emerged as a discipline. It includes authors such as Homer, Plato, Augustine, Ibn Khurradādhbih, Petrarch, Christine de Pizan, Columbus, Thomas More, Sor Juana, Friedrich Schiller, E.A. Poe, Jules Verne, Jamaica Kincaid, and Ananda Devi. The readings will be accompanied in class by maps from different periods and regions of the world.

Katharina N. Piechockiis Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Katharina PiechockiShe specializes in early modern literature, with a particular focus on cartography, translation studies, world cinema, theater and opera, and gender studies. She is currently completing a book on Cartographic Humanism: The Making of Early Modern Europe, 1480-1580. Among her recent publications are “Cartographic Translation: Reframing Leonardo Bruni’s De interpretation recta(1424)” and “Erroneous Mappings: Ptolemy and the Visualization of Europe’s East.” Her research, supported by international and national fellowships and grants, brings together canonical texts alongside untranslated and/or less-studied authors and reflects upon the interstices between Western/non-Western literatures and cultures. A former Distinguished Junior External Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center (2015-16), she was a research fellow at the IFK (Internationales Forschungszentrum für Kulturwissenschaften) in Vienna in Spring 2017.

Session 1: The World as Map (Antiquity)

  • Homer, Iliad, Book 18, “The Shield of Achilles,” 480-487.
  • Genesis, 1.1-11.
  • Cicero, Republic, “Scipio’s Dream.".
  • Ptolemy,Geography, Book I: “Guide to Drawing a Map of the World."
  • Anders Engberg-Pederson, “Introduction. Estranging the Map: On Literature and Cartography."

Session 2: The World as Diagram (Middle Ages to the 21stCentury)

  • Simone Pinet, “Diagrammatic Thought in Medieval Literature."
  • Tom Conley, “The Baroque Fold as Map and Diagram."
  • J. B. Harley, “Deconstructing the Map.”

Session 3: Charting the Limits of the World

  • Seneca,Medea, II, vv. 285-379.
  • Augustine,City of God, XVI.
  • Ibn Khurradādhbih, Book of Roads and Kingdoms.
  • E. A. Poe, “Dreamland."
  • Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “On the Refrain.”
  • Gunnar Olsson, “Dematerialized,” in Lines of Power/Limits of Language.

Session 4: Underwater Geographies

  • Virgil,Georgics, IV.
  • Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, XIV.
  • Friedrich Schiller, “Der Taucher” (“The Diver”). 

  • Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
  • Margaret Cohen, “Underwater Optics as Symbolic Form.”

Session 5: Heterotopias

  • Plato, Timaeus, “Atlantis.”
  • The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, “Paradise Terrestrial.” 
  • Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, Part I.
  • Francis Bacon, New Atlantis.
  • Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces.”
  • Jamaica Kincaid, “What I have been doing lately.”

Session 6: Islands

  • Thomas More, Utopia, Book II.
  • Gilles Deleuze, “Desert Islands.”
  • Kamau Brathwaite, Islands (“Jah,” “Littoral,” “The Cracked Mother,” “Caliban,” “Pebbles,” “Islands”).
  • Ananda Devi, Eve out of her Ruins.
  • Marc Shell, Islandology.

Session 7: Transatlantic Itineraries

  • Christopher Columbus, The Four Voyages, First Voyage, Chapter 2-3 (Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo).
  • Vespucci, “Mundus Novus.”
  • Sor Juana, “The Divine Narcissus.”
  • Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic.
  • Derek Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory.”

Session 8: Poetics, Territory, Exile

  • Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere[bilingual edition], Poem 331.
  • Edouard Glissant, “Errantry, Exile.”
  • Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement, “Stories.”
  • Bruno Bosteels, “From Text to Territory. Félix Guattari’s Cartographies of the Unconscious.”

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Delia Ungureanu, "Localizing Time in World Literature and World Cinema"

Two rising disciplines of the past couple of decades – world literature and world cinema – developed in parallel rather than in conjunction, despite sharing a body of theoretical knowledge and the need to adapt their objects to a globalized world. This seminar reexamines the points of intersection between these two disciplines and the possibilities for the “world” in “world literature” and “world cinema” to overlap to a larger extent than is currently thought. Does world cinema, both as an object of study and as a discipline, originate in world literature? Could world cinema, despite its much shorter history, circulate texts of world literature in a fresher way? Exploring these and other questions, this seminar will look at cinema and literature as temporal arts that find their specificity in the ways they engage with different culturally embedded representations of time. We will focus on films that take time not only as theme but as structural principle and as a means of creation and worlding. Discussions will include conceptual intersections between the national, the transnational, the global and the world, the circulation of cinema and literature between the avant-garde and mainstream circuits, and the relation of simultaneity and/or sequentiality between world cinema and world literature. Sources include literary texts by Proust, Woolf, Basho, Cao Xueqin, Arseny Tarkovsky, and Yourcenar, and films by Martin Scorsese, Stephen Daldry, Raúl Ruíz, Andrei Tarkovsky, Akira Kurosawa and Wong Kar-wai. Secondary readings include texts by Raúl Ruíz, Andrei Tarkovsky, Pheng Cheah, Dudley Andrew, Peter Cooke, and Esther C.M. Yau.

Dr. Delia Ungureanu is Assistant Director of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature and Delia Uassistant professor of literary theory in the Department of Literary Studies at the University of Bucharest. She is the author of From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2017), and of Poetica Apocalipsei: Razboiul cultural in revistele literare romanesti (1944–1947) (The Poetics of Apocalypse: The cultural war in Romanian literary magazines, 1944-1947, Bucharest UP, 2012). She has published essays on canon formation, modern poetry and poetics, Shakespeare, Borges, Nabokov, and Orhan Pamuk, and is coediting "Romanian Literature in Today's World", a special issue of the Journal of World Literature.

 

Session 1: What is the “world” in “world literature” and “world cinema”?

  • Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret: A Novel in Words and Pictures. 1st ed., New York, Scholastic Press, 2007.
  • Martin Scorsese, Hugo (2012).Pheng Cheah, “Introduction.” What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Duke UP, 2016..
  • Lúcia Nagib, Chris Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah, “Introduction” to Theorizing World Cinema. Ed. by Lúcia Nagib, Chris Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah. I.B. Tauris, 2012..

Session 2: National, Transnational, World

  • Selections from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Oxford UP, 2008. Trans. Margaret Mauldon. Part I: Ch. VI, Ch. IX,. Part II: Ch. IX. Part III: Ch. 1, Ch. V.
  • Selections from Posy Simmonds’ Gemma Bovery.
  • Anne Fontaine, Gemma Bovery (2014).
  • Reviews of Anne Fontaine’s film.
  • Mette Hjort, “On the plurality of cinematic transnationalism.” World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives. Ed. by Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman. Routledge, 2010.

Session 3: World Cinema vs. Hollywood

  • Selections from Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway. Oxford UP, 2000. Ed. with an introduction and notes by David Bradshaw.
  • Selections from Woolf’s Orlando. Annotated and with an introduction by Maria DiBattista. Harcourt, 2006.
  • Stephen Daldry, The Hours (2002).
  • Interview with Stephen Daldry: “Hollywood? I’ve never even been there.” February 10, 2013.
  • Peter Cooke, “World Cinema’s ‘Dialogues’ with Hollywood.” In World Cinema’s ‘Dialogues’ with Hollywood. Ed. by Peter Cooke. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Session 4: Is world literature the birthplace of world cinema?

  • Selections from Proust’s Swann’s Way. The Modern Library: NY, 2003. Trans. by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. Revised by D.J. Enright.
  • Selections from Proust’s Time Regained. The Modern Library: NY, 6th vol..
  • Raúl Ruíz, Le Temps retrouvé (1999).
  • Raúl Ruíz, “Fascination and Detachment” and “The Face of the Sea.” Poetics of Cinema II, Dis Voir, 2007.
  • Patrick M. Bray, “The ‘Debris of Experience.’ The Cinema of Marcel Proust and Raúl Ruíz”. The Romanic Review. 101:3, May 2010.

Session 5: World cinema turns East: Japanese poetry, a possible model for the cinematic image

  • Selected poems by Arseny Tarkovsky.
  • Selected haiku by Basho from The Art of Haiku: Its History through Poems and Paintings by Japanese Masters. Ed. Stephen Addiss. Shambhala, 2001..
  • Selections from Tales of Ise: Lyrical Episodes from Tenth-Century Japan. Translated, with an introduction and notes, by Helen Craig McCullough. Stanford UP, 1968.
  • Andrei Tarkovsky, Nostalghia (1983).
  • Andrei Tarkovsky, “After Nostalgia” and “Imprinted Time”. Sculpting in Time. University of Texas Press, 1989..
  • Dudley Andrew, “An Atlas of World Cinema.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media 45.2 (Fall 2004)..

Session 6: Thinking transnationally: from Hong Kong cinema to world cinema

  • Dante, “Paolo and Francesca.” The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Ed. and translated by Robert M. Durling. Introduction and notes by Ronald L. Martinez. Vol. I: Inferno. NY & Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.
  • Selections from The Prose Lancelot.
  • Wong Kar-wai, In the Mood for Love (2000).
  • Lyrics for Zhou Xuan’s “Age of Bloom” and Bryan Ferry’s “I’m in the Mood for Love.” 
  • Esther C. M. Yau, “Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World.” At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Session 7: World cinema and world literature: a structural relation

  • Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone. Vol. I. Selections from Chapter I and Chapter V in full + Appendix. Trans. by David Hawkes. Penguin Books. 2012.
  • Interview with Wong Kar-wai on 2046 by Mark Salisbury, published on londonnet.co.uk.
  • “The Northern Beggar and Southern Emperor in a Pleasant Forest: Dialogue with Wong Kar-wai”, Lin Yao-teh. Wong Kar-Wai: Interviews. Edited by Silver Wai-ming Lee and Micky Lee, 2017.
  • Ken Provencer, “Transnational Wong.” A Companion to Wong Kar-wai. Ed. Martha Nochimson. Wiley Blackwell, 2016.

Session 8. Is world cinema a new type of world literature?

  • Marguerite Yourcenar, from Oriental Tales: “How Wang-Fô Was Saved,” “Our-Lady-of-the-Swallows,” “The Sadness of Cornelius Berg,” “Postscript.” New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985.
  • Marguerite Yourcenar, selections from Dreams and Destinies. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
  • Akira Kurosawa, Dreams (1990).
  • Martin Scorsese, “Akira Kurosawa”. Architectural Digest. Los Angeles 65.11 (Nov 2008).
  • Dudley Andrew, “Time Zones and Jetlag: The Flows and Phases of World Cinema.” In World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives. Ed. by Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman. Routledge, 2010.

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Zhang Longxi, "From Comparison to World Literature: Readings and Conceptual Issues"

In his conversation with J. P. Eckermann, Goethe spoke of the advent of “the epoch of world literature” in talking about his reading experience of a Chinese novel in translation, and the idea of Weltliteratur since Goethe has always implied the transcendence of European or any other national or regional tradition of literature and culture, and also the importance of literary translation. Comparative literature as a discipline established in 19th-century Europe, however, did not embrace Goethe’s cosmopolitan vision, but veered towards Eurocentrism, a cultural version of European expansion and colonialism. Theoretically speaking, the tension between two opposite forces has always resided in world literature as a concept, which stands poised between the local and the global, national specificities and cosmopolitan claims to literary universality. While going beyond national literary traditions, comparative literature has national literature as its basis and has been largely limited to comparisons within the European tradition, but more recently East-West comparative studies has become more visible and challenges traditional Eurocentric tendencies. In contrast, world literature today clearly transcends Eurocentrism and takes into consideration the contribution of literary translation and its efficacy. At the same time, there are still conceptual issues that need to be fully explored in the study of world literature before we may acquire a truly global or planetary perspective, beyond the ethnocentric or nationalistic tendencies almost inherent in all literary traditions. This seminar will discuss such conceptual and methodological issues in relation to readings of literary texts in translation, and explore these issues informed by the consciousness of our own historicity, our understanding of national, comparative, and world literature and literary theories, and our sense of the relevance of world literature to our own time.

Zhang Longxi ZHANG Longxi (MA Peking, Ph. D. Harvard) is currently Chair Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation at the City University of Hong Kong. He is elected President of the International Comparative Literature Association for the term of 2016-2019, an elected foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities and also of Academia Europaea. With David Damrosch, Theo D’haen and Jale Parla, he is an Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of World Literature; an Advisory Editor of New Literary History; and editor of Palgrave Macmillan’s “Canon and World Literature” book series. He has published widely in both English and Chinese, and his English book publications include The Tao and the Logos: Literary Hermeneutics, East and West (Duke, 1992), Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (Stanford, 1998), Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (Cornell, 2005), Unexpected Affinities: Reading across Cultures (Toronto, 2007), and most recently, From Comparison to World Literature (SUNY, 2015).

Session 1: From Weltliteratur to Comparative Literature: Cosmopolitan or Eurocentric?

  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Conversations with Eckermann on Weltliteratur (1827),” in David Damrosch (ed.), World Literature in Theory (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2014).
  • Hugo Meltzl, “Present Tasks of Comparative Literature (1877)”.
  • René Etiemble, “Should We Rethink the Notion of World Literature (1974)”.
  • Zhang Longxi, “Crossroads, Distant Killing, and Translation: On the Ethics and Politics of Comparison,” in Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman (eds.) Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).

Session 2: Debating World Literature

  • Pascale Casanova, “Literature as a World (2005),” in Damrosch (ed.), World Literature in Theory.
  • Alexander Beecroft, “World Literature without a Hyphen: Towards a Typology of Literary Systems (2008)”.
  • Amir R. Mufti, from “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literature (2010),” “What Is World Literature?”; “Global English and the Vernaculars”.
  • Zhang Longxi, “Epilogue: The Changing Concept of World Literature”.

Session 3: Dreams, Interpretations, and World Literature

  • Shakespeare, from The Merchant of Venice, John Russell Brown (ed.), The Arden Shakespeare, Act II, scene 1, pp. 32-35; scene VII; scene IX; Act III, scene II.
  • Sigmund Freud, “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” in Collected Paper, 5 vols. (New York: Basic Books, 1959).
  • Qian Zhongshu, “God’s Dream,” in Christopher G. Rea (ed.), Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts: Stories and Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

Session 4: Utopia in World Literature

  • Krishan Kumar, from Utopianism (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
  • Aziz Al-Azmeh, “Rhetoric for the Senses: A Consideration of Muslim Paradise Narratives,” in The Times of History: Universal Topics in Islamic Historiography (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007).
  • Dowe Fokkema, “Chinese Philosophers and Writers Constructing Their Own Utopias,” in Perfect Worlds: Utopian Fiction in China and the West (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011).

Session 5: Anti-Utopia in World Literature

  • Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, trans. Clarence Brown (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993).
  • Krishan Kumar, “The Ends of Utopia,” New Literary History 41:3 (Summer 2010).

Session 6: Poetry and Sorrow

  • P. B. Shelley, “To a Skylark.”
  • Qian Zhongshu, “Poetry as a Vehicle of Grief,” in Patchwork: Seven Essays on Art and Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2014).

Session 7: East-West Studies and World Literature

  • Claudio Guillén, The Challenge of Comparative Literature, trans. Cola Franzen (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
  • G. E. R. Lloyd, Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections: Philosophical Perspectives on Greek and Chinese Science and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
  • Zhang Longxi, “East-West Comparative Studies: A Challenge and an Opportunity,” KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge, 1:1 (Spring 2017).

Session 8: Discussion and Tentative Conclusions

This will be a general discussion session for participants to take advantage of their different backgrounds and experiences to raise questions and issues of their own interest concerning world literature and literary studies in general, and try to come to some conclusions not just of the seminar itself, but of our understanding of world literature and how best to move forward for its further development in our learning, teaching, and research.