HOME / PROGRAM / PAST SESSIONS / 2017 UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN / SEMINARS /

July 17-26

Hendrik Birus, "Debating World Literature"

The course offers an introduction to the concept of world literature as a key term of Comparative Literature as well as Cultural Studies. During the 19th and 20th century it was nearly exclusively a ‘European affair’, but since the turn of the century there is a fruitful discussion of this concept especially in the United States. The course deals with the most important exponents of the current debate and its preconditions and results. In a next step it asks for the connection of the rise of world literature with the socio-economical as well as ideological advance of globalization. At last it casts a light on the historical roots of this concept which was coined by the late Johann Wolfgang Goethe and propagated by his liberal contemporaries in France as well as e.g. by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Instruction focuses on the theoretical potential of this concept by discussing actual theoretical texts as well as those from its founding period. Aim of the course is to give students an understanding of the usefulness of theoretical debates in the humanities and of their applicability to actual problems in Literary and Cultural Studies.

Hendrik Birus is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Jacobs University Bremen, Germany. He was previously Professor of General and Comparative Literature at the University of Munich (1987-2008) and then Vice President and Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Jacobs University Bremen (2006-2012). He has taught as a visiting professor at the universities of Vienna, Rome, Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), Indiana (Bloomington), Pennsylvania (Philadelphia) and Washington (Seattle), at Washington University (St. Louis) and Yale (New Haven), as well as at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales Paris; he was named a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Study) of Berlin in 1995. His publications include work on literary theory, literary onomastics, and hermeneutics; several studies on Comparative Literature dealing with various authors and philosophers from the 18th, 19th and 20th century, esp. Lessing, Goethe, Jean Paul, Th. Mann, Proust, Joyce, and Celan as well as Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, Freud, Jakobson, Adorno, Foucault, and Derrida.

Session 1: Goethe’s Coining of the Concept World Literature

  • Johann Wolfgang (von) Goethe, “On World Literature (1827),” in: World Literature: A Reader, ed. D’haen, Domínguez and Rosendahl Thomsen.
  • Hendrik Birus, “Main Features of Goethe’s Concept of World Literature,” in: Comparative Literature Now: Theories and Practice, ed. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Milan V. Dimić with Irene Sywenky, Paris: Honoré Champion 1999 (= Proceedings of the 14th Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association. ICLA '94 Edmonton).
  • David Damrosch, What is World Literature? Princeton, Oxford: Princeton UP 2003, esp. pp. 1-28.
  • John Pizer, “Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Origins and relevance of Weltliteratur,” in: The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. D’haen, Damrosch and Kadir.

Session 2: World Literature and National Literatures

  • Georg Brandes, “World Literature,” in: World Literature: A Reader, ed. D’haen, Domínguez and Rosendahl Thomsen.
  • Svend Erik Larsen, “Georg Brandes: the telescope of comparative literature,” in: The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. D’haen, Damrosch and Kadir.
  • Hendrik Birus, “On the Complementarity of National Literature(s) and World Literature,“ in: Literature as Cultural Memory (= Proceedings of the 15th Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association. ICLA '97 Leiden) (unpubl.).
  • Jing Tsu, “World literature and national literature(s),” in: The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. D’haen, Damrosch and Kadir.
  • Alexander Beecroft, “World Literature Without a Hyphen: Towards a Typology of Literary Systems,” in: New Left Review, Sec. Ser. 54, 2008.

Session 3: Globalization and Its Cultural Aspects

  • Jürgen Osterhammel / Niels Petersson, Globalization: A Short History, transl. Dona Geyer, Princeton: Princeton UP 2005.
  • C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons, Oxford: Blackwell 2004.
  • Adam McKeown, “Periodizing Globalization,” in: History Workshop Journal 63 (2007).

Session 4: World Literature and Canon

  • Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, New York, San Diego, London: Harcourt Brace & Co. 1994.
  • Horace Engdahl, “Canonization and world literature: the Nobel experience (2008),” in: World Literature: A Reader, ed. D’haen, Domínguez and Rosendahl Thomsen.
  • Theo D’haen, “How Many Canons Do We Need? World Literature, National Literature, European Literature”, in: The Canonical Debate Today: Crossing Disciplinary and Cultural Boundaries, ed. Liviu Papadima, David Damrosch and Theo D’haen, Amsterdam: Rodopi 2011.
  • Delia Ungureanu, “What to Do about Constructing the Literary Canon. Canonicity and Canonical Criteria”, in: Ibid.

Session 5: On the Way from the “Former Province of the Habsburg Monarchy” to World Literature: The International Canonization of Paul Celan

Markus May / Peter Goßens / Jürgen Lehmann (eds.), Celan Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung, 2nd ed., Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler 2012, pp. 374-396: „Internationale Celan-Rezeption“ (with extensive bibliographies for France, Italy, Netherlands and Flanders, Poland, Romania, and Russia).

Session 6: The Concept World Literature in the 21stCentury (I)

  • Pascale Casanova, La République mondiale des Lettres, Paris: Seuil 1999; transl.: The World Republic of Letters, transl. M.B. DeBevoise, Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard UP 2004.
  • Christopher Prendergast, “The World Republic of Letters,” in: Debating World Literature, ed. Prendergast, London, New York: Verso 2004.

Session 7: The Concept World Literature in the 21stCentury (II)

  • Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” in: Moretti, Distant Reading, London, New York 2013.
  • Moretti, “More Conjectures,” in: ibid.
  • Moretti, “The Novel: History and Theory,” in: ibid. (“the Chinese-European comparison”).

Session 8: The Concept World Literature in the 21stCentury (III)

  • Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability, London, New York: Verso 2013.
  • Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, transl. Steven Rendall [& al.], ed. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood, Princeton, Oxford: Princeton UP 2014.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

Our seminar will focus upon a critical reading of what will be exclusively theoretical texts. Ever so often, critical concepts that are currently "fashionable" on the intellectual marketplace are appropriated and used in a rather unreflected manner – be it some philosophical giant, such as Immanuel Kant, or a "famous" researcher that dominates the contemporary scene. With the help of a few guiding questions for each of the texts read, the seminar will try to create a critical awareness about the presuppositions, the argumentation, and the implied consequences these approaches entail. This is indispensable in order to know where these texts can lead you as far as readings go, and where the blind spot and unreflected biases are that any theoretical approach entails.

As both the concepts of Cosmopolitanism and World Literature revolve around a main binary – that between sameness and difference – we will try to locate instances where these binaries appear, and how they are being designated and used for the purpose at hand. This seminar, thus, is geared toward students/scholars who want to question current – and their own – assumptions about canonized texts within the debates of Cosmopolitanism and World Literature, and to find out more about the connections between the two.

Thomas Claviez is currently Professor for Literary Theory at the University of Berne. He is the author of Grenzfälle: Mythos – Ideologie – American Studies(1998) and Aesthetics & Ethics: Moral Imagination from Aristotle to Levinas and from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to House Made of Dawn (2008), as well as the co-author, with Dietmar Wetzel, of Zur Aktualität von Jacques Rancière (2016). He has co-edited numerous volumes, among them “Mirror Writing”: (Re-)Constructions of Native American Identity (2000), Theories of American Studies/Theories of American Culture (2003), Neo-Realism: Between Innovation and Continuation (2004) and Aesthetic Transgressions: Modernity, Liberalism, and the Function of Literature (2006). He is the editor of The Conditions of Hospitality (2013) and The Common Growl: Toward a Poetics of Precarious Community (2016). He is currently working on a monograph with the title A Metonymic Community? Towards a New Poetics of Contingency, a co-edited collection of essays with the title A Critique of Authenticity, and another collection of essays with the title Throwing the Moral Dice: Ethics and/of Contingency. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the EAAS, and member of the Academia Europaea..

Session 1: The History of Cosmopolitanism

Session 2: The Birth of Nationalism

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

Session 3: Liberal Interpretations of Cosmopolitanism

  • Nussbaum, Martha C. “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism” in Martha C. Nussbaum et al., For Love of Country
  • Butler, Judith. “Universality in Culture” in Martha C. Nussbaum et al., For Love of Country?
  • Nussbaum, Martha C. “Reply” in Martha C. Nussbaum et al., For Love of Country?
  • Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism.
  • Bauman, Zygmunt. Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World.

Session 4: Whose Cosmopolitanism? The Problem of Universalism

  • Pollock, Sheldon et al. "Cosmopolitanisms" in Carol A. Beckenridge et al. Cosmopolitanism.
  • Beck, Ulrich. Cosmopolitan Vision.
  • Derrida, Jacques. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness.
  • Calhoun, Craig. "The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travellers" in Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (eds.). Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice.

Session 5: Origins of World Literature: Goethe to Auerbach

  • Auerbach, Erich. "The Philology of World Literature" in James I. Porter (ed.). Time, history, and literature: selected essays of Erich Auerbach.
  • Pizer, John. "Goethe's 'World Literature' Paradigm and Contemporary Cultural Globalization" Comparative Literature.
  • Cheah, Pheng. "What is a World? On world literature as world-making activity" Daedalus.

Session 6: World Literature or the World of Literature? Agon vs. Hegemony

  • Moretti, Franco. "Conjectures on World Literature" in Christopher Prendergast (ed.). Debating World Literature.
  • ---. "More Conjectures" New Left Review.
  • Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters.

Session 7: Travellin' Books or Planetary Literature?

  • Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature?
  • ---. "Script Worlds, Writing Systems, and the Formation of World Literature" Modern Language Quarterly.
  • Dimock, Wai Chee. "Literature for the Planet" PMLA.
  • ----. "Planetary Time and Global Translation" Common Knowledge.

Session 8: Alternative Communities – Alternative Stories?

  • Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community.
  • Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Christian Dahl, "The Globalization of Greek Tragedy"

In recent years Greek tragedy has witnessed a remarkable global resurgence, thanks not least to non-Western and postcolonial dramatists and performers. Actually, more Greek tragedy has been performed in the last forty years than at any point in history since antiquity.

While in a sense, the globalization of Greek tragedy already began in antiquity and resurfaced in the early modern era, the current dissemination of tragedy raises a number of comparative questions that cannot be answered by traditional philological scholarship: How can we meaningfully compare the dramatic norms of tragedy to non-Western drama, and how can we approach re-adaptations which fuse Greek tragedy with indigenous theatrical traditions we that are less familiar with? Where does the globalization of Greek tragedy leave the philosophical tradition of tragic theory that developed from German idealism?

The seminar will explore different approaches to world drama in its relation to four major works from the Western canon: Sophocles’ King Oedipus and Antigone, Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Euripides’ Bacchae.

Christian Dahl is associate professor, PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Copenhagen. His main research interests are classical and early modern drama.  Publications in Danish include a monograph on Greek tragedy and its political context (Bystat og tragedie, 2010), a translation of Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes and essays on the history of classical and early modern theatre. Publications in English include an anthology on republicanism and essays on African adaptations of Greek tragedy.

Session 1: From Athenian to Classical Tragedy

  • Sophocles: King Oedipus
  • Seneca: Oedipus (Act 1)
  • Jean-Pierre Vernant: “The Historical Moment of Tragedy in Greece”
  • Pierre Vidal-Naquet: “Oedipus in Vicenza and Paris”

Session 2: Aesthetics and History: Towards Modern Tragedy

  • Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Aesthetics (excerpts)
  • Franco Moretti: “The Moment of Truth”

Session 3: Methods of Cross-Cultural Comparison

  • Kalidasa: The Recognition of Sakuntala (Act 1, 6, 7)
  • David Damrosch: “Reading Across Cultures”

  • Sukumari Bhattacharji, "Sanskrit Drama and the Absence of Tragedy"

  • Optional: Marcel Detienne: “Constructing Comparables”

Session 4: African Antigones: Beyond Classical Tragedy

  • Athol Fugard: The Island
  • Lorna Hardwick: “Greek Drama and Anti-Colonialism”

Session 5: African Antigones: Tragedy and Post-Negritude Literature

  • Femi Osofisan: Tegonni (excerpts)
  • Femi Ososfisan: “Theatre and the Rites of Post-Negritude Remembering”

Session 6: Justice and Violence in the Oresteia

  • Yael Farber: Molora
  • Christoph Menke: Law and Violence

Session 7: Cross-cultural Bacchae: the Greek and the Foreign

  • Euripides: Bacchae
  • Homer: Iliad VI “Glaukos and Diomedes”

Session 8: Cross-cultural Bacchae: Ritual, Community and Contemporary Performance

  • Wole Soyinka: The Bacchae of Euripides. A Communion Rite (excerpts)
  • Erika Fischer Lichte: “Preface to Dionysus Resurrected”
  • Film clips from performance productions by Richard Schechner and Tadashi Suzuki

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Susan Stanford Friedman, "Planetary Modernisms"

 

What might the transnational turn in modernist studies contribute to the study of world literature? This seminar proposes a “planetary” approach to “modernity” as a recurrent, polycentric, and global phenomena pre-existing the conventional periodization of modernity and continuing into the present. The seminar will challenge the conventional assumption that modernity begins in post-1500 Europe and spreads, belatedly, to the rest of the world. Rethinking modernity in the longue durée, we will review debates about spatial and temporal scale, periodization, empire, migration, continental and oceanic environments, gender and racial formations, and aesthetics. Discussions will draw on theorists of world systems, cultural circulation, relational networks, and archipelagic thought such as Immanuel Wallerstein, Éduard Glissant, James Clifford, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Epeli Hau’ofa, Wai Chee Dimock, Edward Said, and Elizabeth DeLoughrey. The modernisms of world literature will be considered with readings from  pre-1500 modernities—e.g., Du Fu’s Tang Dynasty poetry and Kabir’s improvisational songs in India—along with discussions of transcontinental modernisms of the long 20th century, including such figures as Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stevens, Tayeb Salih, Derek Walcott, Keri Hulme, Selina Tusitala Marsh, and Mohja Kahf. Four methods of planetary reading of the world literatures of multiple modernities will be discussed—Re-Vision (rereading Anglo-European modernisms from a global perspective); Archaeology (recovery of modernisms outside conventional canons of the West); Circulation (identification of patterns of traveling cultures, translation, and transculturation); and Collage (juxtaposition of differently placed modernisms for comparative insights).

 

Susan Stanford Friedman is Hilldale Professor in the Humanities and Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she directs the Institute for Research in the Humanities. Her most recent books are Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (Columbia UP, 2015) and Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013), co-edited with Rita Felski. She has published widely in modernist studies, narrative theory, feminist theory, women’s writing, migration and diaspora, world literature, religious studies, and psychoanalysis. She is the author of Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. (1981); Penelope's Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.'s Fiction (1990); and Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (1998), which was translated into Chinese in 2013. She edited Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher and Their Circle(2001) and Joyce: The Return of the Repressed (1991) and co-edited Signets: Reading H.D.She is the founding co-editor of the journal, Contemporary Women's Writing (Oxford UP). She was awarded the Wayne C. Booth Award for Lifetime Achievement in Narrative Studies, and her work has been translated into Chinese, Czech, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Serbian, and, Spanish. She is at work on a book provisionally entitled Sisters of Scheherazade: Religion Diaspora, and Muslim Women’s Writing and an edited collection, Contemporary Revolutions: Turning Back to the Future in Twenty-First Century Literature and Art.

 

Advance Reading

  • Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North
  • Readings for Session 1

Suggested Advance Reading

  • Susan Stanford Friedman, Introduction and Conclusion, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time
  • Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

 

Session 1:  World Literature and the Transnational Turn in Modernist Studies

  • Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “The Transnational Turn in Modernist Studies”
  • Susan Stanford Friedman, “Planetarity: Musing Modernist Studies”
  • David James and Urmila Seshagiri, “Metamodernism: Narratives of Continuity and Revolution”
  • Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

Session 2:   Rethinking Modernity: Periodization and Scale

  • Wai Chee Dimock, “Planet as Duration and Extension,” Introduction, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time
  • Susan Stanford Friedman, “Stories of Modernity: Planetary Scale in the Longue Durée,” Selected from Chapter 3, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time

Session 3:   Rethinking Modernism:  Pre-1500 Aesthetic Modernities

  • Selected Poems of Du Fu, 8th century Tang Dynasty Poet
  • Kabir, Selected poems from Songs of Kabir. Trans. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
  • Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (start reading)

Session 4:   Empire, Nation-States, and Multiple Modernisms: The Long Twentieth Century

  • Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities”
  • Virginia Woolf, “Thunder at Wembley”
  • Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North 

Session 5:  Post/Colonial Modernism: Race, Gender, Sexuality

  • Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North

Session 6:   Environments of Modernity:  Continents, Islands, and Oceans

  • Éduard Glissant, “The Unforeseeable Diversity of the World”
  • Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “’The litany of islands, The rosary of archipelagoes’: Caribbean and Pacific Archipelagraphy”
  • Derek Walcott, “The Sea Is History”

 

Session 7:  Archipelagic Poetics of Relation: Planetary Networks

  • Epeli Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands”
  • Keri Hulme, “Floating World,” from Stonefish
  • Selina Tusitala Marsh, Selected poems from Dark Sparring 

Session 8:   Planetary Circulations in World Literature:   Mobilities of Books and Peoples

  • B. Venkat Mani, “Borrowing Privileges: Libraries and the Institutionalization of World Literature”
  • Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile”
  • Mohja Kahf, Selected poems from E-Mails from Scheherazad

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Francesca Orsini, "Colonialism, a Multilingual Local and Its Significant Geographies"

In historical accounts of colonialism and world literature, the literary “colonial encounter” is usually viewed in terms of diffusion, influence, assimilation into world literature and global capitalism, epistemic violence, or mimicry. English is the ideological battleground and local languages and literature are reshaped in its image. But if we take the case of India, the persistent multilingualism, the polyphony of old and new forms of literary production, the varied and sometimes occluded avenues of circulation, and the strikingly different modes of translation suggest a conception closer to geographer Doreen Massey’s idea of space “as the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality; as the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist.” By taking multilingualism seriously and considering a range of genres and tastes that moved or failed to move across languages and along different “significant geographies”, this course traces the distinct trajectories of literature under colonialism and challenges simple models of world literature. 

Francesca Orsini is Professor of Hindi and South Asian Literature at SOAS, University of London.

Her research interests span modern Hindi literature, book history and commercial genres, and multilingual literary history. She has published The Hindi Public Sphere (2002, Hindi 2010) and Print and Pleasure (2009), and edited Love in South Asia (2002), and Before the Divide: Hindi and Urdu Literary Culture (2010). After Timur Left (2014, on the 15c, with Samira Sheikh) and Tellings and Texts (2015, with Katherine Schofield) came out of a multilingual project on North Indian literary culture and history. Another recent project with Ravikant (SARAI/CSDS) was on Hinglish. 

She is working on the multilingual literary history of Awadh and leading an ERC-funded project on “Multilingual locals and significant geographies: for a new approach to world literature” which compares north India, the Maghreb, and the Horn of Africa.

 

Session 1: Introduction: Multilingual locals and significant geographies in lieu of world literature

  • Doreen Massey, For Space, Sage: London (2005), ‘Setting the scene’ and ‘opening propositions’.
  • J-K Gibson-Graham, ‘Beyond Global vs Local: Economic politics outside the binary frame’, Geographies of Power: Placing Scale (2000).

Session 2: How to become multilingual? Education, cultivation and literary tastes

  • Bhanupratap Tiwari, Autobiography (1895), tr. F. Orsini.
  • Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Structure, Habitus, Practice’ (1994), pp. 278-289.

Session 3: Fort William College, Orientalism and the currency of language

  • Bernard Cohn, ‘The Command of Language and the Language of Command’, Orientalism and its Forms of Knowledge, Princeton UP (1986).
  • Aamir Mufti, ‘Orientalism and the institution of world literature’, Critical Inquiry, Spring 2010.
  • Mir Amman, Introduction to Bagh-o Bahar (2 pages), available at http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00urdu/baghobahar/intro_mir...

Session 4: Travelling tales

Session 5: Present absence: Hindi and Urdu literature in London

  • Trübner’s American and Oriental Literary Record (1865), overview of year 1865; available from Google Free Books and Internet Archive.
  • John Macy, The Story of World Literature. London, Bombay, Sidney: George Harap & Co. (1927).

Session 6: Travelling theatre: Indra’s court in Malay

  • Kathryn Hansen, ‘The migration of a text: Indarsabha in print and performance’, Sangeet Natak(1998).
  • Vladimir Braginsky and Anna Suvorova, ‘A New wave of Indian inspiration: Translations from Urdu in Malay, traditional literature and theatre’, Indonesia and the Malay World, (2008).

Session 7: Colonial translation and formal equivalence

  • O. Goldsmith, ‘The deserted village’, available at https://archive.org/details/gemsgoldsmithtr00goldgoog
  • Barrett, The Traveller & The Deserted Village, London: Macmillan (1888).
  • S. Pathak, ‘Ujar gram’, Allahabad (1906), Introduction, Nivedan/Entreaty (to Hindi readers).
  • Valerie Ritter, Kāma's flowers: nature in Hindi poetry and criticism, 1885-1925, Albany: SUNY (2011).

Session 8: Both East and West: translation, the radio, and world literature

  • Miraji, ‘Des des ke gīt’, Adabī duniyā (1938), in Bāqiyat-e Mīrājī, ed. Shima Majid, Lahore: Pakistan Books and Literary Sounds (1990), tr. F. Orsini.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, "Between Nations: Migrant Writing and the Cultural Meeting in the Text"

Migrant writers often find themselves in a precarious situation: between cultures, between nations, between languages, and with an uncertain affiliation to literary cultures. But these challenges have also been turned into a creative resource for several writers whose works are characterized by investigating the space where a stable identity is not an option. This seminar will examine questions of exile, identity, language shifts and mixed languages as well as the poetics of migrant writing and the politics of migration. Authors include Xiaolu Guo, Junot Díaz, Herta Müller, Atiq Rahimi, Salman Rushdie, Edwidge Dandicat, Jacob A. Riis, and James Joyce along with critical perspectives by Édouard Glissant, Rebecca Walkowitz, Edward W. Said and Kwame A. Appiah.

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen (M.A. 1998, PhD 2002 in Comparative Literature, Aarhus University) is Professor with Special Responsibilities of Comparative Literature at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is the author of Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literature (2008), The New Human in Literature: Posthuman Visions of Changes in Body, Mind and Society (2013), and the editor of several volumes, including World Literature: A Reader (2012), The Posthuman Condition: Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics of Biotechnological Challenges (2012), Danish Literature as World Literature (2017) and Literature: An Introduction to Theory and Analysis (2017). He has published in the fields of literary historiography, modernist literature, world literature, canonization, and historical representations of the posthuman. Thomsen has taught at the Institute for World Literature (Harvard, 2013), and he is currently co-director of the research project “Posthuman Aesthetics” (2014-17),  co-director of the Digital Text Lab (2015-) and director of the research focus area “Human Futures” (2016-19). He is a member of the Academia Europaea (2010-).

Session 1: Migrant writing introduction

  • Salman Rushdie: “Imaginary Homelands”, Imaginary Homelands. London 1992, pp. 9-21.
  • Salman Rushdie: “The Porter”, East-West: Stories. London 1994, pp. 175-211.
  • Rebecca L. Walkowitz: “The Location of Literature”, Contemporary Literature 47:4 (2006), pp. 527-545.
  • Herta Müller: The Passport. London 1989. Excerpt tbd.

Session 2: Identity

  • Aleksandar Hemon: Nowhere Man. New York: 2003, pp. 3-25, 129-134, and 194-221.
  • Kwame A. Appiah: “Rooted Cosmopolitanism”, The Ethics of Identity. Princeton: 2004, pp. 213-233.
  • Georg Brandes, Main Currents in 19th Century Literature, London 1901, pp. 1-6.

Session 3: Exile

  • Joseph Conrad: “Amy Foster”. Edition tbd.
  • Edward Said: “Reflections on Exile”, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: 1999, pp. 137-149.
  • Edouard Glissant: Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor 1997, pp. 9-21.

Session 4: Geography and memory

  • Edwinge Danticat: Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York 1994. Excerpt tbd.
  • Patrick Samwaj: “A Homeward Journey”, Mississippi Quarterly 57:1 (2003), pp. 74-84.
  • Ben Okri: Starbook. London 2007. Excerpt tbd.
  • Madhu Krishnan: “Negotiating Africa Now”, Transition 113 (2014), pp. 11-24.

Session 5: Mixed languages

  • Junot Díaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Excerpt tbd.
  • Jamaica Kincaid: Mr. Potter.  Excerpt tbd.
  • Rebecca Walkowitz: “This is not your language”, Born Translated. New York: 2015, pp. 163-202.

Session 6: Language shifts and gender

  • Xiaolu Guo: A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. London 2007, pp. 1-19 and 184-205.
  • Atiq Rahimi: The Patience Stone. New York 2009. Excerpt tbd.

Session 7: Gender

  • Roberto Bolaño: 2666. New York 2008.
  • Melissa Wright: “Necropolitics, Narcopolitics, and Femicide”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36:3 (2011).
  • Guo and Rahimi encore.

Session 8: Poetics and politics of betweenness

  • Roberto Bolaño: 2666. New York 2008.
  • Herman Herlinghaus: “Placebo Intellectuals in the Wake of Cosmopolitanism”, The Global South 5:1 (2011).