July 2-12

Christopher Bush, "The Avant-Gardes in the World"

This seminar considers the early-twentieth-century avant-gardes as a kind of world literature. In addition to such European movements as Italian futurism and French surrealism, we will study a broad range of non-European movements including anthropophagy in Brazil, the Cairo-based Art et Liberté, and New Sensationism in East Asia. Our focus will be on manifestos, literary works, and critical theories of the avant-garde, but we will also consider art and film. Critical topics include futurisms and primitivisms; nationalism and internationalism; art and anti-art; revolution and institutionalization; and fascism and anti-fascism.

Christopher Bush is associate professor in the department of French at Northwestern University, where he also serves on the faculty of Comparative Literary Studies and Asian Studies, and co-directs two interdisciplinary initiatives: the Global Avant-garde and Modernist Studies graduate certificate and the French and the Global Humanities working group. His research focuses on comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to modernism and the historical avant-gardes. Publications include a translation and critical edition of Victor Segalen’s Stèles (Wesleyan, 2007), Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford, 2012), and, more recently, essays in A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism (Eric Hayot and Rebecca Walkowitz, eds., Columbia 2016) and Ezra Pound in the Present (Josephine Park and Paul Stasi, eds., Bloomsbury, 2016). He currently has two book projects under contract: The Floating World: Japoniste Aesthetics and Global Modernity (Columbia) and The Global Avant-garde (Bloomsbury) and is co-editor of the journal Modernism/modernity.

Read in advance

• Walter Benjamin. “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (1939)
• Peter Bürger. From Theory of the Avant-garde
• Harsha Ram. “The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, National, Regional, Local”

Session 1: Futurist Primitivism

{Umberto Boccioni. “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” (1913)}

• F. T. Marinetti. “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” (1909)
• Umberto Boccioni, et al. “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto” (1910)
• F. T. Marinetti. “Destruction of Syntax—Radio Imagination—Words-in-Freedom” (1913)
• F. T. Marinetti. “Bombardment” from Zang Tumb Tumb (1914)
• Lucia Re. “‘Barbari civilizzatissimi’: Marinetti and the Futurist Myth of Barbarism”

Session 2: Art/anti-art/non-art

{Marcel Duchamp. Fountain (1917)}

• Hugo Ball. “Karawane” (1916)
• Tristan Tzara. Seven Dada Manifestos (ca. 1916-1924)
• Martin Puchner. “Dada and the Internationalism of the Avant-Garde” from Poetry of the Revolution
• Thierry de Duve. From Kant after Duchamp

Session 3: Revolution and Internationalism

{Vladimir Tatlin. The Monument to the Third International (1919)}

• Velimir Khlebnikov. “The Trumpet of the Martians” (1916)
• Velimir Khlebnikov. “To the Artists of the World” (1919)
• Norbert Lynton. From Tatlin’s Tower: Monument to Revolution
• Harsha Ram. From “Spatializing the Sign: The Futurist Eurasianism of Roman Jakobson and Velimir Khlebnikov”

Session 4: Aftershocks

{Ramón Alva de la Canal. Stridentopolis (c. 1925)}

• Manuel Maples Arce. “Stridentist Prescription” (1921)
• Manuel Maples Arce. Metropolis: Bolshevik Super-Poem in Five Cantos (1924)
• Hagiwara Kyojiro. Selections from Death Sentence (1925)
• Rubén Gallo. “Maples Arce, Marinetti and Khlebnikov: The Mexican Estridentistas in Dialogue with Italian and Russian Futurisms”
• William Gardner. From Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s

Session 5: Surrealism in Paris

{Eugène Atget. “Boulevard de Strasbourg (Corsets)” (1912)}

• André Breton. From Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)
• Louis Aragon. From Le Paysan de Paris (1926)
• Walter Benjamin. “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” (1929)

Session 6: The Country of the Future

{Tarsila do Amaral. Anthropophagy (1929)}

• Oswald de Andrade. “Cannibalist Manifesto” (1928)
• Roberto Schwarz. “The Cart, the Tram, and the Modernist Poet”
• Vera Wolfe. “Paris as Periphery: Vicente do Rego Monteiro and Brazil's Discrepant Cosmopolitanism”

Session 7: New sensations: mass culture between modanizumu and proletarian art

{Koga Harue. Umi (1929)}

• Riichi Yokomitsu. From Shanghai (1928-31)
• Mu Shiying. “Shanghai Foxtrot” (1934)
• Miriam Silverberg. From Erotic Grotesque Nonsense
• Heather Bowen-Struyk. “Proletarian Arts in East Asia”

Session 8: Art and Liberty

{Ramses Younan. Untitled [Nut] (1939)}

• Art et Liberté. “Long Live Degenerate Art!” (1938)
• Sam Bardaouil. “Introduction” from Surrealism in Egypt: Modernism and the Art and Liberty Group

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Pheng Cheah, "World Literature and Cosmopolitanism in Postcolonial Globalization"

The intensification of globalization in the past decade has led to a renewed interest in reinventing Goethe’s project of world literature. Recent discussions of the topic, however, have taken the normative significance of ‘the world’ for granted. This course explores the normative vocation of world literature and its relationship to cosmopolitanism in postcolonial globalization. We will examine various normative philosophical accounts of the world and the connections that are posited between between literature, culture and worldliness before turning to consider the vocation and effectiveness of postcolonial world literature that seeks to transform the world created by Northern political and economic hegemony. We will explore the following questions in order to articulate a fuller normative account of world literature: Is world literature a form of cosmopolitanism? What is the link between worldliness and temporality? What are the fundamental connections between narrative form and worldliness? What are the affinities and tensions between world literature and postcolonial literature? Readings will be drawn from recent accounts of world literature such as Damrosch, Moretti, Casanova, normative accounts of worldliness such as Goethe, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger and Arendt and postcolonial narrative fiction such as Amitav Ghosh, Nuruddin Farah and Timothy Mo.

Pheng Cheah is Professor of Rhetoric and Geography and Chair of the Center for Southeast Asia Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1999. He has published extensively on the theory and practice of cosmopolitanism. His books include Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (Columbia University Press, 2003), Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Harvard University Press, 2006) and most recently, What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Duke University Press, 2016). His co-edited books include Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (U of Minnesota P, 1998), Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson (Routledge, 2003), and Derrida and the Time of the Political (Duke UP, 2009). His work has appeared in journals such as Diacritics, Boundary 2, Public Culture, Daedalus, New Literary History and PMLA.

Session 1: Framing Questions: World Literature or Global Literature

• Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature” and “More Conjectures”
• David Damrosch, “World Literature, National Contexts” and What is World Literature?
• Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters.

Session 2: The Normative Conception of World Literature, Cosmopolitanism and Temporality

• Erich Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur”
• Selections from Goethe on world literature
• Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (selections)

Session 3: Is the World a Market? The Limits of Materialist Cosmopolitanism

• Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto
• David Harvey, “Notes Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development,” and “Space as a Key Word,” in Spaces of Global Capitalism

Session 4: Worlding and Literature

• Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence of Ground”
• Martin Heidegger, “Why Poets?”

Session 5: Worlding, Literature and Postcolonial Globalization

• Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (selections)
• Frederic Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping”
• Robert Young, “World Literature and Postcolonialism”

Session 6: Subaltern Reworlding and the Novel Form

• Amitav Ghosh, The Hungy Tide (selections)
• Annu Jalais, “Bon Bibi: Bridging Worlds”
• Annu Jalais, “Dwelling on Morichjhanpi: When Tigers Became Citizens, Refugees ‘Tiger Food’”

Session 7: Worldly Ethics and the Time of Stories

• Alex de Waal and Rakiya Omaar, “Doing Harm By Doing Good? The International Relief Effort in Somalia”
• Nuruddin Farah, Gifts (selections)

Session 8: Narrating Cosmopolitanism from Below

• Simeon Dumdum, Timothy Mo and Resil Mojares, “In Conversation: Cebuano writers on Philippine literature and English,” World Englishes 23.1 (2004)
• Timothy Mo, Renegade or Halo Halo (selections)

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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 andProfessor 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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Mitsuyoshi Numano, "Somewhere in Between: Boundaries, Resonances, and Interactions in Time and Space"

This seminar aims at exploring literary phenomena typically taking place “in between” in world literature. Special attention will be paid to Japanese Literature (which is torn by the attraction of the West and the centripetal orientation toward the traditional), Russian literature (which is located between the West and the East), and East European literature (which is located between Western Europe and Russia). No special knowledge of those languages is required, but some bilingual handouts will be provided for those participants who know Japanese, Russian, or Polish.

The topics for this seminar will include: “From the Beautiful World to the Ambiguous World and Beyond” (shifting borders of modern Japanese literature confronted by the West), “Resonances through time and space” (Japanese Medieval literature and contemporary Russian postmodern fiction), “Interactions between staying put and crossing over” (translingual and émigré writers from Japan, Russia, and the U.S.), “What is lost and not lost in the translation of Polish/Japanese poetry and Haiku,” a comparison of Russian and Japanese manners of storytelling, a comparison of visions of dystopia and the inhuman, visions of Fall and Confinement, and Haruki Murakami as an world author/ Kazuo Ishiguro as a “Japanese” author.

By exploring these topics and discussing some of the representative texts in detail, we will try to have an idea about how rich the creative output can be in these “contact zones” in between and what kind of literary resonances occur through time and space. We hope that it will make your scope of modern and contemporary world literature wider and give you an opportunity to rethink the center-periphery dichotomy. 

Mitsuyoshi Numano is Professor of the Department of Contemporary Literary Studies and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, The University of Tokyo. He is currently the chairperson of the Japan Council for Russian and East European Studies, and a member of the Science Council of Japan. He has widely written (basically in Japanese, but sometimes also in English, Russian, and Polish) on Russian and Polish literature, and contemporary Japanese literature. As a literary critic, he also contributes review articles regularly to major Japanese newspapers and literary magazines. Among his books are: The World is Made of Literature: An Introduction to World Literature through Dialogues with Contemporary Writers, 3 vols. (2012-15), From/Toward World Literature: Collected Literary Criticism 1993-2011 (2012), On Utopian Literature (2003, Yomiuri Literary Award), On Literature in Exile (2002, Suntory Academic Award). He served as one of the co-editors of the Iwanami  Introduction Series of Literature in 14 vols. (2002-2005). He is also known as a literary translator, and has translated, among others, Nabokov’s The Gift, Lem’s Solaris, and poetry by Brodsky, Milosz, Szymborska, and Baranczak from Russian and Polish into Japanese.

Session 1: From the Beautiful World to the Ambiguous World and Beyond

• Yasunari Kawabata, “Japan, the Beautiful and Myself” (Nobel lecture).
• Kenzaburo Oe, “Japan the Ambiguous, and Myself”
• Haruki Murakami, “Samsa in Love.”
• Milan Kundera, “The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes,” in The Art of the Novel, excerpts.

Session 2: Resonances through Time and Space

• Victor Pelevin, Buddha’s Little Finger, selections.
• The Tales of Ise (Ise Monogatari), selections.
• Nikolai Gogol, “The Nose,” excerpts.
• Ryunosuke Akutagawa, “The Nose.”
• David Damrosch, “Reading across Cultures,” excerpts, In How to Read World Literature.

Session 3: Interaction between “Staying Put” and Crossing Over

• Levy Hideo, “One of the Guys,” excerpts.
• Yoko Tawada, “Tongue Dance.”
• Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift , excerpts.
• Sergei Dovlatov, “The Colonel Says I Love You.”
• George Steiner, “Extraterritorial.”
• Joseph Brodsky, “The Condition We Call Exile.”

Session 4: What Is Lost and not Lost in Translation: The Cases of Japanese and Polish Contemporary Poetry and Haiku

• Shuntaro Tanikawa, three poems.
• Czeslaw Miłosz, three poems.
• Wisława Szymborska, three poems.
• Basho, selected Haiku.
• Haruo Shirane, “Beyond the Haiku Moment: Basho, Buson and Modern Haiku Myths”, excerpts.
• Hiroaki Sato, One Hundred Frogs: From Renga to Haiku to English, selections.

Session 5: A Matter/Manner of Story Telling: The Russian ‘Skaz’ and the Japanese ‘Rakugo’

• Nikolai Gogol, “The Overcoat,” excerpts.
• Two pieces of Rakugo (Japanese traditional performing art of comic monologue; audio-visual materials are available): “Head Mountain”and “Time Noodles.”
• Daniil Kharms, “A Sonnet.”
• Boris Eikhenbaum, “How Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ Is Made,” excerpts.
• Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” excerpts.

Session 6: Visions of Distopia and the Inhuman

• Evgeny Zamyatin, We, selections.
• Karel Čapek, R.U.R, selections.
• Ryunosuke Akutagawa, “Kappa,” selections.
• Stanisław Lem, Solaris, selections.
• (For comparison, a small fragment of the Tarkovsky film based on the novel will be also screened)
• Yasutaka Tsutsui, “Standing Woman.”

Session 7: Visions of Fall and Confinement

• Anton Chekov, The Cherry Orchard, selections.
• Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun, selections.
• Anton Chekhov, “The Bet.”
• Masuji Ibuse, “The Salamander.”
• Linda Hutcheon with Siobhan O’Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation, excerpts.

Session 8: Is Haruki Murakami a World Author? Is Kazuo Ishiguro a “Japanese” Author?

• Haruki Murakami, “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo.”
• Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills, excerpts.
• Jay Rubin, “Translating Murakami.”
• Rebecca Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature, excerpts

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Jing Tsu, "Multi-Scale Literary Studies"

The vibrancy of world literature studies raises a basic methodological question: What do we do with the ever cumulating literary samples in the world?  If any text can find a sympathetic or dialogic echo across space and time, does that mean everything is connected—and thus nothing really connects?  This seminar addresses these concerns by proposing a “multi-scale” interdisciplinary approach to old and new conceptions of flexible literary spaces, from Area Studies to any variety of diaspora and –phone literatures.  Apart from looking at how large-scale literary studies open up new venues for geographically and nationally restricted fields, this seminar evaluates how transregional and Area Studies can better integrate with Comparative and World Literatures by bringing its own interdisciplinary queries to bear on the conversation.  Drawing examples from Sinophone diaspora—from Hong Kong to Europe, China to North America, Macau to Cuba, Malaysia to Taiwan, etc.—we will consider, and possibly invent, tools to address the ongoing changes that many literary fields currently face.  Topics include “literary governance,” "linguistic nativity," sound and script, comparative morphology, script and camouflage, place and affect, literary systems, technologies of writing, and bilingualism.  Authors include Adam Smith, Lu Xun, William Dwight Whitney, Zhang Guixing, Wang Zhenhe, Dung Kaicheung, Lin Yutang, Hugo Schuchardt, Ha Jin, Chen Jitong, D’Arcy Thompson, Xi Xi, Abbot Thayer, W.K. Wimsatt, Henri Lefebvre, Edward S. Casey, Doreen Massey, and José Marti.

Jing Tsu is Professor of Modern Chinese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages & Literatures at Yale University.  Her disciplinary and research areas include Diaspora and Sinophone studies, Area Studies, Comparative Literature, and History of Science. She is author of Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora (Harvard 2010), Failure, Nationalism, and Literature: The Making of Modern Chinese Identity, 1895-1937 (Stanford 2005), and coeditor of Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays (with David Der-wei Wang; Brill 2010) and Science and Technology in Modern China, 1880s-1940s (with Benjamin A. Elman; Brill 2014).  She has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (Harvard), the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford), and is currently at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), where she is working on a new book, The Alphabetic Mind in Chinese.

Session 1: Sympathy

• Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (excerpts)
• Martha Nussbaum, "Compassion: The Basic Social Emotion"
• Lu Xun "A Warning to the People"

Session 2: Affect

• W.K. Wimsatt, "The Affective Fallacy"
• Ruth Leys, "The Turn to Affect" (excerpts)
• Lin Shu, 1905 Preface to Chinese translation of Uncle's Tom Cabin & Author's Postscript
• The Cuba Commission Report: A Hidden History of the Chinese in Cuba (excerpts)
• José Marti, "A Chinese Funeral"

Session 3: "Linguistic Nativity"

• William Dwight Whitney, Oriental and Linguistic Studies (excerpts)
• Hugo Schuchardt, "The Lingua Franca"
• Lin Yutang, "In Defense of Pidgin Chinese"
• Ha Jin, "The Language of Betrayal"

Session 4: Place

• Edward S. Casey, "Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does It Mean to Be in the Place-World?" 
• Nigel Thrift, "Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect"
• Xi Xi, My City (excerpts)

Session 5: Space

• Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (excerpts)
• Doreen Massey, "Power-Geometry and the Progressive Sense of Place"
• Chen Yingzhen, "Mountain Path"
• Chen Jitong, 1898 conversation with Zeng Pu on "world literature" (shijie de wenxue)

Session 6: Morphology 

• D'Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form (excerpts)
• Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees (excerpts)
• Dung Kai-Cheung, Atlas (excerpts)

Session 7: Adaptation

• Zhang Guixing, My South Seas Sleeping Beauty (excerpts)
• Jing Tsu, "The Elephant in the Room," from Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora (excerpts)
• Abbott Thayer, "The Law Which Underlies Protective Coloration"

Session 8: From Area to Scale: "Literary Governance"

• Immanuel Wallerstein, "What Cold War in Asia? An Interpretive Essay"
• Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline (excerpts)
• Neil Smith, "Remapping Area Knowledge: Beyond Global/Local"
• William Nelson Fenton, "Integration of Geography and Anthropology in Army Area Study Curricula"