July 3-13

Alexander Beecroft, "Literary Worlds Outside the Modern"

The theory and practice of world literature is often focused around modernity, whether directly through a focus on forms of circulation and influence which have operated in modern times, or indirectly, through an emphasis on the ways in which texts from any age circulate and acquire meaning for contemporary readers. But literary texts circulated widely in the premodern world as well. Some, like the Pañcatantra or the Alexander Romance, circulate across virtually the whole of the Eurafrasian world available to them. Others circulate in narrower, but still vast, worlds: Europe, East or South Asia, the Buddhist, Islamic, or Christian worlds. Through a series of primary and theoretical readings, this seminar will explore strategies for conceptualizing premodern world literatures. We will also address the question of how premodern texts and their readers (both contemporaneous and present-day) might productively inform our own debates about world literature.

Alexander Beecroft is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina.

He has written extensively on world literature, including his recent book An Ecology of World Literature (Verso Books, 2015) and a number of articles (including “World Literature Without a Hyphen: Towards at Typology of Literary Systems” New Left Review 54 (2008) 87-100; “On the Tropes of Literary Ecology: The Plot of Globalization” in Globalizing Literary Genres: Literature, History, Modernity, Jernej Habjan and Fabienne Irmlinger, eds., (Routledge, 2015), and “Eurafrasiachronologies,” Journal of World Literature 1.1 (2016), 17-28. He is also a scholar of ancient Greek and Chinese literature, and the author of Authorship and Cultural Identity in Early Greece and China (Cambridge, 2010). His next book is titled A Global History of Literature. He is the winner of a Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship in the Humanities from the American Council of Learned Societies, and is the Secretary-Treasurer of the American Comparative Literature Association.

Session 1: Defining the Modern

Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, “1.5: “What does it mean to be a modern?”
Gaonkar, On Alternative Modernities.
Subrahmanyam, Connected Histories.
Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad. “Early Persianate Modernity”, in Pollock, Sheldon. Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia: Explorations in the Intellectual History of India and Tibet, 1500–1800.

Session 2: Before the Nation

Gellner, Ernst. Nations and Nationalism (2nd edn.). Cornell, 2006.
Smith, Anthony T. “The myth of the 'Modern Nation' and the myths of nations.” Ethnic and Racial Studies vol. 11 no. 1 (1987).
Introduction, from Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity and Frontier in Early Modern China. Pamela Kyle Crossley, Helen F. Siu, and Donald S. Sutton, eds. (University of California Press, 2006).
Pohl, Walter. “Conceptions of Ethnicity in Early Medieval Studies” in Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and Readings, Ed. Lester K. Little and Barbara H. Rosenwein (Blackwell, 1998).

Session 3: Panehellenism: A Case Study

Iliad 2.494-877, in Lattimore, Richmond. The Iliad of Homer. (University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Pindar, Nemean Odes 7. in Burnett, Anne Pippin. Odes for Victorious Athletes. (Hopkins 2010).
Nagy, Gregory. Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past (Hopkins 1990)
Scott, Michael. Delphi and Olympia: The Spatial Politics of Panhellenism in the Archaic and Classical Periods (Cambridge, 2010).

Session 4: Cosmopolitans and Vernaculars

Pollock, Sheldon. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (University of California Press, 2006).
Ali, Daud. “The Early Inscriptions of Indonesia and the Problem of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis” in Early Interactions Between South and Southeast Asia: Reflections on Cross-cultural Exchange. Pierre-Yves Manguin, A. Mani, Geoff Wade eds. (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011).

Session 5: Tales that Travel

from The Greek Alexander Romance. Richard Stoneman, transl. (Penguin, 1991). “The Dream of Nectanebo.”
Selden, DANIEL L. "Mapping the Alexander Romance." The Alexander Romance in Persia and the East. Groningen (2012): pp. 33-50
Kinoshita, Sharon. "Translatio/n, empire, and the worlding of medieval literature: the travels of Kalila wa Dimna*." Postcolonial Studies 11.4 (2008).

Session 6: Regions, Areas, Zones

Holcombe, Charles. The Genesis of East Asia: 221 BC-AD 907. University of Hawaii Press, 2001.
Jonsson, Hjorleifur. “Above and Beyond: Zomia and the Ethnographic Challenge of/for Regional History” History and Anthropology Vol. 21 , Iss. 2,2010.
Vink, Markus PM. "Indian Ocean studies and the ‘new thalassology’." Journal of Global History2.01 (2007).

Session 7: Worlds of Faith

Ricci, Ronit. Islam translated: Literature, conversion, and the Arabic cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia. University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Mair, Victor H. "Buddhism and the rise of the written vernacular in East Asia: The making of national languages." The Journal of Asian Studies 53.03 (1994).
Masson, Vadim Mikhaĭlovich. History of Civilizations of Central Asia: The crossroads of civilizations, AD 250 to 750. Eds. Ahmad Hasan Dani, and B. A. Litvinsky. Vol. 3. Unesco, 1996.

Session 8: Networks and Pathways

Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Before European hegemony: the world system AD 1250-1350. Oxford University Press, USA, 1991.
Gould, Rebecca. "The Geographies of Ajam The Circulation of Persian Poetry from South Asia to the Caucasus." The Medieval History Journal 18.1 (2015).

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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 and 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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Stefan Helgesson, "Literary Form and the Global South"

If we accept that literature is only readable through the material forms it takes and is given, the question asked by this seminar is how form intersects with the historical predicament(s) of the Global South. Drawing on an archive that ranges from the late nineteenth century until today, and with its main focus on Latin America and Africa, the seminar offers eight meditations on diverse genres and modes of writing that have evolved under conditions of colonialism, decolonisation and uneven globalisation. The use of proverbs as a transcultural genre (Plaatje), rewriting Shakespeare (Césaire), the modernist manifesto (Andrade), lyric (De Kok, Okigbo, Craveirinha) and genres of criticism (Candido, Nkosi) are among the forms we will explore. The notion of the Global South will be adopted critically, always in need of disaggregation. But its role here is not least to demonstrate the necessity of a dense, historicised conception of the ”world” in world literature. The world is never a neutral given to which everyone has equal access, but always constructed and imagined under contingent linguistic, cultural and historical conditions.

Stefan Helgesson is professor of English at Stockholm University. His research interests include southern African literature in English and Portuguese, Brazilian literature, postcolonial theory, translation theory and theories of world literature. He is the author of Writing in Crisis: Ethics and History in Gordimer, Ndebele and Coetzee (2004) and Transnationalism in Southern African Literature (2009), has edited volume four of Literary History: Towards a Global Perspective(2006) and is co-editor (with Pieter Vermeulen) of Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets (2015). He is currently leading the large-scale Swedish research programme “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures”, which runs from 2016 until 2021 and is funded by the Swedish Foundation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Session 1: Sol Plaatje, Shakespeare and the proverb

Solomon Plaatje, Sechuana Proverbs with Literal Translations and their European Equivalents(London: Kegan Paul & Co, 1916).
Simon Gikandi, ”African Literature and the Colonial Factor”, in Abiola Irele and Simon.
Gikandi (eds.), The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008).
Deborah Seddon, ”Shakespeare’s Orality: Sol Plaatje’s Setswana Translations”, English Studies in Africa 47.2 (2004).

Session 2: The Caliban complex

Aimé Césaire, A Tempest, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Ubu Repertory, 1992). [optional: the rest of the play]
Roberto Fernandez Retamar, “Caliban: Notes Toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America”, in Retamar, Caliban and Other Essays, trans. Edward Baker (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989).

Session 3: Rerouting realism

Machado de Assis, ”The Looking Glass”, in Assis, The Alienist and Other Stories of Nineteenth-Century Brazil, trans. John Charles Chasteen (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2013).
Roberto Schwarz, Two Girls and Other Essays (London: Verso, 2012).
Ezekiel Mphahlele, Down Second Avenue (London: Faber and Faber, 1959).
[optional: David Attwell, Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History (Pietermaritzburg: UKZN Press, 2005)]

Session 4: The manifesto

Oswald de Andrade, ”Cannibalist Manifesto”, trans. Leslie Bary, Latin American Literary Review 19.38 (1991).
Luís Madureira, Cannibal Modernities: Postcoloniality and the Avant-Garde in Caribbean and Brazilian Literature (Chlottesville: U of Virginia Press, 2005).
Mothobi Mutloatse, “Introduction”, in Mutloatse (ed.), Forced Landing (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1980).

Session 5: The lyric

José Craveirinha, “Seven Poems by José Craveirinha”, trans. Luís Rafael and Stephen Gray, Portuguese Studies 12 (1996).
Ingrid De Kok, Other Signs (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2011).
Christopher Okigbo, Labyrinths (New York: Africana Publishing Corp, 1971).
Shailja Patel, “Shilling Love Part 1” in Migritude (New York: Kaya Press, 2010).
Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009),

Session 6: Postcolonial Bildung?

Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (London: Women’s Press, 2001 [1988]).
Simon Hay, “Nervous Conditions, Lukács, and the Postcolonial Bildungsroman”, Genre 46.3 (2013).

Session 7: Genres of criticism

Antonio Candido, “Literature and Underdevelopment”, in Candido, On Literature and Society, trans. Howard S. Becker (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995).
Lewis Nkosi, “The Republic of Letters after the Mandela Republic”, Journal of Literary Studies 18.3-4 (2002).
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Henry Owuor Anyumba, Taban lo Liyong, “On the Abolition of the English Department”, in Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics (London: Heinemann, 1972).

Session 8: World literature?

Ivan Vladislavić, ”The Reading”, in 101 Detectives (Cape Town: Umuzi, 2015).
Warwick Research Collective (WreC), Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2015). [optional: the rest of chapter 1]

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Dominique Jullien, "Jorge Luis Borges and/as World Literature"

Jorge Luis Borges (Buenos Aires 1899 - Geneva 1986) has become synonymous with world literature. He offers a remarkable case of a writer whose relatively small body of writings, widely translated beginning in the sixties, has profoundly altered the literary landscape, not only in his native Argentina and in Latin America, but also beyond, in a global context. Borges is also unique in shaping both literature and theory in equal measure: his writings have been as influential for contemporary fiction (from magic realism to postmodernism) as for critical theory (from post-structuralism to deconstruction and beyond). With his singular generic diversity, especially his signature blending of fiction and non-fiction, Borges also offers an ideal point of entry into some of the major questions of contemporary literary criticism. This seminar focuses on the ways in which Borges’s writings—stories, essays and poems—engage with key aspects of world literature, including translation history and theory, the dialogue with the Western canon, the legacy of Goethe’s Weltliteratur, and generic hybridity. Alongside major texts by Borges, a sample of texts by writers who either have influenced Borges or have been influenced by him gives a sense of Borges’s crucial position in world literature, while secondary readings also aim to offer a glimpse of Borges’s significance for contemporary literary theory. Readings are in English, mostly from the Penguin edition; Spanish originals of Borges’s texts will be provided for those who can read them.

Dominique Jullien is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her scholarly interests encompass 19th and 20th century fiction, with particular focus on Proust, Borges, Orientalism, the Western reception and reworking of the Thousand and One Nights, travel literature, and translation history and theory. She is the author of Proust et ses modèles. Les Mille et Une nuits et les Mémoires de Saint-Simon (Paris: Corti, 1989), Récits du Nouveau Monde. Les Voyageurs français en Amérique de Chateaubriand à nos jours (Paris: F. Nathan, 1992), Les Amoureux de Schéhérazade: variations modernes sur les Mille et Une Nuits (Geneva: Droz, 2009), and the editor of Foundational Texts of World Literature (New York: Peter Lang, “Currents in Comparative Languages and Literatures”, 2011), among others. She has published extensively on Jorge Luis Borges in Comparative Literature, The Romanic Review, Revue des Sciences Humaines, and elsewhere. Her current book project explores Borgesian renunciation narratives.

Session 1: Cosmopolitan Borges

Introduction to “Global Borges” beyond Argentina and Latin America. “Worlding” Don Quixote: Pierre Menard as an insight into the practice of reading classics globally.

From Collected Fictions: “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, “The Library of Babel”
From Selected Non Fictions: “Kafka and his Precursors”; “The Argentine Writer and Tradition.”
Julio Cortázar, “Continuity of Parks” (End of the Game and Other Stories, New York: Collier Books, 1968)
Beatriz Sarlo, Jorge Luis Borges: A Writer on the Edge, Cambridge: Verso, 1993 (“Introduction”)
Jaime Alazraki, “A new critical idiom: Borges's modernism and the new critical idiom”, in Edna Aizenberg (ed.), Borges and his Successors: the Borgesian Impact on Literature and the Arts (Columbia & London: U. of Missouri Press, 1990).
Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997: Chapter 52 “Pseudosummary in Borges.”

Optional:

Mariano Siskind. “The genres of World Literature: the Case of Magical Realism.” In: Theo D’Haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir. The Routledge Companion to World Literature.

Session 2: Borges and Translation

A discussion of the central role of translation in Borges’s writing career, theoretical insights and creative process, with particular emphasis on Borges’s two foundational essays that, read together, provide an ideal point of entry into key Translation Studies issues.

from Selected Non Fictions: “The Homeric Versions”; “The Translators of the 1001 Nights.”
Franz Kafka, “The Cares of a family man”; “The Truth about Sancho Panza” (The Complete Stories, New York: Schocken Books, 1971).
Efraín Kristal, Invisible Work: Borges and Translation, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt U. P., 2002: Chapter One “Borges on Translation”

Session 3: Borges and the 1001 Nights

A discussion of the foundational presence of the 1001 Nights intertext in Borges. Special focus on themes of framing, orality and anonymity, infinite and recursive narration, and destiny.

J.L. Borges, Stories, from Collected Fictions: “The Story of the Two Dreamers”; “The South.”
Poems: “Someone”, “Metaphors of the 1001 Nights.”
J.L. Borges, Essay “The 1001 Nights”, from Seven Nights.
Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1982 (first tale: “If on a winter’s night a traveler”)
Evelyn Fishburn, “Traces of the Thousand and One Nights in Borges”, in Wen-Chin Ouyang & Geert Van Gelder (eds.), New Perspectives on Arabian Nights: Ideological Variations and Narrative Horizons, London & New York: Routledge, 2005.

(Optional):

Philip Kennedy, “Borges and the missing pages of the Nights” from Kennedy, Philip F., and Marina Warner (eds.). Scheherazade's Children: Global Encounters with the Arabian Nights. New York: New York University Press, 2013.

Session 4: Borgesian Orientalism

A discussion of Borgesian Orientalism, from Spain to China, with special focus on some Borgesian myths: Al Andalus, the English Romantic Orient, hybrid Orients.

J. L. Borges, Stories, from Collected Fictions: “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim”; “The Lottery in Babylon”; “The Garden of Forking Paths”; “Averroës’ Search”; “Parable of the Palace”
Poems: “Rafael Cansinos Asséns”; from Jorge Luis Borges: the Sonnets: “Of the Lovely and Varied Andalusia.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”, in The Complete Poems, Penguin Classics, 2004.
Edward FitzGerald, “Rubaiyat” (selections)
Dominique Jullien, “In Praise of Mistranslation: the Melancholy Cosmopolitanism of Jorge Luis Borges”, Romanic Review, 98: 2-3, “Further Inquisitions”, special issue on Jorge Luis Borges, edited by S.J. Levine, March-May 2007.

(Optional):

Ian Almond, “Borges the Post-Orientalist: Images of Islam from the Edge of the West”, Modern Fiction Studies 50, 2 (Summer 2004).

Session 5: Borgesian Weltliteratur?

A discussion of the intersection of Borges and Goethe’s foundational idea of Weltliteratur, with particular emphasis on Borges’s reworking of the Goethean notion of “morphology”.

Stories, from Collected Fictions: “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero”; “The Plot.”
Poems, from Selected Poems: “Ars poetica.”
from Selected Non Fictions: “Forms of a Legend”; “The Dialogues of Ascetic and King”; “The Argentine Writer and Tradition.”
Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), “A Consolatory Tale”, Winter’s Tales (New York, Random House, 1942; Vintage, 1993).
John Pizer, “Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Origins and relevance of Weltliteratur”, in Theo D’Haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir. The Routledge Companion to World Literature (London & New York: Routledge, 2011).

(Optional):

Fritz Strich, Goethe and World Literature. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1949, chapter 1: “The idea.”

Session 6: Generic Border Crossing: the Cognitive Turn

A discussion of Borges’s signature blending of fiction and non fiction, with particular focus on the epistemological foundation of fictions: the place of knowledge, speculation and encyclopedias in the Borgesian imaginary. Memory, cognition, and the invention of literary genres.

from Collected Fictions: “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”; “Funes, his Memory”; “On Exactitude in science”; “Blue Tigers.”
from Selected Non Fictions: “John Wilkins’ Analytical Language.”
Samuel Beckett, Molloy (Three Novels, New York: Grove Press, 1958)
Reingard Nethersole, “World Literature and the Library”, in Theo D’Haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to World Literature, London & New York: Routledge 2011.

(Optional):

Clive Griffin, “Philosophy and Fiction”, The Cambridge Companion to Jorge Luis Borges, Ed. by Edwin Williamson, Cambridge U.P., 2013.
Rodrigo Quian Quiroga “In Retrospect: Funes the Memorious”, Nature Vol. 463, 4 February 2010,.

Session 7: Borgesian Mysteries

A discussion of the Borgesian engagement with and rewriting of the genre of the detective story, with particular focus on the metaphysical mystery and the intertextual connections to Edgar A. Poe.

from Collected Fictions: “Death and the Compass”
from Selected Non Fictions: “The Labyrinths of the Detective Story and Chesterton”; “The Detective Story”
E. A. Poe “The Murders in the rue Morgue” (online text https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/poe/edgar_allan/p74mu/)
Holquist, Michael. “Jorge Luis Borges and the Metaphysical Mystery”, Mystery and Suspense Writers: The Literature of Crime, Detection, and Espionage, I-II. Robin W. Winks and Maureen Corrigan (eds.). New York, NY: Scribner’s, xiv, 1998.

(Optional):

Irwin John, T. “Mysteries we Reread, Mysteries of Rereading: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story” (from Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism. Eds. Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).
Paul Auster, City of Glass (The New York Trilogy, volume one, Penguin Books, 1987: first chapter)

Session 8 Immortals, Inc.: Reading as Writing

A discussion of the Borgesian theory of reading, with particular emphasis on the Borgesian notion of “precursor” and its relevance for contemporary world literature theory. The place of J. L. Borges in the ongoing debate about “the Classic”.

From Collected Fictions: “The Immortal”; “The Maker”; “Everything and Nothing”; “Borges and I”; “Shakespeare’s memory”.
From Selected Non-Fictions: “From Someone to Nobody,” “Kafka & his Precursors.”
Georges Perec, Life, a User’s Manual (selection from last chapter: chapter XCIX “Bartlebooth, 5”)
John Sturrock “Man into Author”, Paper Tigers: the Ideal Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

(Optional):

David Damrosch : “Goethe coins a phrase”, What Is World Literature?, Princeton: Princeton U. P., 2003.
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (New York: Mariner Books, 2014: “Prime”).

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Reine Meylaerts, "Multilingualism, Translation and World Literature"

The idea of World Literature implies a questioning of the spatial, national, and also linguistic boundaries that have traditionally defined separate (monolingual and national) literatures. Both texts and authors are more often than not multilingual in themselves. This fact also affects translation as the main channel of literary transfer in the world literary space. Literary translation doesn’t so much take place in between monolingual literatures but rather within multilingualliteratures. Studying multilingualism in/and translation thus becomes a privileged way to understand World Literature. This seminar will focus on how the complex relations between multilingualism and translation contribute to creating literature, in mutual exchange, resistance, interpenetration. We will also focus on how translingual poetics, creative interference, multilingual writing, and self-translation blur the boundaries between writing and translating, between literatures and cultures; on how hybrid languages create translation effects in the text; and on how the act of writing and reading multilingual literary texts can be seen as an ongoing translation process between the languages and cultures involved.

Reine Meylaerts is Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at KU Leuven where she teaches courses on European Literature, Comparative Literature and Translation and Plurilingualism in Literature. She was director of CETRA (Centre for Translation Studies; https://www.arts.kuleuven.be/cetra) from 2006-2014 and is now board member. Her current research interests concern translation policy, intercultural mediation and transfer in multilingual cultures, past and present. She is the author of numerous articles and chapters on these topics (https://lirias.kuleuven.be/items-by-author?author=Meylaerts%2C+Reinhilde%3B+U0031976) She is also review editor of Target. International Journal of Translation Studies. She was coordinator of 2011-2014: FP7-PEOPLE-2010-ITN: TIME: Translation Research Training: An integrated and intersectoral model for Europe. She is former Secretary General (2004-2007) of the European Society for Translation Studies (EST) and Chair of the Doctoral Studies Committee of EST.

Seminar 1: World Literature and Translation

D'haen, T. 2012. “World Literature and Translation” in: The Routledge Concise History of World Literature. Routledge Concise History of Literature Series, London and New York: Routledge.
Casanova, Pascale. 2005. “The fabric of the universal” in The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Harvard UP.

Seminar 2: World Literature and (Un)translatability

Apter. E. 2013. “Untranslatables: A World-System” in Against World Literature. On the Politics of Untranslatability. London/New York: Verso.
Toury, G. 2012. “Translations as facts of a ‘target’ culture: An assumption and its methodological implications” in Descriptive Translation Studies – and beyond. Revised edition. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Seminar 3 : Translation and Multilingualism in Literature

Meylaerts, R. 2012. “Multilingualism as a challenge for Translation Studies”. In: Millan-Varela C., Bartrina F. (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies. Routledge.
Shakespeare, Henry V. Ed. by H.M. Hulme. London: Longman.

Seminar 4: Translation and Multilingualism in Literature

Taylor-Betty, J. 2013. “Protean mutations: James Joyce's Ulysses.” In Multilingualism in modernist Fiction. Palgrave MacMillan.
Joyce, Ulysses, Chapter “Oxen of the sun”. With a forew. by Morris L. Ernst and the decision of the US District Court rendered by John M. Woolsey. New York: Vintage. 1961.

Seminar 5: Cities in Translation

Simon, Sherry. 2012. Cities in Translation. Intersections of Language and Memory. New York: Routledge.
Meylaerts, R. 2014. “Transferring the city – Transgressing borders. Translation, bilingual writing and selftranslation in Antwerp (1850-1930).” Translation Studies 7:2.

Seminar 6: Self-Translation and the politics of translation

Hokenson, J.W. and M. Munson. 2007. The Bilingual Text. History and Theory of Literary Self-translation. Manchester, UK, and Kinderhood, NY (USA), St. Jerome Publishing, 2007.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. 1982. Devil on the Cross. Translated from the Gikuyu by the author. Ch. 1-3. London: Heinemann.

Seminar 7: Translingual poetics and Cultural Translation

Wilson, Rita. 2011. “Cultural mediation through translingual narrative.” Target 23:2.
Saro-Wiwa, Ken. 1994. Sozaboy. A novel in rotten English. 1st edition. Longman. Ch. 1-4.

Seminar 8: Scenographies of Translation and Transfictional Writing

Arrojo, Rosemary. 2014. “The power of fiction as theory: some exemplary lessons on translation from Borges’s stories” In: Klaus Kaindl, Karlheinz Spitzl, Transfiction: research into the realities of translation fiction. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Hasak-Lowy, Todd. “The task of this translator”. In: The task of this translator. Orlando: Harcourt Books.

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Galin Tihanov, "Exilic Writing and the Making of World Literature"

This course is about the centrality of exile and exilic writing in the making of world literature. Not only is writing about exile a specific mode of producing a particular version of the world; it is also a way of thinking about movement, mediations, transfers, and boundaries. Crucially, exile is one of the foundational discourses of modernity that interrogates memory, identity, and language. Today’s notion of world literature is inseparable from a transnational and cosmopolitan perspective, which is intimately – and in a characteristically contradictory manner –linked to exilic experiences and the practice of exilic writing. In this course, we will analyse artefacts (literature, but also some paintings, two texts which fall in the genre of “philosophy of history”, a play, and a film) by European, Indian, Japanese, and American authors in order to begin to think about how exile and exilic writing have been inscribed in the very notion of world literature with which we work today.

Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. He has published widely on German, Russian, and East-European cultural and intellectual history. His most recent research has been on cosmopolitanism, exile, and transnationalism. Amongst his recent authored and edited books are Narrativas do Exílio: Cosmopolitismo além da Imaginação Liberal (2013) and Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism(2011, ed. with David Adams). Tihanov is winner, with Evgeny Dobrenko, of the Efim Etkind Prize for Best Book on Russian Culture (2012), awarded for their co-edited A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism: The Soviet Age and Beyond(2011). He is Honorary President of the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory, member of Academia Europaea, and Honorary Scientific Advisor to the Institute of Foreign Literatures at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Tihanov has held visiting appointments at Yale University, St. Gallen University, the University of Sao Paulo, and Peking University.

Session 1: Exotopy and Inbetweenness

Verse selections from the Bible (Psalm 137, “By the rivers of Babylon…”); Ovid, “Tristia” and “Ex Ponto”; and Agha Shahid Ali, “When on Route 80 in Ohio”, in Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate, ed. A. Kumar, New York: Routledge, 2004.
Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000, Ch. 17, “Reflections on Exile” (1984).
Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees”, in H. Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, New York: Grove, 1978.
Giorgio Agamben. "We Refugees", Symposium, 1995, No. 49 (2), pp. 114-119, trans. Michael Rocke.
Paulo Bartoloni, On the Cultures of Exile, Translation, and Writing. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2008.

Session 2: Memory and the Languages of Exile

Viewing of selected paintings by Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall, My Life, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.
Benjamin Harshav, Marc Chagall and the Lost Jewish World, New York: Rizzoli, 2006.
Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin, Lonodn: Heinemann, 1957, Ch. 1.
Bryan Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, London: Vintage, 1993.

Session 3: Exilic Cosmopolitanism

Eugene Ionesco, The Bald Prima Dona, in: Ionesco, Plays, Vol. 1, trans. Donald Watson, London: Calder, 1958.
Eugene Ionesco, Notes and Counter-Notes, trans. Donald Watson, London: Calder, 1964.
David Damrosch, “Auerbach in Exile”, Comparative Literature, 1995, 47, No. 2.
Galin Tihanov, “Why Did Modern Literary Theory Originate in Central and Eastern Europe? (And Why Is It Now Dead?)”, Common Knowledge, 2004, Vol. 10, No. 1.

Session 4: Exilic Anti-Cosmopolitanism

Nikolai Trubetskoi, “Europe and Mankind”, in Nikolai Trubetzkoy, The Legacy of Genghis Khan, Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1991.
Petr Savitskii, “A Turn to the East”, in Exodus to the East. Forebodings and Events: An Affirmation of the Eurasians, Idyllwild, CA: Charles Schlacks, 1996 [originally published in Russian, 1921].
N. Riasanovsky, “The Emergence of Eurasianism”, in Exodus to the East. Forebodings and Events: An Affirmation of the Eurasians, Idyllwild, CA: Charles Schlacks, 1996.

Session 5: The Affective Economy of Exile

Krzysztof Kieslowski, Three Colours: White (1994).
Emma Wilson, Memory and Survival: The French Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski, Oxford: Legenda, 2000.
Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, New York: Harvester & Wheatsheaf, 1991.

Session 6: De-Romanticizing Exile

Mori Ogai, “The Boat on the River Takase”, in The Historical Literature of Mori Ogai, ed. R. Bowring et al., Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1977, Vol. 1 (The Incident at Sakai, and Other Stories).
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, trans. Ralph Parker, London: Penguin, 1963.
Galin Tihanov, “Narratives of Exile: Cosmopolitanism Beyond the Liberal Imagination”, in Whose Cosmopolitanism? Critical Perspectives, Relationalities and Discontents, ed. N. Glick Schiller and A. Irving, New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2015.

Session 7: Homecomers and Boomerangs

Milan Kundera, Ignorance, trans. Linda Asher, London: Faber & Faber, 2002.
V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River, London: Penguin, 1979.
Fiona Doloughan, “The myth of the great return: memory, longing and forgetting in Milan Kundera's Ignorance”, in: Creativity in Exile, ed. Michael Hanne, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004.

Session 8: Reflective Epilogue

In this session, we build upon our discussions of the texts in Weeks 1-7 to revisit the centrality of exile in the making of world literature as a concept and practice. Questions of language, memory, identity, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism – and how they relate to one another – are once again in the spotlight, this time with the purpose of drawing some tentative conclusions while engendering a productive uncertainty about the epistemological status of these notions.