July 5-13

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 Professor for Literary Theory and Co-Director of the Center for Global Studies (CGS) at the University of Bern, where he is responsible for the MA-program "World Literature." 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 co-author, with Dietmar Wetzel, of Zur Aktualität von Jacques Rancière (2016). He is the co-editor of “Mirror Writing”: (Re-)Construc-tions of Native American Identity (2000), Theories of American Studies/Theories of American Culture (2003), Neo-Realism: Between Innovation and Continuation (2004), Aesthetic Transgressions: Modernity, Liberalism, and the Function of Literature (2006), and editor of the collection The Conditions of Hospitality: Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics at the Treshold of the Possible (Fordham UP, 2014) and The Common Growl: Towards a Poetics of Precarious Community (Fordham UP, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph with the title A Metonymic Community? Towards a Poetics of Contingency, and on two editions with the titles Critique of Authenticity (Vernon Press) and Throwing the Moral Dice: Ethics and/of Contingency (Fordham UP), both forthcoming in 2019.

PART I: COSMOPOLITANISM

Session 1: The History of Cosmopolitanism

• “Cosmopolitanism.”
• Kant, Immanuel. “Perpetual Peace.”
• -----. “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View.” 

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: The Problem of Universalism

• Nussbaum, Martha C. “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism.”
• Butler, Judith. “Universality in Culture.”
• Nussbaum, Martha C. “Reply.”
• Beck, Ulrich. The Cosmopolitan Vision.

Session 4: Whose Cosmopolitanism? Cosmopolitanism and the Other

• Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise Than Being.
• ----. Ethics and Infinity.
• Derrida, Jacques. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. 

Session 5: Alternative Communities – Alternative Stories?

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

PART II: WORLD LITERATURE

Session 6: Origins of World Literature: Goethe to Auerbach

• Auerbach, Erich. “The Philology of World Literature.”
• Cheah, Pheng. “What is a World? On World Literature as World-Making Activity.” 

Session 7: World Literature or the World of Literature? Hegemonic and Modernist Approaches

• Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.”
• -----. “More Conjectures.”
• Berman, Jessica. Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community. 

Session 8: Travellin' Books

• Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature?
• -----. “Script Worlds, Writing Systems, and the Formation of World Literature.” 

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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 of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. His books include What Is World Literature? (2003), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007), How to Read World Literature (2d. ed. 2017), and Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age (2020). He is the general editor of the six-volume Longman anthologies of British Literature and of World Literature, editor of World Literature in Theory (2014), and co-editor of The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature, and of two collections in Chinese, Theories of World Literature (2013) and New Directions in Comparative Literature (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”
• Sheldon Pollock, "Comparison without Hegemony"
• 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”
• 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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Simon Gikandi, “Decolonization and World Literature”

In 1958, at the height of the Algerian War of independence, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre defined decolonization as “the most significant event of the second half of the century.” Unknown to most European intellectuals, Sartre argued, decolonization was part of a large moment for human freedom that was calling into question established European theories of history, freedom, and the idea of the human. Furthermore, decolonization constituted the space in which a philosophical critique of colonialism could be undertaken and its institutions, practices and mentalities would be confronted by their conditions of possibility and failure. Literature, or imaginative work in general, was central to this project of rethinking the conditions of freedom, which demanded, as Frantz Fanon noted at the end of the Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la terre), a retreat from European humanism. New forms of literary expression associated with the project of decolonization marked this retreat. Nevertheless, the anticolonial imagination and the making of new subjects was pegged not so much on the emergence of a new kind of world literature but a transformation and, in some cases, reinvigoration of a canon of world literature that seemed to have atrophied amidst the crisis of European identity associated with World War II. The crisis of “European sciences” (Edmund Husserl) and what appeared to be the end of the House of Philology (Eric Auerbach) represented an unprecedented opportunity for anticolonial writers and intellectuals. A central premise of this seminar is that the thinking and writing that came out of decolonization led to the remaking of world literature.

The seminar will start with some broad questions: What were the theoretical assumptions driving the discourse of decolonization? What was the colonized intellectuals’ contribution to the drama of human freedom? How did they go about imagining and conceptualizing a world “no longer and not yet” (Hannah Arendt)? How could the place of colonial violence be transformed into the ontological space of being and becoming? And how did the emergence of a literature of decolonization transform the key terms that define world literature—worldliness, time, translation, and the meaning of the human? The seminar will address these and other questions through a careful reading of the major texts in the discourse of decolonization. We will engage the classics: M. K. Gandhi’s thinking on decolonization as a horizon of experience, Sartre’s “Black Orpheus,” Senghor’s “Negritude and Modernism,” and selections from Frantz Fanon’s oeuvre. We will also read texts dealing with the afterlife of colonialism and its histories by V.Y. Mudimbe, Édouard Glissant, and Gayatri Spivak. These theoretical readings will be accompanied by literary texts that question or defamiliarize established ideas about the nature of the subject (Aimé Cesaire’s Cahier d'un retour au pays natal), global circuits of translation (Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino), time and genre (Ama Ata Aidoo’s Anowa), and difference (Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy).

Simon Gikandi is the Class of 1943 University of Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at Princeton University, where he is also affiliated with the Departments of Comparative Literature and African American Studies and the Program in African Studies.. Gikandi was elected second vice president of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in December 2016. He was the first vice-presi

dent of the MLA in 2018 and became the association's president in 2019. He served as editor of PMLA, the official journal of the MLA, from 2011 to 2016.

Born in Nyeri, Kenya, Gikandi earned his BA in literature, with first-class honors from the University of Nairobi. As a British Council Scholar at the University of Edinburgh, he graduated with an MLitt in English studies. He has a PhD in English from Northwestern University.

Gikandi's major fields of research and teaching are Anglophone literatures and cultures of Africa, India, the Caribbean, and postcolonial Britain; literary and critical theory; the black Atlantic and the African diaspora; and the English novel. His current research projects are on slavery and modernity, Decolonization and African Literature, and Global Modernism.

He is the author of many books and articles, including Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature; Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism; and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, a Choice Outstanding Academic Publication for 2004. He is the coauthor of The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English since 1945, the editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of African Literature, and the coeditor of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature. His book Slavery and the Culture of Taste was winner of the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Award; winner of the Melville J. Herskovits Award, given by the African Studies Association for the most important scholarly work in African studies; and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. He is the editor of The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean since 1950, volume 11 of the Oxford History of the Novel in English.

Gikandi is the recipient of a number of awards, including the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University (2014), a Guggenheim fellowship (2001), and an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship (1989). He has also received fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Gikandi was awarded the Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities at Princeton University in 2017. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018 and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2022.

Session 1: The Fall of Europe and the Crisis of World/Comparative Literature

• Rabindranath Tagore “The Postmaster.”
• Rabindranath Tagore, “World Literature 1907.”
• M.K. Gandhi, “A Reply to Tagore,”
• Erich Auerbach, “Philology and ‘Weltliteratur.’”
• Rene Wellek, “The Crisis of Comparative Literature”
• Optional: Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Idea of Provincializing Europe.”

Session 2: Decolonization and the Transformation of World Literature

• Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Night in Sine” (Nuit de Sine), “Joal” (Joal), “Black Woman” (Femme Noir), Black Mask (Masque nègre).
• Jean-Paul Sartre, “Black Orpheus” (Orphée noir).
• Paige Arthur, “Introduction” and “African Presence”

Session 3: Rethinking/Reimagining the World

• Ama Ata Aidoo, Anowa
• Emily Apter, “Keyword 5 ‘Mode.’”
• Pascale Casanova, “Literature as a World.”

Session 4: Literature and the Question of Freedom

• Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Cahier d'un retour au pays natal).
• Suzanne Césaire, “Surrealism and Us” and the “Great Camouflage”
• T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, “Suzanne Césaire: Tropiques, Negritude, Surrealism, 1941-1945:
• Optional: Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Negritude and Modernity.”

Session 5: The Space of Difference

• Mahasweta Devi "Douloti the Bountiful"
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Woman in Difference”
• Optional: Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Difference”

Session 6: Found in Translation

• Okot p’Bitek, Song of Lawino
• Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator.”
• Jahan Ramazani, “Traveling Poetry”
• Simon Gikandi “Song of Lawino: Translation, Textuality, and the Making of an African Reading Public”
• Optional: Asad, Talal. “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology.”

Session 7: The Displaced Bildungsroman

• Jamaica Kind, Lucy
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Reading with Stuart Hall in ‘Pure’ Literary Terms.”
• Edward Said, “Traveling Theory”

Session 8: Belatedness—World Literature in Postcoloniality

• Earl Lovelace, “Joebell in America.”
• Pheng Cheah, “Postcolonial Openings: How Postcolonial Literature Becomes World Literature.”
• Robert Young, “World Literature and Postcolonialism”
• Optional: Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation”

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Ankhi Mukherjee, “What Is a Classic? The Aesthetics of Postcolonial and World Literature”

“A classic is a work that comes before other classics; but those who have read other classics first immediately recognise its place in the genealogy of classics,” writes Italo Calvino in Why Read the Classics? Calvino's musings depict the contemporary world as “banal and stultifying,” in the throes of a definitional crisis, upon which a classic bestows not only form and purpose but self-understanding. It is unsurprising that the question of the classic brings together the disciplines of world and postcolonial literary studies, with their mutual commitment to canon revision and perfectible value criteria, the longevity and transportability of great books, and to everchanging negotiations and relays between the local, national, global, and planetary. 

In this seminar, we will examine a key dimension of the question of the classic in postcolonial and world literature that is often overlooked: aesthetics. While postcolonial literature is often seen as political – not beautiful, anti-style, didacticism unmitigated by ambivalence or purposelessness – world literature’s translational drive is seen as too motivated for the unthinking “distribution of the sensible” Rancière identified in the aesthetic mode. We will challenge some of these assumptions in this course, looking at acts of literature as well as critical debates mobilising postcolonial and world literature which use the classic/classics to rethink the gap between the aesthetic and the political, feeling, understanding, and debating, the autonomy of art and the heteronomy of reading publics. Questioning the constitutive aesthetic of the classic from the perspective of transversal and transregional world literary studies today is also a reappraisal of its implication in “geontopower” (Elizabeth Povinelli’s term), extractivist and exploitative forms of liberal governance that separate life from non-life, sovereign from governable subjects, the value-charged Western canon from the black and indigenous bodies rendered inanimate therein. 

1. Mukherjee is Professor of English and World Literatures at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wadham 

   

   College. Her recent books are Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor (Cambridge UP, 2021) and What Is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon (Stanford UP, 2014), which won the British Academy Prize in English Literature. Mukherjee’s other publications include Aesthetic Hysteria: The Great Neurosis in Victorian Melodrama and Contemporary Fiction, and the edited collections, A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture and After Lacan. Mukherjee has published extensively in peer-reviewed literary journals and sits on the editorial boards of several international ones. She has been a research fellow of the British Academy, Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University, and the John Hinkley (Visiting) Professor at Johns Hopkins. Mukherjee is currently writing A Very Short Introduction to Postcolonial Literature (Oxford UP) and co-editing Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum (Cambridge UP). © John Cairns

Session 1: World Literature as Anti-Colonial Rupture

• Rabindranath Tagore, “World Literature”
• Rabindranath Tagore, “The Components of Literature” and “The Significance of Literature"
• Supriya Chaudhuri, “Which World, Whose Literature?”

Session 2: Aesthetics, Politics, Value

• John T. Kirby, “The Great Books,
• James English, “Prizes and the Politics of World Culture”
• Sarah Brouillette, “Unesco’s Collection of Representative Works" 

Session 3: What Is a Classic?

• T. S. Eliot, “What Is a Classic?”
• J. M. Coetzee, “What Is a Classic?”
• Ankhi Mukherjee, “What Is a Classic? International Literary Criticism and the Classic Question” 

Session 4: Ruins Lesson

• Derek Walcott, “Ruins of a Great House”
• Maryse Condé, selections from Windward Heights
• Maryse Condé in interview with Emily Apter, “Crossover Texts/Creole Tongues” 

Session 5: Ephemeral Effects, Diaspora

• Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World, Faber, 1986 (advance reading)
• Ishiguro, “Crooner”
• Rebecca Walkowitz, “Ishiguro’s Floating Worlds”

Session 6: The Question of Beauty

• Zadie Smith, On Beauty
• Zadie Smith, “Love, Actually”

Session 7: Black Matter as Text and Subtext

• Toni Morrison, “Black Matters”
• Teju Cole, “Black Body"
• Claudia Rankine, “Weather” 

Session 8: Planetary World Classics

• Abdulrazak Gurnah, “The Wood of the Moon”
• Alexis Wright, selections from The Swan Book: A Novel
• Isabel Hofmeyr, “Universalizing the Indian Ocean” 

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Mariano Siskind, "About the End of the World: Crises of Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary Culture and Theory"

Cosmopolitanism has been an extremely important master concept to understand modern and modernist processes of global dislocation, disjuncture, and displacement, as well as fantasies of totality, communication, and interrelations. Today, the displacement of more than 88 million refugees, migrants, and forcibly displaced persons as a result of environmental catastrophes, economic hardships, and small and large-scale perpetual wars and terror in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and East Asia points to the radical dislocation of the symbolic structure we used to call “world.” Can the concept of cosmopolitanism still be useful to interrogate today’s generalized sense of crisis–particularly the migration crisis and its traumatic losses? What is the ethico-political potential today of a cosmopolitanism without a world? This seminar is not about the very real historical suffering and losses of those whose bodies are wounded by the political, economic, military, and environmental upheavals (which include but precede the COVID pandemic) that we will call ‘the end of the world;’ it is rather about the traces of those experiences that we call art and literature in a post-cosmopolitan world. It explores the ways in which those of us who care about art and literature attend to these forms as symbolic sites as we (professors, students, intellectuals, writers, and artists) struggle to determine what we can and can no longer do about the end of the world through art as mediation.

In order to work through these notions, we will read texts by literary writers and theorists, including Roberto Bolaño, Immanuel Kant, Jacques Derrida, Elizabeth Bishop, Warsan Shire, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, Larissa MachFarquhar, Maurice Blanchot, Julia Kristeva, Yuri Herrera, Hannah Arendt, Sigmund Freud, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Valeria Luiselli, Achille Mbembe, David Harvey, Silviano Santiago, Shahram Khosravi, Davi Kopenawa, Bruce Albert, Amitav Ghosh, Mark Fischer, together with visual work by Bouchra Khalili, Reena Saini Khalat, Subhankar Banerjee, Dahian Cifuentes, Quetzallli Nicte-Ha González, Kirsten Luce, Daniel Castro García, and Daniel Richter; and films by Alfonso Cuarón, Lars von Trier, Christian Petzold, Luiz Bolognesi and Davi Kopenawa.

Mariano Siskind is a Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at Harvard Universit

y. He is the author of Cosmopolitan Desires. Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America (2014), Rumo a um cosmopolitismo da perda. Ensaio sobre o fim do mundo (2020) and The Modernist Songbook. Standards y variaciones sobre formas muertas (2021). He has edited Homi Bhabha's Nuevas minorías, nuevos derechos (2013) and has co-edited with Sylvia Molloy Poéticas de la distancia. Adentro y afuera de la literatura argentina (2006); with Gesine Müller, World Literature, Cosmopolitanism, Globality: Beyond, Against, Post, Otherwise (2019); and with Guillermina De Ferrari, The Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Latin American Literature and Culture (2022). In 2023 he will publish the collection of essays, Dislocaciones y fin de eso que ya no es mundo, and is working on another one, tentatively titled About the End of the World: The Demise of Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary Culture.

Session 1: What has ended? What exactly have we lost? 

Introduction to our seminar: the closure of cosmopolitanism and the loss of the world.

• Elizabeth Bishop’s “One art.”
• Roberto Bolaño, “Mauricio (The Eye) Silva” / “El Ojo Silva.”
• Warsan Shire, “Home” and “Conversations about home (at the Deportation Centre)”

Session 2: What was cosmopolitanism? What was the world?

• Immanuel Kant, “Idea of a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose.”
• Martha Nussbaum, “Patriotism or Cosmopolitanism.”
• Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Afterword to Cosmopolitanisms.”
• David Harvey, “The New Cosmopolitans.”
• Silviano Santiago, “The Cosmopolitanism of the Poor.”
• Achille Mbembe, “Afropolitanism.”
• In class: Reena Saini Khalat’s “Woven Chronicle (2011-16)”

Session 3: The end of the world, crises of cosmopolitanism I: the (im)possibility of hospitality

• Immanuel Kant, “On Perpetual Peace”.
• Jacques Derrida, “A word of welcome” (in Adieu to Levinas)
• Julia Kristeva, selections from Strangers to Ourselves.
• Christian Petzold, Transit (film, 2018).

Session 4: The end of the world, crises of cosmopolitanism II: the refugee and the end of universal rights

• Hannah Arendt, “The perplexities of the Rights of Man” and “We refugees.”
• Giorgio Agamben, “Beyond human rights” and “What is a camp?”
• Lyndsey Stonebridge, “Hannah Arendt in Baddawi” (Writing and Righting).
• Yousif M. Qasmiyeh’s Writing the Camp (selections).

Session 5: Going nowhere, barely surviving: border crossing without a world 

• Yuri Herrera, Signs preceding the end of the world.
• Thomas Nail, Theory of the Border.
• Thomas Keenan, “Aspirational and Operational Maps of Migration.”
• Shahram Khosravi, “Afterword: waiting, a state of consciousness”.
• Jason de León: The undocumented migration project (http://undocumentedmigrationproject.com).
• Bouchra Khalili: “The Mapping Journey Project” (https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1627).
• In class: photography and paintings by Dahian Cifuentes, Quetzallli Nicte-Ha González, Kirsten Luce, Daniel Castro García, and Daniel Richter.

Session 6: Screening the end of the world: dystopian imaginings

• Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster.
• Mark Fisher, “It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
• Films: Children of Men (Dir. Alfonso Cuarón, 2006); The World (Dir. Jia Zhangke, 2004).

Session 7: The end of the world, literally: ecological crisis and the Anthropocene

• Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses”.
• Amitav Ghosh. “Stories” (from The Great Derangement. Climate Change and The Unthinkable).
• Film: The Last Forest / A última floresta (Dir. Luiz Bolognesi and Davi Kopenawa, 2021).
• Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert. The Falling Sky. Words of a Yanomami Shaman.
• In class: notes on surviving, the photography of Subhankar Banerjee.

Session 8: What can we do about it? What can art, literature and the humanities do about it? Activism, mourning and melancholia 

• Valeria Luiselli, Tell me how it ends. An Essay in Forty Questions.
• “Melancholia” (Dir. Lars von Trier, 2011)
• Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”.
• Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left-Wing Melancholia”.

Optional reading: Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive / Desierto sonoro.

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Delia Ungureanu, "The Undiscovered Country: Visionaries of Another World"

Over the past thirty years, world literature scholars have attempted in various ways and with different theoretical instruments – from comparative literature to sociology, translation and postcolonial studies – to conceptualize the “world” in their object of study and discipline. While writers have often portrayed “the way of the world” as it is, and scholars have mapped the worldly circulations of works, other artists and scholars have been concerned “not to describe the world but to change it,” as Pheng Cheah says in his book What Is a World? (2016). Using Martin Puchner’s notion of world literature as revolutionary literature that can change the world, together with Pascale Casanova’s concept of revolutionary periphery and the exception that changes the stake of the game, this seminar will look at world writers and film makers who have sought to portray a world yet to come -- possible worlds that aim at correcting, expanding, or radically changing the world as we know it. We often think of world-changing movements as collective, but revolutionary ideas are often born in solitude, whether by dreamers, visionaries, exiles, political prisoners, or people on the margins of their society. As Harold Bloom argues, it’s the soliloquy that holds the revolutionary power to change the world.

Using primary works from early modernity to the present, this seminar will examine visionary literature and films that seek to restore, rebuild, correct or expand our notion of the world. We will learn that visionaries look into the past, as well as into the future: from Hamlet’s prison house that becomes a world of surveillance in Greg Doran’s contemporary film of Hamlet; from Dostoevsky’s exile and near-death experiences that reverberate in Akira Kurosawa’s postwar Japan and Andrzej Wajda’s post-Communist Poland, from Primo Levi and Viktor Frankl’s Auschwitz memoirs, from Mircea Cărtărescu’s dream world born during the worst hours of Romanian Communism, from Erdogan’s prisons in Ahmet Altan’s survival essays, or from a secluded corner in provincial France that brings the world home in Facteur Cheval’s construction of the Ideal Palace. Our readings and films will be framed with theoretical works by Pascale Casanova, David Damrosch, Martin Puchner, and Andrei Tarkovsky, as well as with essays by Montaigne, Woolf, and André Breton, and Seneca’s letters.

Delia Ungureanu is Associate Director of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature and associate professor of literary theory in the Department of Literary Studies at the University of Bucharest. She is the author of Time Regained: World Literature and Cinema (2021), From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature (2017), and Poetica Apocalipsei: Războiul cultural în revistele literare românești (1944–1947) (The Poetics of Apocalypse: The cultural war in Romanian literary magazines, 1944-1947, 2012). She has published essays on canon formation, modern poetry and poetics, Shakespeare, and Nabokov, and has co-edited special issues of the Journal of World Literature on "Romanian Literature in Today's World" (2018, with Thomas Pavel), on the legacy of Pascale Casanova (2020, with Gisèle Sapiro), and on world literature and world cinema (2021, with Michael Wood).

Epigraph: Shakespeare, Sonnet XXVII.

Recommended advance reading: Mircea Cărtărescu, Gemini. 

Session 1: The revolutionary power of soliloquies, or How to put time back into joint

• Shakespeare, Hamlet. The soliloquies.
• Greg Doran, Hamlet, RSC production, 2009.
• “Interpreting Shakespeare: An Interview with Gregory Doran.” February 13, 2013, theoxfordculturereview.
• Martin Puchner, “Teaching Worldly Literature.”
• Andrei Tarkovsky on Hamlet from Time within Time.

Session 2: Our Future World Is in the Past. Masculine Writing, Feminine Vision: Shakespeare in Purgatory

• Hamlet, Gravediggers scene.
• Kenneth Branagh, All Is True.
• Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own. Selections.
• David Damrosch, “Worlds” from Comparing the Literatures .

Session 3: The revolutionary power of exile and (near-) death experiences (I)

• Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot. Selections.
• Fyodor Dostoevsky, selections from A Writer’s Diary. Vol. I: 1873-1876.
• Akira Kurosawa, Hakuchi (The Idiot), 1951.
• Joseph Frank, from Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years: 1865-1871.
• An account of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by a survivor, “Fire in the Sky.” In The Penguin Book of Hell.
• Pascale Casanova, from The World Republic of Letters.

Session 4: The revolutionary power of exile and (near-) death experiences (II)

• Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot. Selections.
• Fyodor Dostoevsky, selections from A Writer’s Diary. Vol. I: 1873-1876.
• Andrzej Wajda, Nastazja (1994), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMnLyEByq7g&t=2961s
• Andrzej Wajda, “Artist as Politician: An Interview”.
• Takashi Wada, “Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot” .
• Virginia Woolf, The Russian Point of View and On Cinema.

Session 5: Solitude and the Birth of Revolutionary Ideas: The Androgynous Mind

• Virginia Woolf, Orlando. Selections.
• Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway. Selections.
• Mircea Cărtărescu, Gemini. Selections.
• Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own. Selections.

Session 6: Is there life after the death camps? Surviving through storytelling, the End of the World, and a New Life

(Dai Dudu, Li Tiezi, Zhang An, Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante)

• Dante,The Divine Comedy. Selections.
• Primo Levi, “The Canto of Ulysses.” In If This Is a Man.
• Viktor Frankl, selections from Experiences in a Concentration Camp [Auschwitz] or Man’s Search for Meaning.

Session 7: “There is no gate, no lock, no bolt, that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” The illuminating power of solitude: from a room of one’s own to the prison cell 

• Ahmet Altan, I Will Never See the World Again. Selections.
• Ahmet Altan, “I prefer prison to exile”. Interview, 2021.
• Montaigne, “On Solitude.” Selections.
• Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1928). Selections.

Session 8: Voyaging in my mind’s eye: Postman Ferdinand Cheval, the visionary of another world

• Nils Tavernier, L’Incroyable Histoire du Facteur Cheval (2019). (film)
• André Breton, Facteur Cheval (poem).
• André Breton, The Automatic Message.
• Seneca, Letter 88 and Letter 90.

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

Although the history of translation theory and practice has been distinguished by a range of concepts and strategies, two approaches have recurred so frequently as to be considered dominant models. The first can be called instrumental, treating translation as the reproduction or transfer of an invariant contained in or caused by the source text, whether its form, its meaning, or its effect. The second can be called hermeneutic, treating translation as the inscription of an interpretation, one among varying and even conflicting possibilities, so that the source text is seen as variable in form, meaning, and effect. This seminar will explore the continuing pertinence of these models for the study, practice, and evaluation of translation by examining the work of various theorists and commentators, including Jerome, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Eugene Nida, Gideon Toury, Antoine Berman, and Jacques Derrida. The discussions will be grounded in analyses of translations into and out of English from a variety of humanistic genres and text types, including the lyric poem, prose fiction, the screenplay, philosophy, and social history. Attention will be given to various theoretical concepts, including equivalence, norms, and ethics, as well as the fundamental relationship between theory and practice and the question of what constitutes a good translation. Throughout we will be concerned with the centrality of translation to the study of world literature.

Lawrence Venuti, professor of English at Temple University, is a translation theorist and historian as well as a translator from Italian, French, and Catalan. He is the author of The Translator’s Invisibility: A 

History of Translation (1995; 2nd ed., 2008), The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (1998), Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice (2013), and Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic (2019). He is also the editor of Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology(1992), The Translation Studies Reader (2000; 3rd ed., 2012), and Teaching Translation: Programs, Courses, Pedagogies (2017). His translations include Antonia Pozzi’s Breath: Poems and Letters (2002), the anthology Italy: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (2003), Massimo Carlotto’s crime novel, The Goodbye Kiss (2006), and J. Rodolfo Wilcock’s collection of real and imaginary biographies, The Temple of Iconoclasts (2014). In 2008 he won the Robert Fagles Translation Prize for his version of Ernest Farrés’s Edward Hopper: Poems. His work has been supported by such agencies as the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institut Ramon Llull.

I. Translation Commentary and the Theory of World Literature

Session 1: The Dominance of Instrumentalism in Translation Commentary

• Alejandro Chacoff, “Solitaire,” The New Yorker, 4 and 11 January 2021.
• Eliot Weinberger, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei.
• Mark Polizzotti, “The Magnetic Fields,” 4Columns, 16 October 2020.
• Paul Maziar, “Signs of Life in a Surreal World: A Conversation with Charlotte Mandel on Breton and Soupault’s The Magnetic Fields,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 21 February 2021.

Session 2: Translation as World Literature

• Pascale Casanova, “Consecration and Accumulation of Literary Capital: Translation as Unequal Exchange” (2002),
• Gisèle Sapiro, “French Literature in the World System of Translation.”
• Case Study: Julio Cortázar, “Las babas del diablo,” in Las armas secretas (1959) and “Blow-Up,” in The End of the Game and Other Stories, trans. Paul Blackburn (1967).

II A Brief History of Translation Theory and Practice

Session 3: The Rise of Instrumentalism in Antiquity

• [Zhi Qian?], From the Preface to the Sutra of Dharma Verses (c. 220-252CE), trans. Haun Saussy.
• Dao’an, From the Preface to A Collation of the Perfection of Great Wisdom Sutra” (c. 382), trans. Haun Saussy.
• Jerome, “Letter to Pammachius” (395CE), trans. Kathleen Davis.
• Friedrich Nietzsche, “Translations” (1882), trans. Walter Kaufmann.
• Case Study: Livius Andronicus, fragments from the Odissia (3rd century BCE), trans. David Camden.

Session 4: The Invariant and Cultural Assimilation

• Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt, Prefaces to Tacitus (1640) and Lucian (1654), trans. L. Venuti.
• Eugene Nida, “Principles of Correspondence.”
• Lin Shu, Paratexts to A Record of the Black Slaves’ Cry to Heaven (1901), trans. R. David Arkush, Leo Ou-fan Lee, and Michael Gibbs Hill.
• Case Study: Extract from Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” trans. Alan Bass; extracts from Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics, trans. William Weaver.

Session 5: The Hermeneutic Model of Translation

• Friedrich Schleiermacher, “On the Different Methods of Translating” (1813), trans. Susan Bernofsky.
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Translations” (1819), trans. Sharon Sloan.
• Case Study: Charles Baudelaire, “The Cat,” trans. Joanna Richardson; extract from Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman, Annie Hall (1977), Spanish trans. by José Luis Guarner.

Session 6: Style as Interpretation in Modernist Translation

• Ezra Pound, “Guido’s Relations.”
• Qu Qiubai and Lu Xun, “An Exchange on Translation” (1931-1932), trans. Chloe Estep.
• Jorge Luis Borges, “The Translators of The One Thousand and One Nights” (1935), trans. Esther Allen.
• Case Study: Catullus 56 and 70, trans. Peter Whigham (1969), Louis and Celia Zukofsky (1969), Charles Martin (1979).

Session 7: The Translator’s Agency in Social Formations

• Itamar Even-Zohar, “The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem” (1978/1990).
• Gideon Toury, “The Nature and Role of Norms in Translation.”
• André Lefevere, “Mother Courage’s Cucumbers: Text, System and Refraction in a Theory of Literature.”
• Case Study: Italian Publishing Statistics; Carlo Lucarelli’s review of Edward Bunker’s No Beast So Fierce (1973) and Stefano Bortolossi’s Italian translation, Come una bestia feroce (2001).

Session 8: Translation Ethics and Cultural Innovation

• Antoine Berman, “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign” (1985), trans. L. Venuti.
• Lawrence Venuti, “The Poet’s Version; or, An Ethics of Translation” (2011), in L. Venuti, Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice (2013).
• Case Study: I. U. Tarchetti, Fantastic Tales (1992) and Fosca (1994), trans. L. Venuti, and reviews from The New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review..