July 6-16

Helena Buescu, "Conspiracy: Theories and Practices"  

Conspiracy is a comparative topic that can be approached from quite different angles. Some of its characteristics, though, remain the same. We will investigate, through texts that belong to various times and cultures, how conspiracies are both social and personal, how they are linked to politics, passion, ethics, and aesthetics. There even exist ontological conspiracies. Or, to rephrase this: are all conspiracies ontological, and, if so, how? What is common to all conspiracies considered? What varies between them? And in which ways are they significant?

Helena Carvalhão Buescu is professor of Comparative Literature at ULisboa. HelenaMain areas of interest centre on the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as theoretical issues in comparative and world literature. She regularly collaborates with international Universities, in Europe, United States, Brazil and Macau. She has authored ten books, and published more than one hundred articles, in both Portuguese and international periodicals. She founded and directed the research Centre of Comparative Studies (ULisboa) and served in international boards such as the Institute of World Literature, the International Comparative Literature Association, the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, or the International Network of Comparative Humanities. Her most recent book is on literature and history (2019)). She is member of Academia Europaea, member of Academia das Ciências de Lisboa and longlife member of St. John’s College, Cambridge Univ.

Session 1: Conspiracy and founding Texts (1)

  • The Tale of Sinuhe. 2009.
  • Second Book of Samuel in The English Bible, King James Version: Old Testament2012

Session 2: Conspiracy and founding Texts

  • Sophocles. Ajax. In Plays: Ajax, Electra, Oedipus Tyrannus. Cambridge: Harvard U: London, 1994.

Session 3: Stories and texts as the third party. The triangle

  • 1,001 Nights. (11th and 12th Nights, “The Story of the First Dervish”). 
  • René Girard. The Gods, the Dead, the Sacred, and Sacrificial Substitution. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979.

Session 4: Conspiracy, politics, and secret. Becoming global

  • Titu Cusi Yupanqui, An Inca Account of the Conquest of Peru.
  • Optional reading: Matthew Restall. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. Oxford UP: 2003. Ch. 3.

Session 5: The Shaping of modern thought: the prince and the hero

  • Macchiavelli, The Prince. Oxford UP. 2005. Chapters XXIV to XXVI.

Session 6: Being born out of time as an existential conspiracy: art as a form of conspiracy against bare life (Giorgio Agamben)

  • Thomas de Quincey, “On Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts”.
  • Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying”.

Session 7: Conspiracy and conflict: affective and ethical values

  • Luchino Visconti, Senso (1954).

Session 8: Ontological conspiracy

Jorge Luis Borges. Tlon, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius. Labyrinths. Selected Stories and Other Writings. New Directions Paperbook.

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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 David DProfessor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University and director of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature. 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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Stefano Evangelista, "Citizens of Nowhere: Writing Cosmopolitanism"

Cosmopolitanism, derived from the Greek for ‘world citizenship’, denotes the aspiration to transcend the cultural and linguistic boundaries of the nation, and to imagine oneself in relation to a global community. This seminar will address different ways in which cosmopolitanism has been theorised, debated, practised, attacked and defended, and how ideas of transnational citizenship have shaped literary texts. We will explore cosmopolitanism’s complex and sometimes fraught relationship with ideas of nationalism, globalisation and wStefano Evangelista 2orld literature. We will interrogate how theories of cosmopolitanism are affected by gender, class and identity politics. Texts covered by the seminar range from works by Kwame Anthony Appiah to Baudelaire, Herder, Georg Simmel, Rabindranath Tagore, Virginia Woolf and Stefan Zweig.

Stefano Evangelista is Associate Professor of English at Oxford University. He specialises in nineteenth-century English and comparative literature. His publications include British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile(2009) and edited volumes on the reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe and literary cosmopolitanism in the fin de siècle. His work on literary cosmopolitanism has been awarded prestigious grants by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy. 

Session 1:World Literature, World Citizenship

  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘On World Literature’, in World Literature: A Reader, ed. by Theo D’haen, César Domínguez and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen (London and New York: Routledge, 2013).
  • Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, in The Cosmopolitanism Reader, ed. by Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012).
  • Fritz Strich, ‘World Literature and Comparative Literary History’, in World Literature: A Reader, ed. by Theo D’haen, César Domínguez and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen (London and New York: Routledge, 2013).

Session 2: Nationalism

  • Johann Gottfried Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, ed. by Frank E. Manuel (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1968).
  • Fedor Dostoevsky, ‘Pushkin Speech’..
  • Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Nationalism in India’, in Indian Philosophy in English: From Renaissance to Independence, ed. by Nalini Bhushan and Jay L. Garfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Session 3: Worldliness

  • Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in The Painter of Modern Life and other Essays, trans. by Jonathan Mayne (New York: Da Capo, 1986).
  • Henry James, The Ambassadors, ed. Adrian Poole (London: Penguin, 2008).
  • Paul Bourget, Cosmopolis (New York: Current Literature Publishing, 1908) Author’s introduction- https://archive.org/details/cosmopolis00bour/page/n9

Session 4: World Capitals

  • Pascale Casanova, ‘Literature as a World’, in World Literature: A Reader, ed. by Theo D’haen, César Domínguez and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen (Routledge, 2013).
  • Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, trans. by Anthea Bell (London: Pushkin Press, 2011),‘Foreword’ and ‘Beyond Europe’.
  • Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, Capital of the nineteenth Century’, in Reflections(New York: Schocken, 2007).

Session 5: Queer Worlds

  • C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems, trans. by Evangelos Sachperoglou (Oxford World’s Classics, 2007).
  • Mikhail Kuzmin, Mikhail Kuzmin, Wings, trans. by Hugh Alpin (London: Hesperus, 2007).
  • Robert Aldrich, ‘Introduction: the seduction of the colonies’ to Colonialism and Homosexuality.

Session 6: Patriotism and Pacifism

  • Appiah, Kwame Anthony, ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’, Critical Inquiry23:3 (1997).
  • Woolf, Virginia, Three Guineas, in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, ed. by Michèle Barrett (London: Penguin, 1993).

Session 7: The Love of Strangers 

  • Georg Simmel, ‘The Stranger’.
  • J.K. Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. by Robert Baldwick (London: Penguin), chapter XI.
  • Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Little Governess’, in Selected Stories(New York, Norton, 2006).
  • Jacques Derrida, ‘Foreigner Question’, in Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford University Press, 2000).

Session 8: Resistance of Form

  • Theodor Adorno, ‘On the Use of Foreign Words’, in Notes to Literature, trans. by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press)
  • Barbara Cassin, Dictionary of Untranslatables, trans. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood (Princeton University Press, 2014): Preface and Introduction and ‘Welt’.

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B. Venkat Mani, "Exiles, Migrants, and Refugees: Borderlines of World Literatures and Global Histories" 

We are living, once again, in times of forced migration and refuge. In the 1990s, the number of refugees from the former Yugloslavia was highest since the Second World War. For 2019, the United Nations’ High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates 70.8 million forcibly displaced people around the world, highest since the recorded data available since the two World Wars. The proliferation of refugees and stateless people in the world has coincided with the resurgence of exclusive nationalism, and divisive rhetoric centered on securing and insulating borders. The widespread rhetoric of walls and barbed wires on national borders are manifestations of a much longer history of frontier politics, whose roots can be traced back to European colonialism and the ideological geo-political divisions in the wake of the Cold War. In the current times, the rise of majoritarian supremacies, resurgence of populism and nationalism, as well as slow, incessant pressures on natural resources and the current climate crisis are major causes of forced migrations.

From the current vantage point, in this seminar we will engage with a range of texts and historical contexts in the twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries that led to the creation of exiles, migrants, and refugees. Central to the seminar is migration as a comparative critical framework. What do historical moments of forced migration and refuge impact our understanding of national and world literatures? How does an engagement with exilic and refugee figures broaden and deepen our comprehension of world literature? How does reading history and literature together enrich our understanding of aesthetic and political representations? These questions will serve as catalysts for our seminar. The aim of the seminar is threefold. First, by engaging with conceptual histories of the terms “exiles,” “migrants,” and “refugees,” we will develop a differentiated understanding of “willful” and “forced” migrations. Second, by refracting European examples with those from the non-Euro-American world, we will try to cultivate a global framework of literary and historical comparison. And third, by locating narratives of exiles, migrants, and refugees at the intersection of “world literature” and “global history”—two terms that have gained traction in the twenty-first century scholarship—we will foster a wider and deeper understanding of fault lines of race, ethnicity, sexuality, language, and religion.

Readings for the seminar include texts by thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Edward Said, and Hayden White; historians such as Sebastian Conrad, Peter Gatrell, Ranajit Guha, Ayesha Jalal, and Mark Mazower; world literature scholars such as David Damrosch, Debjani Ganguly, Lital Levy, Aamir Mufti; and short prose by literary authors such as Ismail Kadare, Sayed Kashua, Saadat Hasan Manto, Viet Thanh Ngyuen and Atiq Rahimi. By reading literature and history together, we will explore how authors and artists engage with historical events, and subvert, resist, or challenge dominant official narratives by providing alternative, “unauthorized” accounts.

B. Venkat Mani is Professor of German, and Director of the Center Manifor South Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research and teaching focus on 19th to 21st Century German literature and culture, literatures of migration, book and digital cultural histories, and world literature. He is the author of Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk (University of Iowa Press, 2007), and Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books (Fordham University Press, 2017), which won the German Studies Association’s DAAD Book Prize (2018) and the Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize (2018) for outstanding scholarship in German Studies. His recent work has appeared in Edition Text+Kritik, Journal of World Literature, Gegenwartsliteratur, German Quarterly, PMLA, among others. He has co-edited special issues of Modern Language Quarterly, TRANSIT, and Monatshefte, and is associate editor of the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature (forthcoming). He is working on a new book project, Addresses of our Last Homes: Global Archives of Refugees. Recent fellowships and grants include Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Fellowship, Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminar Grant on his project “Bibliomigrancy,” a visiting fellowship at the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin, and a Title VI National Resource Center Grant for Center for South Asia from the US Department of Education. He was a faculty member of the Institute for World Literature 2019 (Harvard University) and Forum Transregionale Studien’s 2019 seminar on “World Literatures from Elsewhere” (ZfL Berlin).

Session 1: Exiles, Migrants, and Refugees: Conceptual Histories

  • Arendt, Hannah. “We Refugees.” The Jewish Writings, edited by Ron H Feldman. New York: Schocken Books, 2007.
  • Said, Edward W. “Reflections on Exile.” Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
  • Guha, Ranajit. “The Migrant’s Time.” Postcolonial Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, 1998.
  • Nguyen, “On Being a Refugee, An American—and a Human Being.” The Refugees. New York: Grove Press, 2018.

Session 2: World Literature, Global History: Critical Approaches

  • Mani, B. Venkat. “Introduction: Recoding World Literature.” Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017.
  • Conrad, Sebastian. “Introduction.” What Is Global History?, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.
  • Mazlish, Bruce. “Comparing Global History to World History.” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 28:3, 1998.
  • Damrosch, David. “Toward a History of World Literature.” New Literary History, 39:3–4, 2009.

Session 3: Migration, Forced Migration, and Refugee Studies: Critical Approaches

  • Chimni, B. S. “The Birth of a ‘Discipline’: From Refugee to Forced Migration Studies.” Journal of Refugee Studies, 22:1, Mar. 2009.
  • Gatrell, Peter. “Refugees--What’s Wrong with History?” Journal of Refugee Studies, 30:2, June 2017.
  • Nguyen, Vinh. “Refugeetude: When Does a Refugee Stop Being a Refugee?” Social Text, 37:2, 2019.

Session 4: Walls, Borders, Frontiers: Critical Approaches

  • Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Migrations, Diasporas, and Borders.” Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, edited by David Nicholls. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2007.
  • Nail, Thomas. “Border Kinopower.” Theory of the Border. Oxford and NY: Oxford University Press, 2018.
  • Marshall, Tim. “Introduction.” Age of Walls: How Barriers Between Nations Are Changing Our World. New York: Scribner, 2019..
  • Anzaldúa, Gloria E. “The Homeland, Aztlán.” Borderlands: The New Mestiza = La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.

Session 5: The Frenzies of Partition: India-Pakistan

  • Butalia, Urvashi. “Return” and “Beginnings.” The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. New Delhi: Penguin, 2017 [1998].
  • Gatrell, Peter. “Midnight’s Refugees?.” The Making of the Modern Refugee. Oxford and NY: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Session 6: Struggles of Self-Determination: Israel-Palestine

  • Kashua, Sayed. Let It Be Morning. Translated by Miriam Shlesinger. New York: Atlantic Publishers, 2007.
  • Gatrell, Peter. “‘Nothing Except Commas’.” The Making of the Modern Refugee. Oxford and NY: Oxford University Press, 2015.
  • Levy, Lital. “Introduction: The No-Man’s-Land of Language.” Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Session 7: Dust and Debris of the Berlin Wall: The Balkans

  • Kadare, Ismail. Three Elegies for Kosovo. Translated by Peter Constantine. London and NY: Vintage Books, 2011.
  • Gatrell, Peter. “Some Kind of Freedom.” The Making of the Modern Refugee. Oxford and NY: Oxford University Press, 2015. 

Session 8: From the Cold War to the War on Terror: Afghanistan and Iraq

  • Rahimi, Atiq. Earth and Ashes. Translated by Erdağ M. Göknar. London: Harcourt, Inc., 2002.
  • Blasim, Hassan. “The Nightmares of Carolos Feuntes.” Translated by Jonathan Wright, The Madman of Freedom Square. London: Comma Press Limited.

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Natalie Melas, "Figures out of Place: Lyric and Human Difference (or, Race) in the Modern Imperial World System" 

How can we think modern lyric on a world scale? This seminar will explore this question by posing a hypothesis and testing it through a reading of poets writing at the periphery of empire. We will attempt to articulate two world systems and one world republic: the idea of the modern capitalist world system as a dynamic political- economic entity consisting of centers and peripheries in Immanuel Wallerstein’s sense, the modern imperial discursive and conceptual world system that operationalized and later codified a hierarchy of human difference and finally the modern world republic of letters, as Pascale Casanova elaborates it, centered in 19th century Paris and for the purposes of this seminar, on Baudelaire’s invention of modern lyric. The argument to be tested at the center of this seminar is how Roberto Schwarz’s concept of “misplaced ideas,” the innovations produced by the discrepant importation of the novel form into Brazil, can help us articulate a rigorous concept of modern world poetry grounded in the materialities of a modern world system. We will ask: how have poets crafted their lyric modernity partly through a poetic engagement with those dimensions of European modernism and aestheticism that touch upon the civilizational and racial difference that fix them in their imperial peripheries? To put another way, how might racial difference, broadly understood, inflect modern form? We will consider a range of modern poets on the periphery of empire including CP. Cavafy, Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, Miraji, W.B. Yeats and any other poets seminar participants may wish to suggest.

Natalie Melas teaches Comparative Literature at Cornell University where she is alsoMelas resident director of the Institute for Comparative Modernities. Her fields of inquiry include French and English Caribbean literature and philosophy, anticolonial thought and aesthetics, the poetics and politics of comparison, Alexandrianism, Primitivism and philosophies of race and time. She is the author of All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison and co-editor with David Damrosch and Mbongiseni Buthelezi of The Princteon Sourcebook for Comparative Literature. She is currently completing a study of Aimé Césaire and C.P. Cavafy on the question of race and lyric time from which the topic of her seminar is drawn.

Session 1: Capitalism and the dialectic of world literature: world systems

  • Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Modern World System as a Capitalist World Economy”
  • Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature”
  • Roberto Schwarz, “Misplaced Ideas”
  • Stephen Owen, “Stepping Forward and Back: Issues and Possibilities for 'World' Poetry"

Session 2: Imperialism and human difference: race as a global idea

  • Edward Said, part II of Introduction, Orientalism, “Empire, Geography, and Culture” from Culture and Imperialism 
  • Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man
  • Denise Ferreira da Silva, Towards a Global Idea of Race

Session 3: Paris: World capital of modern poetry

  • Pascale Casanova, from “World Literary Space” in The World Republic of Letters 
  • Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century”, The Arcades Project and “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” Illuminations 
  • Charles Baudelaire, “The Swan,” “Spleen LXXVI –J’ai plus de souvenir » “To a woman passing by [à une passante]”

Session 4: From Alexandria with Horizontal Decadence

  • C.P. Cavafy, “Correspondences according to Baudelaire”, “Waiting for the Barbarians”, “For Ammonis, Who Died Aged 29, in 610,” “The God Abandons Anthony;” “Ionic;” “Alexandrian Kings;” “Kaisarion;” “A Prince from Western Libya;” “Days of 1909, ’10, and ’11;” “In the Same Place”
  • Charles Baudelaire, “Correspondences”
  • Paul Verlaine, “Langueur”
  • Diana Haas. "Cavafy's Reading Notes on Gibbon's "Decline and Fall"." Folia Neohellenica 4 (1982)
  • Dimitris Papanikolaou, "Days of Those Made Like Me: Retrospective Pleasure, Sexual Knowledge, and C.P. Cavafy’s Homobiographics." Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 2.37 (2013) 

Optional:

  • Renato Poggioli, "Qualis Artifex Pereo! Or, Barbarism and Decadence." The Mind and Art of C. P. Cavafy: Essays on His Life and Work.
  • Peter Jeffreys, Ch. 2 “Translating Baudelaire” from Reframing Decadence: C.P. Cavafy’s Imaginary Portraits
  • Edward Said, “Glimpses of Late Style” I-III in On Late Style

Session 5: From Fort-de-France with Cannibal vitalism

  • Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal ; Journal of a Homecoming. « Poetry and Knowledge » « Maintenir la Poesie”
  • Baudelaire, « L’Albatross, » Sartre, «Black Orpheus ;» Fanon, « The Lived Experience of the Black Man” in Black Skin White Masks

Optional:

  • Donna Jones, “Cesaire’s Returns” in The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Negritude, Vitalism, Modernity
  • Suleymane Bachir Diagne, African Art as Philosophy

Session 6: Caribbean Returns

  • Derek Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory [Nobel speech];” “The Schooner Flight,” “Names;” “Map of the New World”
  • Suzanne Césaire, “1943: Surrealism and Us” and “The Great Camouflage.” In Richardson ed., Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean

Session 7: W.B. Yeats and the Autumnal Atmosphere of Revival

  • “The Second Coming,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Byzantium,” “The Circus Animals’ Desertion, “Under Ben Bulben”
  • Renato Poggioli,. "The Autumn of Ideas." The Massachusetts Review 2.4 (1961)
  • Edward Said, “Yeats and Decolonization” in Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature

Session 8: Miraji and the Dark Lover

selected poems http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00urduhindilinks/baidarbakht/mod04miraji.pdf and Geeta Patel,“Baudelaire: The Troubled Master of the Modern, in Lyrical movements, historical hauntings on gender, colonialism, and desire in Miraji's Urdu poetry

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

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

Delia Ungureanu is Assistant Director of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature Delia Uand associate professor of literary theory in the Department of Literary Studies at the University of Bucharest. She is the author of From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2017), and of Poetica Apocalipsei: Razboiul cultural in revistele literare romanesti (1944–1947) (The Poetics of Apocalypse: The cultural war in Romanian literary magazines, 1944-1947, Bucharest UP, 2012). She has published essays on canon formation, modern poetry and poetics, Shakespeare, and Nabokov, and has coedited with Thomas Pavel Romanian Literature in Today's World, a special issue of the Journal of World Literature. She is currently finishing her third book, Time Regained: World Literature and Cinema that will be published by Bloomsbury. Together with Gisèle Sapiro she is coediting a special issue of the Journal of World Literature dedicated to the memory and legacy of Pascale Casanova.

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

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

Session 2: National, Transnational, World 

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

Session 3: World Cinema vs. Hollywood

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

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

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

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

  • Selected poems by Arseny Tarkovsky.
  • Selected haiku by Basho from The Art of Haiku: Its History through Poems and Paintingsby Japanese Masters. Ed. Stephen Addiss. Shambhala, 2001..
  • Selections from Tales of Ise: Lyrical Episodes from Tenth-Century Japan. Translated, with an introduction and notes, by Helen Craig McCullough. Stanford UP, 1968.
  • Andrei Tarkovsky, Nostalghia (1983).
  • Andrei Tarkovsky, “After Nostalgia” and “Imprinted Time”. Sculpting in Time. University of Texas Press, 1989..
  • Dudley Andrew, “An Atlas of World Cinema.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media45.2 (Fall 2004)..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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