June 30 – July 10

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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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 Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and French Studies.

Trained at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, with an Agrégation de Lettres Modernes, and a PhD from Paris III, she has spent her entire teaching career in the United States (Yale, Columbia and UC Santa Barbara), and has been a Visiting Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, UK, and a Visiting Professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris (2023-2024). She has also taught several times at the Harvard Institute for World Literature. She writes and lectures on a wide range of topics: on modern and contemporary fiction, particularly Proust and Borges, with a focus on intertextuality, reception studies, translation studies, East-West intercultural dialogue, travel narratives, media studies and world literature. She has published widely on the Western reception of the 1001 Nights (Proust et ses modèles: les Mille et une nuits et les Mémoires de Saint-Simon, 1989; Les Amoureux de Schéhérazade: Variations modernes sur les Mille et Une Nuits, 2009), as well as numerous articles on this subject. An interest in travel narratives yielded a book on French travelers’ descriptions of America ( Récits du Nouveau Monde: les voyageurs française en Amérique de Chateaubriand à nos jours , 1992) as well as several articles on Oriental travelogues. Her most recent monograph is Borges, Buddhism and World Literature: A Morphology of Renunciation Tales (2019). Her current book project looks at technologies of optical mediation and illusionism in contemporary fiction, particularly the ways in which writers (such as Chateaubriand, Flaubert, Poe or Proust) respond creatively to the challenges of a visually dominant culture. A related collection, Screens and Illusionism: Alternative Teleologies of Mediation, co-edited with Peter J. Bloom, is forthcoming with Edinburgh U. P. (“Film and Intermediality Series”) in January 2025. At UCSB, she created and directed the Graduate Center for Literary Research (GCLR) from 2013 to 2018, and she was Chair of the program in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies from 2018 until 2023. She teaches French literature and culture courses, and comparative literature courses on a range of topics, such as “The Artist in the Novel”; “Epic Heroes, Classic Texts”; “The 1001 Nights as / and World Literature”; “Mental States in the Novel (Proust, Woolf, Borges)”; “Writing Back”, and more. She welcomes inquiries from students with related.

Link to personal website: jullien.complit.ucsb.

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.”
Beatriz Sarlo, Jorge Luis Borges: A Writer on the Edge, Cambridge: Verso, 1993 (“Introduction”).
Pascale Casanova, “Literature as a World”. In D’Haen, Theo, et al. (eds.) World Literature: A Reader. London: Routledge, 2012.
Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997: Chapter 52 “Pseudosummary in Borges.”

Optional:

Julio Cortázar, “Continuity of Parks” (End of the Game and Other Stories, New York: Collier Books, 1968).
Nora C. Benedict, Borges and the Literary Marketplace: How Editorial Practices Shaped Cosmopolitan Reading. Introduction: “Sorting through the Stacks” .
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.
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).

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.”
Suzanne Jill Levine, ‘Borges on Translation’, in Williamson, E. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Jorge Luis Borges.
Efraín Kristal, Chapter One “The Arnold-Newman Discussion”, Invisible Work: Borges and Translation.
Sergio Gabriel Waisman, Borges and Translation, chapter 4 "The aesthetics of irreverence: mistranslating from the margins", conclusion "The Value of the Margins."
Susan Bassnett & David Damrosch, “Translation Studies Meets World Literature.”

Optional:

Susan Bassnett, “The Figure of the Translator.”
Lawrence Venuti, “World Literature and Translation Studies”. In Theo D’Haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir, eds. The Routledge Companion to World Literature.

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.
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.
Sandra Nadaff, “The Thousand and One Nights as World Literature” in Theo D’Haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir, The Routledge Companion to World Literature
Dominique Jullien, “Intertextual Labyrinths: Borges and the Nights”, in Approaches to Teaching the 1001 Nights.

(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.
Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.

Session 4: Borgesian East and West

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.”
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.
Robin Fiddian, “The Orient and Orientalism”, in “Post-colonial Borges.”
Luce López-Baralt, “Islamic Themes”, in “Post-colonial Borges.”

(Optional):

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan.”
Edward FitzGerald, “Rubaiyat.”
Ian Almond, “Borges the Post-Orientalist: Images of Islam from the Edge of the West.”
Robin Fiddian, Postcolonial Borges: Argument and Artistry. Chapter 7: "Borges the Post-Orientalist: Selected Writings of the 1970s and 1980s."

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.”
Dominique Jullien, Borges, Buddhism and World Literature: A Morphology of Renunciation Tales.
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):

Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), “A Consolatory Tale.”
Max Müller, “On the Migration of Fables.”
Fritz Strich, Goethe and World Literature. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1949, chapter 1: “The idea.”
Erich Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur.”

Session 6: Borgesian epistemologies

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.”
Clive Griffin, “Philosophy and Fiction”, The Cambridge Companion to Jorge Luis Borges,
Reingard Nethersole, “World Literature and the Library.”

(Optional):

Samuel Beckett, Molloy.
Rita Raley & Russell Samolsky, “Borges and AI.”
Perla Sassón-Henry, “Jorge Luis Borges: a forerunner of the technology of the new millennium--links and forking paths.”
Rodrigo Quian Quiroga “In Retrospect: Funes the Memorious.”

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”.
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.
“Introduction: crime fiction as world literature”, in Nilsson, Louise, David Damrosch, and Theo d’Haen (Eds.). Crime Fiction As World Literature.

(Optional):

Irwin John, T. “Mysteries we Reread, Mysteries of Rereading: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story.”
Emron Esplin. “Borges’s Philosophy of Poe’s Composition.”
E. A. Poe “The Murders in the rue Morgue” (online text https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/poe/edgar_allan/p74mu/)
Paul Auster, City of Glass.

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.”
John Sturrock “Man into Author.”
Laura Jansen, Borges’ Classics: Global Encounters with the Graeco-Roman Past.
Italo Calvino, “Why Read the Classics?"

.(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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Jahan Ramazani, "Poetry and/as World Literature"

Although the novel has dominated much of the attention in studies of world literature, poetry is arguably more fully global, with long and rich histories in many cultures and languages in different parts of the world. In this seminar, we will explore some of the rewards of, and impediments to, approaching poetry as world literature. We will take up the debates about the translatability and untranslatability of world literature in relation to poetry. We will reflect on how code-switching and multilingualism in poetry can stitch together discrepant cultures and demarcate differences. We will consider how forms and genres of poetry, such as the sonnet, the ghazal, the elegy, haiku, and lyric, travel transnationally and transhistorically. We will study exemplary poems in relation to theoretical and historical debates around globalization. We will examine how poetry responds to the global challenge of climate change. We will trace how postcolonial poetry from the global South repurposes and remakes the innovations of Western modernist poetry, themselves indebted to non-Western cultures. And we will tease apart varieties of the concept of the poem as world in relation to theories of literary world-making. Stimulated by critical and theoretical texts, our discussions will take up poetry written in various languages, mostly modern and contemporary poems in English from around the world.

Jahan Ramazani is University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

His books include Poetry in a Global Age (2020), A Transnational Poetics (2009), winner of the Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, and Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (1994), all from the University of Chicago Press. He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry (2017), coeditor of the most recent editions of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (2003) and The Norton Anthology of English Literature (2006, 2012, 2018, 2024), and associate editor of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012). Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016 and the American Philosophical Society in 2022, he is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEH Fellowship, a Rhodes Scholarship, the William Riley Parker Prize of the MLA, and an honorary doctorate from Aalborg University, Denmark.

Session 1: Varieties of World Literature

Debjani Ganguli, Introduction to The Cambridge History of World Literature.

Session 2: Poetry, Translatability, and Untranslatablity

Ezra Pound, from How To Read.
Roman Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.”
David Connolly, “Poetry Translation.”
David Damrosch, from What Is World Literature?
Paul Ricoeur, from On Translation.
Lawrence Venuti, from The Scandals of Translation.
Examples: Horace, Ode 1.5, Li Bai and Ezra Pound, “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” “Lament of the Frontier Guard,” Rumi, Ghazal 1759, Christian Morgenstern, “Das aesthetische Wiesel," T. S. Eliot, “Mélange Adultère de Tout,” Agha Shahid Ali, “Arabic” and “In Arabic,” Mai Der Vang, “Mother of People without Script.”

Session 3: Global Poetic Forms and Genres

Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature” and from “More Conjectures.”
Edward Hirsch, “Elegy."
excerpts of global elegiac poetry in Edward Hirsch, Gabriel, Sa‘di’s elegy for his son, F. D. Lewis, “Ghazal,” Agha Shahid Ali, “Tonight,” Patricia Smith, “Hip-Hop Ghazal,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/49642/hip-hop-ghazal; Evie Shockley, “where you are planted,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55669/where-you-are-planted, T. V. F. Brogan, L. J. Xillman; C. Scott; J. Lewin, “Sonnet", Gwendolyn Brooks, “the rites for cousin vit,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51983/the-rites-for-cousin-vit; Terrance Hayes, “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/143917/american-sonnet-for-my-past-and-future-assassin-598dc83c976f1; Agha Shahid Ali, “Postcard from Kashmir,” https://www.jstor.org/stable/23005779; Billy Collins, “American Sonnet,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=37394

Session 4: Poetry’s Worlding of the World

M. H. Abrams, “Types and Orientations of Critical Theories.”
W. H. Auden, Secondary Worlds.
Ayesha Ramachandran, The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe.
Pheng Cheah, from What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature.
Eric Hayot, “Does Poetry Make Worlds?”
Eva Zettelmann, “Apostrophe, Speaker Projection, and Lyric World Building.”
Examples: Wallace Stevens, “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain” and “The Planet on the Table,” Margaret Atwood, [“you fit into me”], K. Ramanujan, “Alien,” Patience Agbabi, “Prologue.”

Session 5: Globalization: Theory, History, Poem

Paul Jay, Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies
Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.”
Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Contamination.”
Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Globalization: A Short History.
Example: T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, https://wasteland.windingway.org/

Session 6: Postcolonial Poetry as World Poetry (1)

Stefan Helgesson, “Postcolonialism and World Literature: Rethinking the Boundaries.”
Jahan Ramazani, introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry.
Examples: Derek Walcott, “A Far Cry from Africa,” “The Sea Is History,” “The Schooner Flight," Kamau Brathwaite, “Wings of a Dove,” “Calypso,” “Ogun,” “Stone,", Louise Bennett, “No Lickle Twang,” “Dry-Foot Bwoy,” “Colonization in Reverse,” “Jamaica Oman,” “Jamaica Language,” Lorna Goodison, “On Becoming a Mermaid,” “Guinea Woman,” “Nanny,” “Annie Pengelly.”

Session 7: Postcolonial Poetry as World Poetry (2)

Okot p’Bitek, from Song of Lawino.
Christopher Okigbo, from “Heavensgate”: [“Before You, Mother Idoto”], [“Dark Waters of the Beginning”], [“Bright”], [“I Am Standing above the Noontide”]; “Come Thunder.”
K. Ramanujan, “Self-Portrait,” “Elements of Composition,” “Alien,” “Extended Family,” “Chicago Zen,” "Foundlings in the Yukon,” “Where Mirrors Are Windows: Toward an Anthology of Reflections.”
Agha Shahid Ali, “Postcard from Kashmir,” “The Dacca Gauzes,” “I See Chile in My Rearview Mirror,” “The Country without a Post Office,” “Lenox Hill.”

Session 8: A World Imperiled: Poetry and Climate Change

Margaret Ronda, Remainders: American Poetry at Nature’s End..
Examples: From “Poetry of Climate Change”, Seamus Heaney, “Höfn” (see also https://fawbie.info/district-and-circle/hofn/Links to an external site.), Patience Agbabi, “ECO2nomics”, Peter Reading, “Clockwise (from the bottom),” Vahni Capildeo, from “The Book of Dreams/Livre de Cauchemars,” VI, Craig Santos Perez, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier”, Pascale Petit, “Rainforest in the Sleep Room”, Simon Armitage, “Ark, Ed Roberson, “To See the Earth Before the End of the World” “asked what has changed”, Jorie Graham, “Dawn 2040”
Video poem: “Rise,” directed by Dan Lin, poem written and narrated by Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Aka Niviâna, https://350.org/rise-from-one-island-to-another/#poem

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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 Executive 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 the transmedial world circulation of ideas and the global spread of surrealism. She 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 out 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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Moira Weigel, "Global Media"

This seminar will introduce central topics, methods, and frameworks in the interdisciplinary field of global media studies while historicizing and interrogating both of its defining concepts. If you are reading this, my words have traveled to meet you through underground or undersea cables or outer space satellites. At the same time, increasingly ubiquitous surveillance and networked computation are translating your every click and keystroke, or failure to click or hit a key, into data. How, then, can we cognize: What is global? And what is media? What can humanists reveal about how they co-create each other–and our world? Our eight sessions offer a chronology and typology of global media studies, pairing artifacts and genres with articles and chapters that exemplify influential scholarly approaches, including media history, archaeology, and anthropology, postcolonial theory, cultural and reception studies, political economy, and STS.

Moira Weigel is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. She was previously a member

of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, a fellow of the Data and Society Research Institute and a Junior Fellow at Harvard, as well as an Assistant Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Northeastern. She is the author of Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating (2016) and Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do–And Why They Do It (2020), a collection of oral histories co-edited with Ben Tarnoff and has recently published academic articles in New Media and Society, The International Journal of Communication, and Polity and essays in The New York Times and The New Republic. She is currently working on a monograph that examines transnational (出海) marketplace platforms like Amazon, Alibaba, TikTok and Temu, as sites of cross-cultural communication and entangling subjects who would otherwise never meet.

Session 1: What Are Global Media?

Read Guillory, John. "Genesis of the media concept." Critical Inquiry 36.2 (2010): 321-362.
Kate Crawford and Vladen Joler, “Anatomy of an AI System” (2018)

Session 2: Media, Modernity, and the Senses

Read: Hansen, Miriam. "The mass production of the senses: Classical cinema as vernacular modernism." Modernism/modernity 6.2 (1999): 59-77.
Zhang, Zhen. “An ‘Amorous History of the Silver Screen’: the Actress as Vernacular Embodiment in Early Chinese Film Culture,” Camera Obscura 48 (2001): 229-63.

Session 3: Reassembling Orientalism and Ethnography

Read: Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978): 1-4.
Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham and London: Duke University Press 1996): 3-5, 99-104.
“There Is No Such Thing as a Documentary: an Interview with Trinh T. Minh-ha,” Frieze, November 1, 2018.
Watch: Trinh T. Minh-ha, Reassemblage (1982)

Session 4: Situating “Glocal” Audiences

Read: Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Theory, Culture, and Society (1990): 295-310.
Emily Witt, Nollywood: The Making of a Film Empire (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016): 12-23, 62-95.

Session 5: Histories and Archaeologies

Read TWO of the following three texts:

Nicole Starosielski, “Circuitous Routes,” The Undersea Network (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 27-63.
Jing Tsu, “Tipping the Scale of Telegraphy,” in Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern (New York: Riverhead Books, 2022): 89-126.
Priyasha Mukhopadyay, “Reading for the Record,” in Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024): 56-89.

Session 6: Feminist Anthropologies

Read: Nakamura, Lisa. "Indigenous circuits: Navajo women and the racialization of early electronic manufacture." American Quarterly 66.4 (2014): 919-941.
Posner, Miriam. “See No Evil.” Logic 4 (2018): 215-29.

Session 7: Platform Capitalisms and Cultures

Read: Gillespie, Tarleton. "The politics of ‘platforms’." New media & society 12.3 (2010): 347-364.
Steinberg, Marc, Lin Zhang, and Rahul Mukherjee. "Platform capitalisms and platform cultures." International Journal of Cultural Studies (2024).
Wu, Angela Xiao. "The Politics of Platforms/Pingtai 平台: A Chinese Genealogy." Communication and the Public (2024).

Session 8: Translating Machines

Read: Suchman, Lucy. "The uncontroversial ‘thingness’ of AI." Big Data & Society 10.2 (2023).
Tenen, Dennis Yi, “Intelligence as Metaphor” and “Markov’s Pushkin” in Literary theory for robots: How computers learned to write. New York: Norton, 2024.

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Zhang Longxi, "World Literature as Discovery"

World literature has been the most successful approach to the study of literature since the beginning of the new millennium. It has invigorated literary studies not just in Europe and North America, but in many other parts of the world. Wolfgang von Goethe is often credited for giving Weltliteratur a prominent place in opening the European literary horizon up to the world, but his cosmopolitan idea was not developed in the nineteenth century partly because that was the time of European expansion, imperialism, and colonialism, and partly because Goethe did not clearly define the concept. As Claudio Guillén and others pointed out, Goethe’s Weltliteratur was vague and impracticable, and it had to be redefined before it could be a workable concept in literary studies. David Damrosch is probably the most successful in redefining world literature as works that “circulate beyond their culture of origin,” thus cutting down the impossibly huge number of literary works in the world as world literature and making the concept clearer and useful in practice. World literature is now a burgeoning new field and a new wave in literary studies in many parts of the world because it provides an excellent opportunity for the world’s different literary traditions to go beyond their culture of origin and become known globally as part of world literature.

Given the geopolitical reality of the imbalance of power between the West and the Rest, however, there is also the imbalance of cultural capital and knowledge. The currently circulating works of world literature are by and large canonical works of the major European or Western literary traditions, mainly English, French, and German literatures, while works of non-Western and even “minor” European literatures remain largely unknown, untranslated, and unappreciated beyond their culture of origin. World literature cannot be the sum of all the literary works in the world, which would be the old vague idea again that could not work in practice, but world literature cannot be just the canonical works of European or Western literature, either. We need to go beyond the limitations of the Eurocentric canon to include more important works from the world’s various literatures, but at the same time we cannot include all the works from non-Western and the “minor” European literatures, either. Therefore, world literature should be the discovery of many of the world’s yet-unknown literary classics, the canonical works that have long been recognized in different literatures but not yet introduced to the global readership beyond their original scope of native readers. It is now the task of literary scholars of the world’s different literary traditions to bring those works to the global critical attention and expand the canon of world literature. World literature in its true sense will be the discovery of the yet-unknown canonical works from the world’s different, especially non-Western and the “minor” European, literary traditions, and only then, world literature will be true to its name as World Literature.

Zhang Longxi has taught at Peking, Harvard, the University of California, Riverside, and the City University of Hong Kong.

He is currently Xiaoxiang Chair Professor of Comparative Literature at Hunan Normal University, a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities and of Academia Europaea. He served as President of the International Comparative Literature Association for 2016-2019. He is an Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of World Literature, and an Advisory Editor of New Literary History. He has published more than 20 books and numerous articles in East-West comparative studies. His recent books in English include From Comparison to World Literature (SUNY, 2015), A History of Chinese Literature (Routledge, 2023), and World Literature as Discovery: Expanding the World Literary Canon (Routledge, 2024).

Session 1: The Concept of World Literature

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Conversations with Eckermann on Weltliteratur (1827),” in David Damrosch (ed.), World Literature in Theory.
Hendrik Birus, “Debating World Literature: A Retrospect,”

Session 2: World Literature: Different Perspectives

René Etiemble, “Should We Rethink the Notion of World Literature?” in Damrosch (ed.), World Literature in Theory.
Pascale Casanova, “Literature as a World (2005),” in Damrosch (ed.), World Literature in Theory.
Theo D’haen, “Worlding World Literature.”

Session 3: Dreams, Interpretations, and World Literature

Shakespeare, from The Merchant of Venice.
Sigmund Freud, “The Theme of the Three Caskets.”
Qian Zhongshu, “God’s Dream,” in Christopher G. Rea (ed.), Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts: Stories and Essays.

Session 4: Utopias in World Literature

Krishan Kumar, from Utopianism.
Dowe Fokkema, “Chinese Philosophers and Writers Constructing Their Own Utopias,” in Perfect Worlds: Utopian Fiction in China and the West

Session 5: Framing Narratives in Persian and Arabic Literature

Paulo Lemos Horta, “Tales of Dreaming Men: Shakespeare, ‘The Old Hunchback,’ and ‘The Sleeper and the Waker’.”
Alexandra Hoffmann, “Cats and Dogs, Manliness and Misogyny: On the Sindbad-nameh as World Literature.”

Session 6: Poetry and Pain

P. B. Shelley, “To a Skylark.”
Qian Zhongshu, “Our Sweetest Songs.”

Session 7: Literature, Allegory, and Dichotomous Reading

Lu Xun, “Medicine,” in Lu Xun, Selected Works.
Fredric Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.”

Session 8: Comparisons and Universals

David Damrosch, “Comparisons,” Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age.
Zhang Longxi, “Literary Universals.” In World Literature as Discovery.