2011 Seminars

July  4-15, 2011

David Damrosch, Director of the Institute for World Literature, Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA

Zhao Baisheng, Professor of Comparative World Literature and Chair of the Institute of World Literature, School of Foreign Languages, Peking University, PRC

Poetics of World Literature 

This seminar will discuss issues in poetics and genre theory as seen through theoretical essays and literary examples from around the world. Our focus will be on definitions and counter-definitions of major global genres -- lyric, drama, short fiction, and the novel -- looking both at literary form and at differing understandings of how literature is written (or orally composed), how it it read (or heard, or performed), and what are the social uses and abuses of literature.

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Theo D'haen, Chair of English and American Literature at Leuven University (Belgium) and Emeritus Professor of English and American Literature at Leyden University (Netherlands)

From Goethe Onward: A Survey of World Literature

This seminar comprises a reading of key texts of world literary theory, from Goethe to Benjamin to Bhabha, with a focus on connecting historical texts and present-day theory.

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Zhang Longxi, Chair Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation, City University of Hong Kong

World Literature before Goethe: Theoretical and Methodological Issues

As Goethe popularized the concept of Weltliteratur after he had read a Chinese novel in translation, the substance of that Weltliteraturobviously consisted of works in different literary traditions before Goethe, but available to him and his generation of cosmopolitan readers in translation. The availability of works in translation is what makes world literature conceivable, and the issues of translation, global circulation, and critique of ethnocentrism become important. When we understand world literature as truly literature of the world, it should contain all the works created in the world that are literary, and here we need to have some basic understanding of what literature is in different cultures and traditions, and perhaps more importantly, how these different notions of literature may cohere to form the conceptual basis of world literature. In terms of content, no one can read all the works of the world’s various literary traditions, and thus selection is necessary and crucial, which poses the question of canon and random choice, the difference between local tradition and global reception, anthologizing and representativeness. In this seminar, these will be the theoretical and methodological issues to be explored, and in our exploration, we shall concentrate on literature from the ancient world to roughly 1600, thus in a more literal sense world literature before Goethe. All our discussions and explorations, however, will be informed by the consciousness of our own historicity, our understanding of national, comparative, and world literature and literary theory, and our sense of the relevance of world literature to our own time. Readings will include selections from ancient Egyptian poetry, the Bible, Homer, Plato, Zhuangzi, the Chinese Book of Poetry, the Ramayana, Virgil, Chinese Tang poetry, The Arabian Nights, Chaucer, Montaigne, Bacon, Shakespeare, etc.

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July 18-29, 2011

David Damrosch, Director of the Institute for World Literature, Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA 

Reading World Literatures of the Modern Era

This seminar will focus on key issues and skills involved in reading and teaching world literature from the 18th century to the present. This seminar will explore the following topics and conjunctions of writers: the challenges of reading works from disparate cultures (with comparison of Molière and his distant contemporary Chikamatsu Mon’zaemon); definitions and transformations of genre (looking at the rise of the novel in Cao Xueqin and Voltaire); rewriting and cultural reframing (Lu Xun rewriting Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman,” Italo Calvino rewriting Marco Polo’s China travels); translation and retranslation (with The 1001 Nights as a prime example); centers and peripheries (Nguyen Du, Kafka, Borges, Walcott); colonial and postcolonial writing (Kipling, Achebe, Soyinka, and Rushdie); literary globalization today (Bei Dao, Agha Shahid Ali, Orhan Pamuk).

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Zhang Longxi, Chair Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation, City University of Hong Kong 

World Literature before Goethe: Theoretical and Methodological Issues

Same as above.

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Zhao Baisheng, Professor of Comparative World Literature and Chair of the Institute of World Literature, School of Foreign Languages, Peking University, PRC

Theories of World Literature

Macro-poetics in literary studies receives far less attention than its counterpart in economics, i.e. macro-economics. This seminar will draw on theoretical resources from the East and the West in order to lay some foundation stones for macro-poetics which may be defined as theories of world literature. We will concentrate our discussions on such theoretical issues as the idea of "shijie" (the world), the concept of "Weltliteratur", Third World Literature, hidden agenda of canonization, world literary history, genealogy of world literature, globalization, the Global South, and cross-culturalism. Such generic concepts as world poetry, global novel, international drama, cross-cultural autobiography will be examined to illustrate the ongoing shaping of world literatures. Reading materials include selections from Confucius, Liu Xie, Goethe, T. S. Eliot, Hans Robert Jauss, Michel Foucault, Qian Zhongshu, Fredric Jameson, Frantz Fanon and Ngugi wa Thiong'o.