Studies in East-West Literary Relations

The concept of world literature has existed in the West for approximately two centuries, although it owes its resurgence in popularity to the current post-Cold War era of globalization, as well as to a still ongoing restructuring of the field of Comparative Literature, after the “linguistic turn” in the humanities appeared exhausted. In place of the now traditional model of comparative literature as the rigorous study of predominantly Western national literatures in a given linguistic, historical, civilizational or theoretical frame, we have seen a rise of interest in non-Western literatures, accompanied by vigorous critiques of Eurocentrism, and a new openness to the properly global dimensions of literary production. Yet problems arise. Is world literature the sum of all literatures, or an expanded canon of their best and greatest? Is world literature a constitutable object or a set of questions and procedures? Should language training remain at the heart of comparative work? Is literature in translation the solution, or part of the problem? Assuming the existence of a potentially infinite global archive, must distant reading replace close reading, and quantitative analysis take the place of the aesthetic judgements that give rise to canon formation? Is world literature a system, or at least a series of circulatory networks, susceptible to theoretical modelling? Does the world literary system have a geography? Is it egalitarian or hierarchical? Is it a conglomerate of national literatures, or do other forces, such as the marketplace and transnational networks of circulation, have a role to play? How do we articulate the relationship between “major” and “minor” literatures, between “centres” and “peripheries”? What should we make of the diachronic dimension of world literature – above all the gap, found in many parts of the world, between classical or sacred languages and modern vernaculars – as well as the synchronic dimension – the existence of nations and world regions with distinct and often discontinuous experiences of the literary? To what extent are contemporary theories of world literature trapped by the historical limitations of modernity, and the generic limitations of the dominant modern genre: the novel? Would a literary system oriented towards other world regions, other historical periods or literary genres produce different models of world literature? Can older scholarly practices such as philology and poetics, which flourished independently and for centuries in many parts of the world, offer an alternative to current models of world literature? Critics we will be reading this semester include David Damrosch, Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti, Emily Apter, J. G. Herder, Aleksandr Veselovsky, Aamir Mufti, Nirvana Tanoukhi, Vilashini Cooppan, Zhang Longxi, Sheldon Pollock, Michael Holquist, and Lawrence Venuti.