Panel 1: Troubling Totality

Katie Trumpener, “The Novel Astray: The Picaro and the World”

This paper will address the old (venerable) preoccupations of Comparative Literature–the movement of books, literary models and figures across geo-political frontiers and across time–alongside recent polemics for, against, and about that uncertain construct tentatively titled World Literature–but also against the recurrent, melancholy specter of mass displacement. In the process, my paper touches on Second World experiences of world literature, the question of whether women novelists offer distinct maps of world literature, and the relation between world epic, picaresque novel and eighteenth-century novelistic experiments.

Christian Thorne, “The Novel at Sea”

I’m going to talk through some of the particular narrative challenges faced by anyone writing maritime fiction — that is, I want to identify a few of the ways in which it is difficult to tell stories about the sea — and then talk a bit about the ways in which novel do and don’t meet those challenges. Behind those questions lurks another, which is whether maritime fiction isn’t specially suited to serve as a world literature, by which I always mean an emphatically transnational literature about the world, and not just novels from other continents that I feel educated people should have read. Time allowing, I’ll probably register a few respectful disagreements with Margaret Cohen’s Novel and the Sea.

Wai Chee Dimock, “World Literature as Endangered Planet”

This will start with a report on the near-extinction of amphibians, routed through Thoreau’s sound portrait of the bull frog in Walden. World literature will be discussed through this lens: the Sixth Extinction as an anthropocene world system.

 

Panel 2: System, What System?

Jed Esty, “Occidental Drift: World-System and Genre-System”

This paper will use Giovanni Arrighi’s account of shifting capitalist hegemony as a way to introduce historical change into current models of the literary world-system. It will ask whether Arrighi’s graph of British and American “cycles of accumulation” can be used to reinflect the Paris-centric model of Casanova’s “world republic.” More specifically, do the genre-systems of late-Victorian British and Cold-War American popular narrative represent a literary history of hegemon cultures whose peak eras not only overlap but unfold in sequence, moving from 1890 to 1960? If so, what does that two-step transatlantic literary history tell us about modernism and totality? In answering these questions, I will try to assess the conceptual gains made in shifting our level of analysis 1) up from text to genre to genre-system and 2) down from global culture to culture-industry to genre-system.

Jordan Brower, “The Great Transformation: Or, Pascale Casanova Goes to Hollywood”

Is “world literature” a productive analytic for understanding the transmission and consecration of twentieth-century literature when it was precisely then that print culture was overtaken by cinema as the most widely-consumed global medium? Conjugating Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters with Miriam Hansen’s “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” (both published in 1999), the one work identifying the “Greenwich Mean Time” and world capital of literature (Paris), the other the GMT and world capital of film (Hollywood), the paper proposes that literature’s slow but sure subsumption into a new transnational global field dominated by Hollywood spectacle and the moving image issued in the demise of a myth-oriented heroic modernism and a turn to a reception-oriented technological postmodernism. Surrealist Hollywood theorist and former modernist poet Parker Tyler, erstwhile modernist scholar and media guru extraordinaire Marshall McLuhan, and émigré cinema-lover and ne’er-do-well late modernist Malcolm Lowry, play starring roles in this great transformation.

Dudley Andrew, “Beyond the Bird Nest, China’s Edgy Art Films”

World literature and cinema presume expansion. David Damrosch makes this definitional: only works reaching audiences beyond their homes are world class. Expansion implies Franco Moretti’s Center-Periphery cultural economy. But if we exchange his maps for a globe, periphery becomes relative. Spinning it, China and Africa may come into focus, upsetting the usual polarity. Chinese cinema first operated beyond the periphery, invisible to the world until 1984 when the 5th generation screened in ‘foreign festivals,’ the equivalent of city-states. Yellow Earth and Red Sorghum featured marginal peoples. Progressively, the directors of these meteors gravitated to the center. Zhang Yimou’s Olympic Birdnest spectacle would become an emblem of concentrated authority and global broadcast. Power and pride have followed, as China fashions itself into a turbine of the world system. Controlling distribution throughout a country where massive theater construction is underway, Chinese producers now embark on offshore investment in films unrelated to the homeland. Huallywood and Nollywood rehearse the history of Hollywood. Western critics who once supported “edgy” Chinese films that took aim at Beijing, now ride atop the graphs of growing market shares. Nevertheless, beyond the birdsnest, fledgling films are on the wing, such as Kaili Blues, Tharlo, Behemoth ,and Ice Poison, all by and about people beyond Beijing’s orbit. Out there, at the edge, another modernism spawns.

 

Panel 3: World Readers Now

Bruce Robbins, “Can Literary History Be Cosmopolitan?

The existence of diverse and seemingly irreducible literary histories, national, sub-national, and regional, if not also on still smaller scales, suggests that the project of writing a global or totalizing literary history is a non-starter. This paper will defy this increasingly common understanding of the necessarily fragmentary fate of literary study in our globalizing times. It will try out a version of such a history which is cosmopolitan not in the sense of being comprehensive, but in the ethically more strenuous sense of focussing on moments in which writers from around the world have defied the ethical common sense of their native countries by representing atrocities committed by their compatriots against foreigners. In doing so, it tries to answer the question of what a history of literary representations of atrocity-against-others would look like, offering such a history as a hypothetical example of literary history that is planetary in at least one significant sense.

Seo Hee Im, “The Universe, Which Others Call the Library”

Unlike their modernist predecessors, recent writers such as Calvino and Borges delegate the task of grasping and articulating a sense of totality to their readers, suggesting that one’s best chance of assimilating the world through text lies not in devouring a single splendiferous Gesamtkunstwerk but in grazing across many national literatures. Yet such readerly (as opposed to writerly) world-constitution has long been the norm in the so-called peripheries of the literary world-system. I offer a case study of South Korea, where publishing houses have stayed solvent thanks to the evergreen demand for collectible sets of literature in translation. Contemporary global novels and non-Western conceptions of literary totality make evident the historical contingency as well as the idiosyncrasy of the longstanding Anglophone ambition to express a coherent literary world in a single text or figure.

James English, “Literary Reception Studies at World Scale?”

When our discipline has undertaken empirical study of readers and reading it has mostly been at quite modest scale (members of a few book clubs; borrowers from a few libraries). Even the handful of big-dataset studies such as those done by sociologists of reading in France, Australia, the US, and the UK have had to accept the nation as a hard limit. The rise of Goodreads to a position of global dominance for online curation, recommendation, and reviewing of books represents an opportunity for scholars to try to study reading habits and tastes at something approaching world-system scale. Jim English will present interim findings from the Goodreads datamining project he leads at Penn’s Price Lab for Digital Humanities.