Comparative Histories of European Language Literatures: Global Perspectives Past and Future, 2017
University of St Andrews, Parliament Hall, June 2, 2017
- 09-10.00: Zhang Longxi (President of the International Comparative Literature Association; Prof. of Comparative Literature and Translation, City University of Hong Kong)
Chair: César Domínguez
The Challenge of World Literary History
- 10-10.30: Karen-Margrethe Simonsen (President of CHLEL; Prof. of Comparative Literature, Aarhus University)
Chair: Mark Sandberg
European Comparative Literary History: a Global and an Anachronistic Perspective
- 10.30-11.00: César Domínguez (Secretary of CHLEL; Prof. Comparative Literature, University of Santiago de Compostela)
Chair: Karen-Margrethe Simonsen
Minor / Small Literatures in Comparative Literary History
- 11.00-11.30: Break
- 11.30-12.30: Rebecca Walkowitz (Professor and Director of Graduate Program, Dept. of English, Rutgers University)
Chair: Karen-Margrethe Simonsen
Reading Both: Contemporary Literature and Literary History
- 12.30-13.30: Lunch
- 13.30-14.00: Birgit Neumann (Prof. Anglophone Literature and Literary Translation, University of Düsseldorf)
Chair: Dirk Göttsche
World Literature and Translation
- 14.00-14.30: Massimo Fusillo (Prof. Comparative Literature, Universitá de Áquila, Italy)
Chair: Dirk Göttsche
Intermediality and Literary History
- 14.30-15.00: Margaret-Anne Hutton (Prof. French and Comparative Literature, University of St. Andrews) and Vivian Liska (Prof. German Literature and Director of Institute for Jewish Studies, University of Antwerp) Chair: Helga Mitterbauer
Writing a Literary History of the Contemporary
- 15.00-15.30: Break
- 15.30-16.30: Margaret Higonnet (Professor Emerita, Dept. of English, University of Connecticut; former President of CHLEL)
Chair: Mark Sandberg
Some Challenges to Comparative Literary History: The Case of World War I
- 16.30-17.00: Break
- 17.00-18.00: Jim English (Professor of English and Director of the Penn Humanities Forum, Pennsylvania University)
Chair: Margaret-Anne Hutton
Literary Reception Studies at Global Scale: Mining Goodreads
Abstracts
Comparative Histories of European Language Literatures: Global Perspectives Past and Future (University of St Andrews, Parliament Hall, June 2, 2017)
Zhang Longxi (President of the International Comparative Literature Association; Prof. of Comparative Literature and Translation, City University of Hong Kong)
The Challenge of World Literary History
The writing of history has encountered many challenges in theoretical discussions, and literary history in particular has been questioned and met with proposals of revisions and alternatives. An additional question arises when we move beyond national literary history to world literary history with comparative interest in patterns, themes, literary modes or systems. This paper tries to make sense of some the major concepts and theoretical positions involved in these discussions and propose a way to write literary history that will contribute to our understanding of literature from a global perspective.
Rebecca Walkowitz (Professor and Director of Graduate Program, Dept. of English, Rutgers University)
Reading Both: Contemporary Literature and Literary History
In the future, we will need to read both. We will need to read comparatively in a number of ways, which will involve reading literary works locally and globally, reading across editions and formats, and reading within and across languages. Since the turn of the last century, we have been asked to exchange national models of literary history for linguistic models: British literature for anglophone literature, French literature for literature in French. But what comes after the monolingual model, and how can works of contemporary literature, concerned visually and verbally with their embeddedness in languages, help us read more and read differently?
Margaret Higonnet (Professor Emerita, Dept. of English, Univ. of Connecticut; former President of CHLEL)
Current theoretical possibilities of/challenges to writing literary history from a global point of view
Jim English (Professor of English and Director of the Penn Humanities Forum, Pennsylvania University)
Literary Reception Studies at Global Scale: Mining Goodreads
Literary reception studies is a broad and well-established field involving conversation across several major disciplines (history, literary studies, sociology), and research into a wide range of national literatures with distinctive publishing industries, library systems, and patterns of consumption. And it has deployed various more or less abstract theories of the reader, from the “ideal” or “implied” reader to the “ordinary,” “middlebrow” or “elite” reader. When it comes to actual readers and the values that motivate their reading, however, scholars have had to rely on very small and arguably unrepresentative samples, using ethnography, individual or small-group case studies, and other qualitative approaches. With the recent rise of online consumer reviews, social reading sites, and new platforms of fandom devoted to particular authors, series, or genres, there is suddenly a great deal of quantitative data about readers’ tastes, values, and habits, making possible much larger scale studies and creating opportunities for quantitative disciplines such as computer science and natural language processing to play an important role in the field. In this paper, Jim English will describe some of his team’s recent work on Goodreads, the largest and most international site of online literary reception, curation, and communication.