New Keywords and Directions for World Literature

SOAS/QMUL, 11-12 March 2021

World literature has become a very exciting platform for literature scholars and students to come together from all sorts of directions. We are (re)discovering connections between works and movements across the Global South, exploring different kinds of “contact zones”, finding resonances between distant texts and forms through poetics or location, thinking about comparative poetics and global humanities in the premodern period, and so on.

And yet when it comes to the “theory” of world literature, a “triad” of thinkers still rules (Damrosch, Moretti, Casanova), rigid models of the world, of diffusion and assimilation, and of global circulation dominate, and neat categories are privileged over the existing diversity of trajectories and forms. As a result, the spectres of Goethe and of the old Eurocentric Comparative Literature rise from the ashes. 

This workshop brings together scholars who have been involved in ground-breaking world literature projects in the past few years to ask them: how do we theorise from our projects and findings, and what new keywords can we bring for world literary theory? Instead of binaries (centre-periphery, major-minor, dominating-dominated), what categories can help theorise and invigorate the field without imprisoning works, authors, and readers? If world literature in the age of the global Anglophone assumes and produces a single, global system, what can we who do not recognise ourselves in such a vision propose from our respective locations?

Day 1

Debjani Ganguli (University of Virginia)

Stefan Helgesson (Stockholm University)

Ann Morgan (blogger and author of A Year of Reading the World)

Wen-chin Ouyang (SOAS, University of London)

Francesca Orsini (MULOSIGE/SOAS)

Shital Pravinchandra (QMUL, TBC)

Galin Tihanov (QMUL)

Roundtable: Dilip Menon (University of Witsvatersrand)

Day 2

Adhira Mangalagiri (QMUL)

Mark Gamsa (Tel Aviv University)

Nicolai Volland (Pennsylvania State University)

Krista van Fleit (University of South Carolina)

Rossen Djagalov (NYU)