The Magazine and World Literature monthly webinar series is convened by Patricia Novillo-Corvalán (University of Kent) and Francesca Orsini (MULOSIGE project, SOAS).
Much of the recent debate on world literature has revolved around either the curriculum and teaching of World Literature courses, anthologies, or publishers’ series (e.g. Damrosch’s Teaching World Literature, Venkat Mani’s Recoding World Literature). Yet arguably in many places and for many readers, exposure to literatures from other parts of the world largely took place through magazines, and magazines were where foreign books and writers were discussed and reviewed.
How is the medium part of the message in the case of the magazine: what kind of experience of world literature do magazines create? Which of the different versions of world literature—the world’s classics; the best of X literature; the latest, the contemporary; of similar political affiliation—do different magazines convey? Does their reliance on short forms (the review, the short note, the poem, and the short story) and on fragmentary, serendipitous, sometimes token offerings produce a particular experience of world literature, what here we call happenstance? How is such an experience different from the more systematic but abstracted ambition of the book series and the course?
This webinar series seeks to expand our discussion on world literature to a consideration of the crucial role of magazines, and the particular configurations and happenstance visions and experiences of world literature they produced.
We would love for you to join The Magazine and World Literature monthly webinar. Please email fo@soas.ac.uk for joining details.
Literary Distance in Southern African Journals: The Case of Charrua
Stefan Helgesson is professor of English at Stockholm University.
Francesca Orsini on Literary Activism in Cold War India
Professor Francesca Orsini gave this talk on "Literary Activism and Cold War Activism" as part of the Postcolonial Print Cultures reading groups and webinars.
Talks
8 June 2020:
Francesca Orsini (SOAS), Literary Activism in Cold War India
25 September 2020:
Stefan Helgesson (Stockholm University), Literary Distance in Southern African Journals: The Case of Charrua
16 October 2020:
Jia Yan (Peking University), ‘“Eastern Literature” as Happenstance: Indian Literature and the Conceptualisation of “Eastern Literature” in 1980s Chinese Magazines’
20 November 2020:
Laetitia Zecchini (CNRS, Paris & Visiting Scholar, Boston University). ‘Eating away the corners of (world) literature: The littleness and the ‘wordliness’ of Indian magazines of the 50s-70s’
11 December 2020:
Francesca Billiani (University of Manchester), ‘Randomly Clear Choices: Literary and Cultural Journals in Inter-war Italy’
22 January 2021:
Elena Ostrovskaya (NRU Higher School of Economics) and Elena Zemskova (National Research University Higher School of Economics), ‘International Literature and the Literary International’
19 February 2021:
Jennifer Dubrow (University of Washington), ‘Looking East: Japan, Saqi and the World of Urdu Modernism in 1930s South Asia’
19 March 2021
Zain Mian (University of Pennsylvania), ‘Friends, Caretakers, Countrymen: Shabkhūn and the Reonciliations of Urdu Modernism’
16 April 2021:
Patricia Novillo-Corvalan (University of Kent), ‘Argentine Modernist Culture and the Rise of Left Magazines: The Case of Revista de Oriente (1925-1926)’
Explore more about magazines and world literature in this talk, given by MULOSIGE’s Principal Investigator Professor Francesca Orsini. This talk was given as part of the Convocation Seminars in World Literature and Translation, co-convened with LINKS (London Intercollegiate Network for Comparative Studies).