Coordinators: Ugo Mondini (University of Oxford), Michael Angerer (University of Cambridge), Wiebke Denecke (MIT)
The Idea: Motivations & Scope
Literature is a fundamentally human phenomenon. It exists wherever humans are and reflects the wide variety of human experiences, cultures, media, and languages. Across different societies, it variously fulfils key social functions, shapes people’s worldviews, and animates public and private spaces. Thus, the very definition of what “literature” is has greatly varied over time and space. Today, thanks to the exponential increase of translation, freely available library resources, and digital communication methods, the whole treasure trove of human literature is now more accessible than ever to academic and lay readers alike. However, the nature of academic institutions often reduces the study of the global human phenomenon of literature to a few well-established traditions in major world languages, with only cursory excursions beyond. With the recent contraction of the humanities, in particular of language study and philological training, the opportunities for truly global literary and cultural studies are in danger of decreasing.
Our Pillar responds to this historic challenge and opportunity. We aim to comparatively explore both what is distinctive and what is shared by literature in different languages, regions, and periods. This can only be achieved through a worldwide dialogue with colleagues and institutions both within and outside academia, designed to foster global connections and to examine the greatest number of diverse literary traditions. We aim to enjoy literature for its own sake, but also think conceptually through the enormous variety of scripts, languages, genres, occasions, and places of literature, which have flourished throughout world history, and compare its various social & political, ethical & religious, and cognitive & aesthetic functions. If we humans are indeed “poetic” animals—beings that “make” things, including literatures—just as Aristotle defined us as “social animals,” should we not fully embrace the appreciation and creation of literature as a basic cognitive and emotional human need, which deserves a much bigger footprint in our communities, societies, and education systems?
Guiding Questions
- What can we learn about us and the diverse ways we create, consume, and preserve the human phenomenon called “literature”?
- How have literary cultures emerged, flourished, transformed, died, or re-emerged across space and time? How have they interacted with other forces shaping societies, such as political shifts, technological change, and cultural movements?
- What kinds of institutions and social spaces have stimulated, sustained, and transformed literary cultures in different regions across time?
- How has class, gender, and ethnicity shaped literary communities across time, and how did those dynamics influence the scripts, languages, and genres available to authors, and inform broader patterns of literary circulation and exchange?
- What types of distinctive language ecologies developed in different places and periods across the globe? How did language choice depend on or shape these political, social, and religious spaces?
- What concepts of the “literary” did different cultural communities develop at different points in their history? What types of poetics did they produce to set it apart from (or sometimes strategically align it with) other forms of knowledge and human pursuits?
- How did literary cultures influence each other across different languages and regions? How did these patterns of literary exchange shape human knowledge and wider cultural discourse?
Goals & Actions
The central goal of the Pillar is to allow the constitution of The Atlas of Human Literatures, an interactive, open-source stratigraphic map of global literatures (see Project 1). The Atlas is devised as an open-access research tool to enable a broader understanding of sustained interactions that have shaped the modern world and its cultures. It is also a platform to show, through the lens of literature, how humans have been interconnected across geographies and times, and how literature emerges in and interacts with different contexts. Open-source and participatory by design, the Atlas will support teaching and research, foster contributions from diverse communities, and host academic as well as public events worldwide, turning the study of literature into a shared, global endeavor whose impact lies well beyond the classroom.
Through the Atlas as well as its other projects, the Pillar creates a space for dialogue, inviting international scholars, educators at any level and in any country, cultural practitioners, and diplomats to dialogue on the history of human literature and its impact today.
Overall, the Pillar aims to:
- Foster sustained, collaborative dialogue among scholars, practitioners, and citizens from across the globe to imagine the present and future role of literature in education (including academia) and, more broadly, in society, and to promote the study of languages and appreciation of the world’s literatures on their own terms
- Develop empirically driven, bottom-up conceptual models for analyzing literary cultures in comparison across world history based on a local, regional, and global scale
- Map the past, present, and future trajectories of global literatures, moving beyond the limitations imposed by the availability of primary sources (especially in translation) or confined by the dominant anglophone canon of non-anglophone literatures globally championed by Western scholars
- Find productive ways, from this historically and culturally more comprehensive perspective, to enrich the (often still very Western-case-based) theoretical framework of important current subfields of literary studies (such as philology, manuscript & print culture and media studies, translation studies, reception studies, history of the book, “World Literature,” etc.) and to reconsider how we present literature and narrate literary historiography today
- Embed experiences of reading and writing literature into everyday lives, rituals, and education systems of our societies
- Reposition literature as an active agent in informing diplomacy and politics on local, regional, and global scales
Ongoing Work
- Project1:The Atlas of Human Literatures
- Ugo Mondini (University of Oxford), Michael Angerer (University of Cambridge), Wiebke Denecke (MIT)
- Project2: World Poetries of the Neighborhood: A Living Digital Anthology
- Di Wang (Hunan University), Marina Bazzani (University of Oxford), Joshua Bennett (MIT), Wasalu Jaco/Lupe Fiasco (MIT), Wiebke Denecke (MIT)