Coordinators: Wiebke Denecke (MIT), Arthur Bahr (MIT), Joshua Bennett (MIT), and Andrew Ollett (University of Chicago)
Overview
Two of modernity’s key features have been globalization and accelerated communication. In theory these processes could have led to a thousand renaissances across the world, and to a deeper mutual understanding of human cultures in their manifold manifestations across world history. In reality they have led to the hegemony of the English language and Anglo-American institutions, resulting in the decimation of local literary traditions, and the contraction of literary study to specialized and siloed academic fields of only a handful of literatures, largely in the major NATO languages. How can we remedy this unfortunate outcome?
What might our appreciation and study of literature, past and present, look like if we could take the good and leave the bad? If we could benefit from the globalization and democratization of ideas, creativity, and resources, and did not at the same time cower under the specter of global English, and accept the loss of the great diversity of humanity’s literatures as an inevitable process?
Current Scope
We aim to think conceptually through the enormous diversity of scripts, languages, genres, occasions, and places of literatures, which have flourished throughout world history, and compare their variously social & political, ethical & religious, and cognitive & aesthetic functions. What can we learn about us and the very diverse ways they create and consume the distinctively human, anthropological phenomenon of “literature”? How have literary cultures emerged, flourished, transformed, died or reflourished through drastic political changes and media revolutions, and across vast spans of space and time? Which shared or distinctive patterns of the lives and deaths of literatures from around the world can allow us to provincialize the theories and preconceptions that have usually formed the basis for current studies of literature? And, if indeed we humans are “poetic creatures,” just as we are Aristotelian “social creatures,” should we not embrace the appreciation and creation of literature much more strongly as a basic cognitive and emotional human need, which deserves a much bigger footprint in our societies and education systems?
Guiding Questions
•What kinds of institutions and social spaces have stimulated, sustained, and transformed literary cultures in the world’s major macroregions across time?
• What types of distinctive language ecologies developed in different places and periods across the globe? How was language choice—such as between cosmopolitan or transregional and local or vernacular, sacred and secular, scholarly and demotic, nativist or translationese, written and performed—shaped by and in turn shaped these social and political 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 such as philosophy, cosmology, theology, historiography etc.? Can we take “emic” categories, produced within the literary cultures themselves, and “globalize” them, with a view to either applying them in other contexts or critiquing them?
• What role did the lives and deaths of literary forms play in the constant transformations of literary traditions and their deeper social significance in particular periods and places in world history? What shaped the gender politics of different cultural communities in different periods and how did that inform the scripts, languages, and genres authors chose to use and the broader patterns of circulation of literary works?
Goals
• Bring into sustained collaborative dialogue scholars and readers of literature from across Afro-Eurasia (the Sinitic World, Indosphere, Arabic-Persianate World, Mediterranean, Africa, Eastern and Western Europe etc.), the Americas, and Oceania
• Develop empirically driven, bottom-up conceptual models for analyzing literary cultures in comparison across world history based both on their longue-durée native genealogies before the global age, and their increasing interconnectivity since the early modern period
• 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.)
• Embed experiences of reading and writing literature into everyday lives, rituals, and education systems of our societies