Title: The Location of World Literature
Lecturer: Gilan Vassilev Tihanov (George Steiner Chair of Comparative Literature, Queen Mary, University of London)
Chairperson: FAN Jing (Professor, Department of Chinese Language and Literature, East China Normal University)
Date: 2 pm, April 24th, 2014 (Thursday)
Venue: Room 5303, Building of School of Humanities
Sponsor: Si-mian Institure for Advanced Studies in Humanities, ECNU
Abstract of the Lecture:
In this lecture, Prof. Gilan Vassilev Tihanov seeks to locate the Anglo-Saxon discourse of “world literature” vis-à-vis three major reference points: time, space, and language. In the first part, he will examine the position of ‘world literature’ on the axis of time by asking the question of whether “world literature” can be conceived of solely as an offspring of globalization and transnationalism, or should it rather be seen as having always been there (but, if so, how do we write its history?), or merely as a pre-modern phenomenon that dissipates with the arrival of the nation state and national cultures. In the second part, his main concern is with the notion of “circulation of texts” currently deployed to formulate the subject of “world literature” as a field. In the final part, he will analyze the complex relationship between the discourse of “world literature” and language, which also has important consequences for how we interpret the dissipated legacy of modern literary theory.
Brief Introduction of the Lecturer:
Prof. Galin Tihanov (PhD; DPhil, Oxon.) is George Steiner Chair of Comparative Literature, Queen Mary, University of London, Honorary President of ICLA Committee on Literary Theory and member of Academia Europaea. He was previously Professor of Comparative Literature and Intellectual History at the University of Manchester. His most recent research has been on cosmopolitanism, exile, and transnationalism. His publications include three books and eight (co)edited volumes, as well as over a hundred articles on German, Russian, French, and Central-European intellectual and cultural history and on cultural and literary theory. Some of his work has been translated into Bulgarian, Danish, French, German, Hungarian, Macedonian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, and Slovene. Tihanov is winner, with Evgeny Dobrenko, of the Efim Etkind Prize for Best Book on Russian Culture (2012), awarded for their co-edited A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011). Tihanov sits on the boards of several journals (Arcadia; Bakhtiniana: Revista de Estudos do Discurso; Comparative Critical Studies; Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies; Literaturna misul; Primerjalna književnost; Slavonica; Vestnik Tiumenskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta; Wiener Slavistisches Jahrbuch) and publication series.