Title: Goethe’s Weltliteratur as a Trauma Narrative
Lecturer: Vladimir Biti (Professor of World Literature and Comparative Literature at the Faculty for Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Vienna)
Chairperson: FAN Jin (Professor of World Literature and Comparative Literature at Chinese Faculty, East China Normal University)
Date: 2 pm, May 15th, 2019 (Wednesday)
Venue: Room 3102, Building of School of Humanities, Minhang Campus, ECNU
Sponsor: Si-mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, ECNU
Abstract of the Lecture:
The recent comparatist celebration of literature in the shape of “planetary system”, which is on the rise in the last two decades of the discipline’s development, promoted Goethe to the status of its chief engineer. Disregarding important differences between Goethe’s and our age, recent interpreters placed his idea of world literature at the service of their particular geopolitical projections. In order to avoid such “nationalism masquerading as globalism” (Spivak), I will focus on both personal and collective traumatic constellations, which generated Goethe’s “project” of world literature. He felt stranded in his present as both a writer and German. This is why he, in both capacities, envisioned transborder alliances as the best method of coping with these frustrations. The lecture investigates this personal and national investment in his idea of world literature in more detail.
Brief Introduction of the Lecturer:
Vladimir Biti is Professor of World Literature and Comparative Literature at the Faculty for Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Vienna. He is the author of nine books, including the most recent Tracing Global Democracy Literature, Theory, and the Politics of Trauma (2016), in addition to more than a hundred journal articles. From 1996 to 2004, he was a member of the Executive Board of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, from 2001 to 2005 Chair of the Committee on Literary Theory of the International Comparative Literature Association, and from 2004 to 2010 a member of the Executive Bureau of the same Association. An editor of the renowned journal arcadia: International Journal of Literary Culture, he is also a member of the editorial board of several other international journals, including Journal of Literary Theory and Journal for Literature and Trauma Studies. He received the 1998 Great Award of the Croatian Academy of Sciences, the 2000 Award for Science of the Matrix Croatica, and the 2001 Award of the Faculty of Philosophy for an extraordinary contribution to the research and teaching activities of the Faculty. In 2007 he became a member of Academia Europaea.
