A workshop with Francesca Orsini (SOAS, UK), Paola Iovene (EALC), Hoyt Long (EALC) and Sascha Ebeling, of UChicago, on the theme of the magazine and world literature.
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. 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 particular magazines convey? Does their reliance on short forms (the review, the short note, occasionally the poem or the short story) and on fragmentary, serendipitous, sometimes token offerings produce a particular experience of world literature? How is such an experience different from the more systematic but abstracted ambition of the book series and the course?
In the early twentieth century, Indian periodicals presented world literature as a discovery of the plurality of the world beyond India and the British empire and a redressal of the asymmetric balance and exchange between East and West. For the 1950s and ‘60s, in the context of the Cold War, Andrew Rubin has suggested that “the accelerated transmission of essays and the short story meant that there were newly efficient ways of respatializing world literary time.” Along these lines, Elizabeth Holt has been argued that the “near-simultaneous publication of essays, interviews and sometimes stories and poems in multiple Congress [for Cultural Freedom] journals and affiliated publications engendered a global simultaneity of literary aesthetics and discourses of political freedom and commitment” (Holt). Something similar could also be said for Communist and Third world internationalist magazines like Lotus. This workshop seeks to expand our discussion on world literature to a consideration of the crucial role of magazines, and the particular configurations and experiences of world literature they produced.
Dates:
Tuesday, October 15, 2019 - 3:00pm
Foster 103