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World Literature
Belonging, home and exile
Speaker
Why do we need a category called “World Literature” when the World is already speaking and singing and crying in so many languages and literatures? Is this purely an academic need? Is this move innocently descriptive or is it ideological? Who wants to speak for the World and why? Will the category of “World Literature” be truly inclusive, or will it function as a regulative normative threshold? Is every literature automatically part of “World Literature,” or should it seek to scale itself up to qualify at the level of the “World?” Moreover, why not “World Literatures” in the plural? What role do translations play in the production of “World Literature”? What is special about “Literature,” rather than say, Economics or Politics? What about the role of comparative studies in the creation of this new category? Can comparisons be undertaken neutrally and equitably in a world that is uneven and structured in dominance?
These are some of the questions the speaker looks forward to sharing with the audience by way of opening up a broader conversation. A few names and concepts that will figure in the talk include: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Rabindranath Tagore, Edward Said, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Phenomenology, Nationalism, Home and World, and Nation and Exile.
Speaker
R Radhakrishnan
Dr. R. Radhakrishnan is Distinguished Professor of English, Comparative Literature and African American Studies at the University of California Irvine. One of the leading literary critics in the United States, he has written several books including Theory in an Uneven World, Between Identity and Location: The Politics of Cultural Theory, Edward Said: A Dictionary, and History, the Human, and the World Between. His essays have been published extensively in journals and edited collections, and he is a published poet in English and Tamizh with a volume of poems in Tamizh. He has also translated contemporary Tamizh fiction into English. The recipient of numerous fellowships including the Fulbright, he is currently working on essays on World Literature, Translation and Translatability, Humanism and post Humanism, and the Epistemology of Pessimism.
