Syllabus 2025

Seminar Schedule 2025

Week 1: Debates on World Literature. David Damrosch, “Introduction: World Literature in Theory and Practice”; Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature” and “More Conjectures”; Emily Apter, “Against World Literature”; Sarah Brouillette, "Wither Production?"

Week 2: The Country and the City. Karl Marx, “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation” and "The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist" from Capital Vol. 1 (Ben Fowkes, Transl. Penguin, ISBN: 978-0140445688); Raymond Williams, The Country and the City(excerpt); Epeli Hau'ofa, "The Glorious Pacific Way"

Week 3: Methods of Global Reading. Karl Marx, "The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret" (Ben Fowkes, Transl. Penguin, ISBN: 978-0140445688); Lisa Lowe, "A Fetishism of Colonial Commodities", from The Intimacies of Four Continents; Fredric Jameson, "Modernism and Imperialism"

Week 4: World Literature from the South. Antonio Candido, "Literature and Underdevelopment", in The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader; Roberto Schwarz, "Misplaced Ideas"Link opens in a new window and "Brazilian Culture, Nationalism by Elimination"Link opens in a new window in Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture; Neil Larsen, "Roberto Schwarz: A Quiet (Brazilian) Revolution in Critical Theory", from Determinations: Essays on Theory, Narrative and Nation in the Americas.

Week 5: Peripheral Aesthetics. Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star (1977) (B. Moser translation, ISBN: 978-0811219495); Rita Terezinha Schmidt, “Crossing Borders: Clarice Lispector and the Scene of Transnational Feminist Criticism”, Brazilian Literature as World Literature, Ed. Eduardo F. Coutinho, 2018; Neil Lazarus, "The Ground Beneath our Feet: Positions and Position-Takings in World-Literary Studies" Into Our Labours (2022), pp. 35-44Link opens in a new window.

Week 6: World-Systems and World-Literature. Immanuel Wallerstein, selections from World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (2004); Warwick Research Collective, selections from Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature.

Week 7: World-Literature and Time. Happy as Lazzaro (dir: Alice Rohrwacher, 2018); Ernst Bloch & Mark Ritter "Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to its Dialectics" (1977); Warwick Research Collective, "The Question of Peripheral Realism"

Week 8: The City of World Literature. Ivan Vladislavic, Portrait with Keys (2006); Recommended: Deleuze and Guattari "Introduction: Rhizome"Link opens in a new window (1980); Lorna Burns, Postcolonialism after World Literature (2019), selectionLink opens in a new window (read from "literatures of resistance")

Week 9: Labour in World-Literature. Neil Lazarus, “Work, Literary Form and the Ideology of Culture”, Into Our Labours (2022), pp. 49-104; Sharae Deckard, “Social Reproduction, Struggle and the Ecology of ‘Women’s Work’ in World-Literature” (2024)

Week 10: World Literature and World-Ecology. Michael Niblett, "World-Economy, World-Ecology, World Literature"; Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg's Curse.