Written by Michael Rothberg, Director of the Unit for CriticismFor some time I’ve been musing about a particular semantic, conceptual, and political matter: the persistent and frequently unreflexive use of the concept of “the West”—and the not-quite-as-frequent use of its correlate, “the non-West”—by cultural critics and...

Written by Waïl S. Hassan, Comparative LiteratureComparative literature as a discipline has never taken its object of study to be self-evident or in any way fixed. There is no clearer illustration of the discipline’s constant self-reflection than the fact that the Bylaws of the American Comparative Literature...

Written by Marcus Keller, FrenchIn response to Casanova’s “World Republic of Letters,” Dimock’s vision of “deep time,” and Moretti’s project of “distant reading,” I would like to propose a close reading of some of their propositions to globalize literary studies. Despite my sympathy for efforts to widen or at least change the...

Written by Ericka Beckman, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese I. World-systems of literature I want to start tonight by addressing the possible utility of a world-systems approach in our attempts to “globalize” literary studies beyond the territorial and temporal boundaries of the nation-state. Reading the background texts for this...

Written by Harriet Murav, Slavic Languages and LiteraturesThis paper critiques Casanova and Moretti for linking nationalist historiography, canon, and close reading. Using my current work on the Yiddish author Dovid Bergelson (1896-1952) I argue that close reading can be attentive to various kinds of borderlands within a single literary...

Written by Michael Rothberg, Director of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory This multi-part series concerns the problem of how to think about literature in relation to national, transnational, and global frames of reference. The stakes of these questions are simultaneously theoretical, methodological, and...

For readers: since this word has come up a few times in recent posts, how do you define "the state" as an object of analysis? How does your discipline inflect your understanding and methodology when dealing with this term? Should this term be reserved for historians, political scientists and social scientists alone?

Written byEleanor Courtemanche, EnglishOne of the reasons this topic is so fascinating is that in the last 10 or 20 years, comparative literary work has been defined by a paradox. On the one hand we live in an age of globalization, of increased interest in the international cross-currents that influence the production of art and...

Written by Matt Hart, English1. Spiky Exceptions. Writing after the abortive 1979 referendum on Scottish Home Rule, Tom Nairn rejected the consolations of socialist internationalism over the nation-state. Internationalism, he wrote, is “an organic part of the conceptual universe of...

Written by Michael Rothberg, Director of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive TheoryThe following series grows out of two spring 2008 Unit for Criticism panels on world literature and literary methodology. The idea for this series crystallized when I was reading Through Other Continents, a recent book by the...