Under the auspices of the Academia Europaea, which via its Curien funding provides financial support, the Stockholm Collegium, and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS), which has kindly offered to act as host, the editorial team behind the 4-volume Literature: A World History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2022) organizes a two-day international symposium at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS), Uppsala, Sweden, to discuss the writing of transcultural literary-historical works.

A wide range of questions will be addressed: #

• What can be the raison d’être of a world history of literature?
• How can one secure the competence to transcend cultural and linguistic borders?
• Is there a viable alternative to the use of periods when organizing an account of transcultural literary history?
• How can one secure focus, fairness, and an adequate conceptual framework?
• How does one handle oral literature and the interplay between orality and writing?
• How can one do justice to transcultural topics by introducing transcultural comparisons?
• How can one handle the topics of language situations, translation, and cross-cultural transfer?
• How can one handle nationalisms and the influence of imperial cultures?

Speakers include:#

• David Damrosch (Harvard) (zoom): "Literary History in a Global Age"

• Anders Pettersson (Umeaa): "Motivations for World Histories of Literature"

• Gunilla Lindberg-Wada (Stockholm): “LAWH as a child of its time/times past”

• Eileen Julien (Indiana University): “Discovery, the Joy of LAWH”

• Longxi Zhang (City University of Hongkong) (zoom): "What's So Special about LAWH?"

• Harish Trivedi (Delhi University) (zoom): “How to Do LAWH All Over Again”

• Assaad Khairallah (American University Beirut): “The Local and the Global: What LAWH Taught me about Arabic Literature”

• Bo Utas (Uppsala): "Nationalisms and Imperial Cultures"

• May Hawas (American University in Cairo and Cambridge) (zoom?): “Close Reading and History”

• Peter Hajdu (Neohelicon): “Problems of Geographical Divides in Presenting Classical Antiquity”

• Andrew James Johnston (Berlin Freie Universität): “Beowulf and Its Multiple Histories of World Literature”

• Lena Rydholm (Uppsala): “Some reflections on transcultural literary-historical works and LAWH: Where do we go from here? And why?”

• Svend Erik Larsen MAE (Aarhus): “Global mapping or focused exchange?”

• Chengzhou He MAE (Nanjing University): “New Challenges in Worlding Chinese Literature”

• Stephen Shapiro (Warwick) (zoom): “World-system, world-literature, world-culture: possibilities for the next phase”

• Theo D’haen MAE (Leuven) “World Literature, World Times, Worlds”

The syposium is open to all members of the Academia Europaea wishing to attend, but registration well in advance is required to ensure that appropriate meeting conditions are arranged.

Theo D’haen MAE