Challenging "Nation" in World Literature
Description
From Goethe’s Weltliteratur to contemporary debates on decoloniality and the global South, world literature has often relied—implicitly or explicitly—on the organizing principle of the nation-state. However, in his Imagined Communities (1983), Benedict Anderson argues that nations are by nature constructions; they are, in his words, “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (6). Since the publication of that text, much ink has been spilled on the constructedness of nations, and yet, the nation remains one of the most pervasive rubrics for discussing culture. Departments are named after nations (e.g. German Studies, Japanese Studies), classes take on national and temporal titles (19th-century British literature, Renaissance Italian literature), and even the Nobel Prize committee links winners to their national origins.
This seminar invites scholars to challenge the centrality of “nation” in the production, circulation, and study of world literature. The very idea of “nation” has long been contested: by exilic, migrant, diaspora, and stateless writers; by multilingual and Indigenous traditions; and by transnational networks of circulation that complicate literary belonging. How does the nation function as a literary container and a political construct? Who defines what constitutes “national” literature, and who is excluded from it? What alternatives—diasporas, hybridity, oceans, languages, class, race, region, empires, ecologies—might displace it? How can we imagine a world literature that is not merely a collection of national canons?
We have defined three interconnected perspectives as a basis for discussion:
Challenging the Nation from Within
How do ethnic minorities, diasporic and immigrant communities, regional and local writers disrupt the coherence of the national narrative? How does hybridity—linguistic, cultural, or formal—destabilize the homogenizing impulse of nationalism? What does ‘nationalism’ means to them?
Challenging the Nation from Without
How do literary texts engage with or resist international markets, translation economies, and the frameworks of world literature? How does global circulation reframe national literatures, and to what extent does world literature reproduce or undo nationalist logics?
Reimagining the Nation through Literary Figures and Narratives
Which authors have historically defined the contours of national literature, and how have they constructed or contested narratives of nationalism? How do literary texts challenge imperial histories, and how are national identities reconfigured in postcolonial and post–Cold War contexts? Individual authors may reveal more as they defy national limitations by writing in multiple languages (Samuel Becket, Vladimir Nabokov, Milan Kundera, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, etc.), in creoles, etc.
Please submit a 250-word proposal by October 2nd.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Eleanor Zhang is a PhD student in German Studies at the University of Lausanne, working as a doctoral researcher within a project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation on Switzerland’s publishing scene as a site of transit for international literature. Before their PhD, Eleanor completed an MPhil in Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge, and holds a BA in Modern Languages from the University of Oxford.
Speaker Bio
Studied English, German, Romance, and Slavic studies at the Universities of Trento, Dresden, Rouen, and Vienna. Since 2023 PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna. Former ifk Junior Fellow (Vienna). Currently recipient of Marietta Blau Stipend. Research stays at University Ca' Foscari (Venice), University of Tokyo and Institute of World Literature (Bratislava). Interests: publishing, Central European lit., literary mediation, dandyism, fin-de-siècle, modernity theories.
Speaker Bio
Robert L. Colson is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Brigham Young University. His work, which focuses primarily on modern and contemporary fiction, has appeared in ARIEL, Research in African Literatures, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, and James Joyce Quarterly. He is currently at work on a book project titled Novel Forms of Nationalism.
Speaker Bio
Tatevik Gyulamiryan is Associate Professor of Spanish at Hope College. She authored The Transnational Hero: Re-accentuations of Don Quixote in the Novel (Juan de la Cuesta, 2024), and is the co-editor of A Character Named Cervantes: On Screen, on Stage, and on the Page (University of Toronto Press, 2025). She has also published various articles with a focus on Cervantes and comparative studies, Bakhtin and his notion of re-accentuation, as well as literature informed by cognitive approaches.
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Julia Chan is an Assistant Professor of English at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. Her research explores the intersection of modernist literatures in British, Chinese, and Russian contexts. She has published in journals such as Modernist Cultures, Modernism/modernity Print Plus, and boundary 2. Her current book project, New Worlds for Old: Modernism, Utopia, and Socialism Beyond the Nation, studies the impact of Soviet internationalism as a cultural system in competition with European empires.
Speaker Bio
Yanli He teaches at Sichuan University, is affiliated with Brandeis University, and also serves as a Non-Resident Fellow of Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.
Speaker Bio
Tathagata Som (PhD, English, University of Calgary) is an Instructor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. His research interests include environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, Indigenous studies, South Asian literatures, world literature, and translation studies. His scholarly work has appeared in Asian Review of World Histories, The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Medical-Environmental Humanities, and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment.
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Yixuan Jiang is a second-year M.A. student in Liberal Studies at Duke University, where she is also pursuing a certificate in East Asian Studies. She holds a B.A. in English Language and Literature. Her research interests include migrant literature, feminist theory, Tibetan Buddhism, and postcolonial studies. She is currently working on her M.A. thesis on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Buddhist turn.
Speaker Bio
Dr Ola Sidorkiewicz is a postdoctoral fellow at Université libre de Bruxelles. She is interested in the relationship between language and national identity and has written on transnationalism and translingualism in the Polish literary context. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford, with a thesis on Maria Kuncewicz's and Stefan Themerson's transnational literary projects.
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Daniel Pratt is assistant professor at McGill
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Speaker Bio
Madigan Haley is Associate Professor of English at The College of the Holy Cross. His research focuses on how modern and contemporary fiction function as world literature, and his articles have appeared in Novel, Genre, The Journal of Modern Literature, and A Companion to the English Novel (Wiley), which he co-edited. He is currently completing a book manuscript titled “The Global Work of Literature: The Modernist Art of Making Another World.”
Speaker Bio
Frauke Matthes is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Research interests include contemporary German-language literature, particularly by authors of non-German origins; transnational and world literature; and masculinities in literature. She is the author of Writing and Muslim Identity: Representations of Islam in German and English Transcultural Literature, 1990-2006 (2011) and New Masculinities in Contemporary German Literature: From "Native" to Transnational (2023).
Speaker Bio
Imke Brust is Associate Professor of German and Chair of the German department at Haverford College. Brust’s research and teaching interests focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century German literature and film, nationalism, globalization, and European and African studies. Her essays engage issues of gender and race and investigate the images of, and the tensions between, nation and state in contemporary literature and film.