Hegel and World Literature
Virtual Session
Description
The specter of Hegel looms large over contemporary scholarship. Debunking overhasty dismissals of Hegelian thought as vulgar panlogism or reductive teleology, recent work has presented Hegel as a theorist of modernism avant la lettre (Pippin 2013), mapped his filiations across Euro-American theory (Cole 2014), redrawn his influence over twentieth-century anti-colonial thought (Brennan 2014), and underscored the aesthetic register of dialectical thinking (Ngai, forthcoming). However, although such scholarship has done much to redefine Hegel’s legacy for the humanities in the twenty-first century, within the field of world-literary studies his name is rarely evoked. This is all the more surprising given that two of the earliest proponents of Weltliteratur—Goethe and Marx—were close readers of Hegel’s philosophy. Setting out to remedy this disconnect, this seminar asks: What is the significance of Hegel for the study of world literature today?
To respond to this question, the seminar brings together two interrelated perspectives: one to do with formation, the other with method. The first approach seeks to draw out the literary resonance of Hegel’s language, reevaluate his relation to German romanticism, and reconstruct his theories of culture and aesthetics. Alongside Hegel’s own presentation of the system of the individual arts in his Aesthetics, the seminar also invites reappraisals of the aesthetic foundations of Hegelian philosophy more broadly. How might this reconstructivist approach allow us to repicture Hegel as a theorist of world literature?
A second, more speculative approach considers what Hegel’s philosophy has to teach us about the practice of interpretation. Particularly significant for this side of the conversation are Hegel’s statements on ‘absolute method,’ in which speculative truth is presented as a result to be achieved, not something to be supposed in advance. What, we ask, does the style of world-literary criticism have to learn from the successive resolution of ‘shapes of consciousness’ in the Phenomenology, or the systematic dialectic of the Science of Logic? If, as Gillian Rose argued, ‘Hegel’s philosophy has no social import if the absolute cannot be thought’ (1981), can the theory of world literature be defined as an effort to think the absolute?
Putting these approaches into dialogue with one another, we invite abstracts on topics including but not limited to the following:
World literature and the ‘end of art’
Hegel, Romanticism, and the avant-garde
Black radical readings of Hegel
Hegel’s literary style
The theory of ‘objective form’
World literature and dialectical criticism
Abstracts can be submitted via the ACLA portal (https://www.acla.org) from September 13 2024. Any questions or queries should be directed to Thomas Waller ([email protected]) and Carson Welch ([email protected]).
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Christina Chalmers is a postdoctoral fellow and visiting lecturer at NYU’s Faculty of Arts and Science. She recently completed her PhD on Italian feminism, psychoanalysis and Marxism in the 1970s, titled “Crises of transmission: Inheritance, reproduction and the critique of the family in Italy 1950-1985”. She has published articles in Diacritics, and a number of edited collections.
Speaker Bio
Andrew Haas is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley in the English Department with a Critical Theory Designated Emphasis, focusing on comparative modernisms, global Marxisms, and twentieth-century avant-gardes, especially as they stand in relation to theories of surplus population and global unemployment.
Speaker Bio
Adam Koutajian studies Comparative Philosophy at Harvard, where he is writing a dissertation on theories of imagination and reality-construction in Continental and Islamic thought.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Sebastiaan Boersma is a PhD student in English at Carleton University, investigating the convergence of communist theory and literary production in the 21st century. His research examines how Marxist thought, particularly value theory and Marxist-feminism, intersects with literary and artistic networks in response to the post-2008 economic collapse, the crisis of the university, and the rise of social media as a tool for radical organizing. He is also writing a short novel with the working title "Justin Bieber Marxist Fanfiction."
Speaker Bio
Anisha Sankar is a PhD student in Social and Political Thought at York University, Toronto. She has published in Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy, Counterfutures: Left Thought and Practice Aotearoa, and is a co-editor of Towards a Grammar of Race in Aotearoa New Zealand (Bridget Williams Books, 2022).
Speaker Bio
Carson Welch is a PhD candidate in the Program in Literature at Duke University.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Tavid Mulder is the author of Modernism in the Peripheral Metropolis: Form, Crisis and the City in Latin America (Palgrave, 2023). Tavid's research deals with Latin American literature, global modernism, and dialectical critical theory. He teaches global literature and literature of the Americas at Emerson College.
Speaker Bio
Jensen Suther is currently a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. His writing has appeared in a range of academic and public-facing venues, including Representations, the Hegel Bulletin, and the New Statesman. His debut book—Spirit Disfigured: Modernism and the Persistence of Freedom—explores Hegel’s legacy for Marxism in aesthetic, political, and philosophical contexts and is forthcoming in the Cultural Memory in the Present series at Stanford University Press.
Speaker Bio
Thomas Waller is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. He is the author of Genres of Transition: Literature and Economy in Portuguese-speaking Southern Africa (2024) and the editor of Roberto Schwarz and World Literature (forthcoming). His research has also been published in journals such as Modern Fiction Studies, Textual Practice, Research in African Literatures, and Rethinking Marxism. Thomas is an Associate Editor at CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture.