This seminar gathers new research on the topic of singularity across history, literature, and culture. Physics posits the big bang singularity as a point of immense gravitational density that destroys conventional notions of time and of similar pasts or futures. It reveals itself in the absence of repeatability or circulation. How have authors used such a notion of singularity to present historical events? How is such insistence registered and produced within the cultural domain and what are its stakes and consequences? What forms do such assertions of singularity take? Where can it be figured, in absences or presences? How is such an idea of singularity to be read in literary texts or performance studies? How do writers and nations insist on the uniqueness of their historical experience through what cannot be transmitted? Conversely, how can comparative literature account for missing archives and non-circulating texts without forcing them into easy frameworks of global exchange? Such exploration of singularity can happen in material archives, in literary or artistic form and absence, or in the obdurate presence of the local or the untranslatable in texts. This seminar asks for a reading of literary history across languages and cultural formations through the lens of the incommensurable.

This seminar asks for proposals (250 words) and a bio (100 words) to be submitted to Stephen Ross ([email protected]) and Anjali Nerlekar ([email protected]).