The Section of Linguistics and Literary Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences has the honour to invite you to the lecture of

David Damrosch
Toward a Global Philology: Cultural Values in an Intercultural World

on November 11^th 2019 at 14.00 pm.

Venue

MTA Central Building, Reading Room (Felolvasóterem)
1051 Budapest, 9 Széchenyi István square, 1^st floor

Abstract

From Herder’s time onward, languages and literatures have been closely identified with national cultures, and even comparative studies usually stayed within the boundaries of a given region (usually Europe) or language family, such as the Indo-European. How can we now work toward a fully global perspective without imposing a locally derived set of cultural values on the world as a whole? This talk will discuss strategies that have been employed by activist scholars who have sought to create new values for a globalizing world through the revaluing of literary traditions. Examples will be drawn from the Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum published in Cluj/Kolozsvár in 1877-1888, from China’s New Youth magazine in the early twentieth century, and from selected print and online sources today.

David DAMROSCH is Ernest Bernbaum Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at Harvard University and director of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature. His books include What Is World Literature? (2003), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007), How to Read World Literature (expanded 2d. ed. 2017), and Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age (forthcoming from Princeton). He is the general editor of the six‑volume Longman anthologies of British Literature and of World Literature, editor of World Literature in Theory (2014), and co‑editor of The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature, and of two collections in Chinese, Theories of World Literature (2013) and New Directions in Comparative Literature (2010).