Dr Patricia Novillo-Corvalán, Head of the Department of Comparative Literature, is co-convening a new webinar series titled ‘The magazine and world literature’.
Held in conjunction with the MULOSIGE (Multilingual Locals and Significant Geographies) project at SOAS, the series seeks to expand our discussion on world literature to a consideration of the crucial role of magazines, and the particular configurations and happenstance visions and experiences of world literature they produced.
Much of the recent debate on world literature has revolved around either the curriculum and teaching of World Literature courses, anthologies, or publishers’ series (e.g. Damrosch’s Teaching World Literature, Venkat Mani’s Recoding World Literature). Yet arguably in many places and for many readers, exposure to literatures from other parts of the world largely took place through magazines, and magazines were where foreign books and writers were discussed and reviewed.
How is the medium part of the message in the case of the magazine: what kind of experience of world literature do magazines create? Which of the different versions of world literature—the world’s classics; the best of X literature; the latest, the contemporary; of similar political affiliation—do different magazines convey? Does their reliance on short forms (the review, the short note, the poem, and the short story) and on fragmentary, serendipitous, sometimes token offerings produce a particular experience of world literature, what here we call happenstance? How is such an experience different from the more systematic but abstracted ambition of the book series and the course?
The first event in this series will be Stefan Helgesson, of Stockholm University, speaking on Literary Distance in Southern African Journals: The Case of Charrua.
Further details on these webinars can be found on the Department of Comparative Literature events calendar.