Agenda

Martin Kern, Princeton University

World Literature or Global Literature?

The “global literature” of our time erases the idea of Goethe’s “world literature”: where world literature thrives on intra- and intercultural alterity, global literature conforms to the universal market. Examples from Chinese poetry show how world literature is still possible but only if we recognize, with Adorno as our guide,its radicalstance of difference both at home and abroad. To preserve this dual alterity is the ultimate task of the translator.

About the Speaker.
Professor Martin Kern is the Chair of the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. He has published extensively across the fields of literature, philology, history, religion, and art in ancient and medieval China. His current book project is titled Performance, Memory, and Authorship in Ancient China: The Formation of the Poetic Tradition. At Princeton, Kern leads the new university-wide initiative “Comparative Antiquity”; at Renmin University of China (Beijing), he directs the “International Center for the Study of Ancient Text Cultures.”

Program of the upcoming lectures attached.