David Damrosch | Harvard University (original) (raw)

Papers by David Damrosch

Journal of World Literature

The following is an edited transcript of the opening plenary session of the Institute for World L... more The following is an edited transcript of the opening plenary session of the Institute for World Literature in July 2020 – held online as a result of Covid-19. In this conversation with IWL’s director and associate director, Orhan Pamuk discusses his understanding of world literature and his place in it, and his ongoing work on his novel Nights of Plague, then nearing completion.

The Canonical Debate Today, 2011

1616: Anuario de Literatura Comparada, 2019

Journal of World Literature, 2019

The following is an edited transcript of a presentation by Pheng Cheah on his book What Is a Worl... more The following is an edited transcript of a presentation by Pheng Cheah on his book What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature, followed by a discussion with David Damrosch, with selections from the question and answer period. The event took place on the opening day of the July 2018 session of the Institute of World Literature, hosted by Professor Mitsuyoshi Numano and the Department of Contemporary Literary Studies at the University of Tokyo.

Journal of World Literature, 2020

Pascale Casanova’s seminal book has had an enormous and continuing impact around the world in a d... more Pascale Casanova’s seminal book has had an enormous and continuing impact around the world in a dozen languages, and as a result La République mondiale des lettres has itself become subject to the processes described within the book itself, as it enters world scholarly space. Casanova herself reflected directly on the somewhat unsettling results of this process, and her subsequent work was shaped in various ways by the international response to her pathbreaking book. This essay examines Casanova’s responses to the varied responses to her book, and suggests that her subsequent books should be understood as embodying a resulting mixture of resistance and rethinking of her earlier positions.

Tensions in World Literature, 2018

Damrosch/How to Read World Literature, 2009

The Journal of English Language and Literature, 2014

Representations, 1991

The political "impurity" of these poems is seconded by a further, historical complexity... more The political "impurity" of these poems is seconded by a further, historical complexity, for the lyrics, in the form we have them, are intimately bound to two very different periods: the decades before the Conquest, and the decades there-after. We cannot simply wipe away a few ...

New Literary History, 2009

Neohelicon, 2011

World literature is often defined in terms of the circulation of works out into languages and cul... more World literature is often defined in terms of the circulation of works out into languages and cultures beyond their original homeland. But it is also possible to consider an opposite mode of literary worldliness, which occurs when writers draw on foreign literatures in order to intervene within their own culture. This article takes the example of the biblical Book of Job, based on a Babylonian model which it neither imitates nor parodies (the more usual modes of relation of biblical writers to the literary productions of the larger imperial cultures around them). Instead, the poet of the Book of Job selectively draws on Babylonian tradition in order to open up a new mode of understanding of the divine amid the crisis of the Babylonian exile, neither rejecting the surrounding culture nor assimilating to it, portraying a just but unknowable God who has characteristics of a benevolent Mesopotamian tyrant.

Modern Language Quarterly, 2007

David Damrosch is professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and is a... more David Damrosch is professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and is a past president of the American Comparative Literature Association. His books include What Is World Literature? (2003) and The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007). He is general editor of The Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004).

European Review, 2007

As the discipline of Comparative Literature expands beyond its traditional concentration on the l... more As the discipline of Comparative Literature expands beyond its traditional concentration on the literatures of a few European great powers, our expanded range of vision involves rethinking Europe itself as well as the larger global production of literature. Already in the 19th century, comparatists were deeply engaged in sorting out relations between major powers and minor literatures, as can be seen in the ambitious early journal Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum, edited in the 1870s by the Transylvanian comparatist Hugo Meltzl. This article discusses Meltzl's journal and its struggles against the great-power cosmopolitanism represented by Meltzl's rival, the German comparatist Max Koch. As an illustration of the importance of trans-national perspectives in understanding European identity, the article concludes with a discussion of the recording of pagan myth in medieval Iceland.

Comparative Literature Studies, 2011

Comparative Critical Studies, 2006