讲座题目：Making Good on the Promise of "World" Literature

讲座摘要：

It is the “rise to power” of Europe, or more precisely of Western Europe, that leads to what we may unabashedly term the Eurocentric view of world history, and of world literature, that starts taking shape as of the sixteenth century and comes to fully prevail as of roughly the end of the eighteenth century, with the change-over from what has been termed the age of colonialism to the age of imperialism. In fact, the discipline under whose aegis world literature eventually came to resort, that is to say, comparative literature, in its actual practice in many ways came to shadow the organization of (the American economic historian Immanuel) Wallerstein’s economic and political world system: a “core” made up of Western European literatures, in first instance French, English, and German, with already somewhat more tenuously but because of their undeniable importance in Early Modernity also Italian and Spanish, a “semi-periphery” comprising, next to Portuguese and Dutch literature, which notwithstanding the undeniably important role the societies/countries they emanate from played during Early Modernity never made it into the “big league,” most other European literatures, and a “periphery” covering the rest of the world’s literatures. Over the last twenty years or so, however, the world has changed considerably, and with it the study of world literature.

主持人：梁昭 副教授