Book Launch: Literature and the Work of Universality

Moderator

Adnan Mahmutovic (Stockholm University)

Speakers

Anna Jörngården (Stockholm University)
Galin Tihanov (Queen Mary University of London)
Tsitsi Jaji (Duke University)
The editors – Alice Duhan (Stockholm University), Stefan Helgesson (Stockholm University), Christina Kullberg (Uppsala University) and Paul Tenngart (Lund University)

In an age of ecological crises, global inequalities and democratic fragility, Literature and the Work of Universality addresses the need to achieve renewed articulations of human commonality. With anchorage in critical theory as well as world literary studies, this volume approaches literature – and modes of literary thinking – as a key resource for such a task. "Universality" is understood here not as an established "universalism", but as a horizon towards which intellectual inquiry and literary practices orient themselves. In the field of world literature, there is a repertoire of epistemological resources through which claims to universality can be both questioned and reconfigured. If, at one end of the spectrum, world literature confronts us with the spectre of homogenisation, at another end, renewed forms of philological, anthropological and ecological attentiveness to the particulars of languages and texts allow for defamiliarising perspectives on historical narratives and aesthetic practices. Vernacularity emerges here as a central point of reference for constructing the universal from within the particular, the idiomatic, and the experiences of social subordination or complicity.

Literature and the Work of Universality is published in open access and can be downloaded directly from De Gruyter’s website: 

Welcome to join us for the book launch in hybrid format.
To access the webinar, please register here