Bibliomigrancy: World Literature as a Pact with Books (LINKS event)

Professor B. Venkat Mani (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Chair: Professor Francesca Orsini, Chair of CCLPS, SOAS

This lecture draws on Professor Mani's forthcoming book to politicize the idea of world literature. It argues that investigations of library and print and digital cultural histories assist in understanding world literature as historically conditioned, culturally determined, and politically charged, and focuses on the role of the state in the construction of world literature. It presents Nazi Germany as a case study, sharing archival finds that have made into the book.

B. Venkat Mani is Professor, Department of German and faculty affiliate, DAAD Center for German and European Studies, Global Studies, Center for South Asia, and the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research and teaching focus on 19th to 21st Century German literature and culture, world literature in translation, migration in the German and European context, book and digital cultural histories, and theories of cosmopolitanism, globalization, post-colonialism, and transnationalism. He is the founder and co-director of UW-Madison’s World Literature/s Research Workshop. His first book, Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk (University of Iowa Press, 2007) was the was the first monograph published in the US to evaluate Turkish-German literature in comparison with contemporary Turkish literature. His second monograph, Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books (Fordham University Press, 2017) will be the first to consider the “medial” development of world literature through library and book histories.

This is a London Intercollegiate Network for Comparative Studies (LINKS) seminar.