Workshop on « World Literature Before Modernity: Writing Diversity in the Early Modern World »

Workshop on « World Literature Before Modernity : Writing Diversity in the Early Modern World »

Our Center is proud to announce an upcoming SSRHC-funded workshop titled « World Literature Before Modernity : Writing Diversity in the Early Modern World » co-organized by two of our members, Marie-Alice Belle and Joyce Boro.

This interdisciplinary workshop rethinks the idea of world literature and Europe’s place in it, using case-studies from the early modern period, and bringing together scholars from Canada, USA, United Kingdom, Korea and Denmark. Each of the ten presentations at the workshop centers on a different kind of textual work or form in the early modern world and the ways in which it writes or traverses the spaces and events of its time: from wampum beads to Chinese medical texts, or from Jesuit correspondence in Japan to Algonquian translations of the Bible. These presentations will later be refined and published as part of a larger collection of essays, Europe in the World: A Literary History, 1529-1683, contracted to Oxford University Press, and edited by collaborator Prof. Warren Boutcher at Queen Mary University of London.

In many scholarly accounts ‘world literature’ begins with Goethe in the early nineteenth century; in other accounts both the modern colonial and post-colonial moments begin at the same time. But ‘world literature’, as a number of scholars have already insisted, did not begin with Goethe’s Europe. Instead, both colonial and post-colonial global perspectives of different kinds informed writing well before the nineteenth century. This workshop focuses on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when both the internal diversity of Europe’s forms of writing and their connections and interactions with other global forms of writing and culture intensified. In doing so, it explores the ways in which early modern individuals and communities were ‘writing diversity’, not only in terms of how the variety and flux of humanity and the world were inscribed in human imagination and knowledge, but also in how the varied world of texts and inscription— its languages, scripts, forms—were configured during this time of immense change.

The full program is available in PDF (Montreal_Textdive_schedule).

Ce contenu a été mis à jour le 25 mars 2025 à 19 h 17 min.