Masterpieces of World Literature

1: Goethe and the birth of world literature

Introduction
The texts are joint by the theme of the joint evolution of world literature and writing technologies.
Intersection of storytelling and writing technologies: we are living through one of the rare periods
in literature history. The ways of reading and learning are changing. We can use this perspective to
see when different new writing technologies emerged, and how they influenced the history of
literature.
Why is it important to think about writing technologies and literature at the same time?
- First piece of literature: epoch of Gilgamesh: on clay. What does that mean? It actually takes
place in a world made of clay: city, vessels, buildings. Its greatest achievement is this epic: it
brags about this clay civilization
- How materials interplay with literature: paper: crucial technology. Parchment was very
expensive to make. Paper lowered the cost of literature. More people had access:
democratizing. New types of literature emerged.
o The tale of Genji: japan 1000s AD: first novel on paper by hand: takes place on a paper
world: screens, poems, textures, weapons. This is a court novel in a paper civilization
The invention of writing itself
- It was invented at least twice: in Mesopotamia and other early cultures. The Eurasian
landmass allowed the transfusion. Then it was invented by the Mayans
- What kinds of writings? pictographs: later, the alphabet reduces the number of symbols
needed to write: connection of writing to speech: what allowed the creation of the Homerian
epics.
- Effect of paper and the alphabet worldwide: have an effect beyond the culture that created
them.
- Print: was also invented twice, first in china and later in Europe. We can study the
difference between the prints of these periods.
- The same techniques that democratize literature (paper and print) also favor old and
foundational texts: first it was a Buddhist sutra and then it was the Latin bible by Guttenberg
Goethe 1827: coins the expression “World literature” as a market allowed by the new marine trade
allowed by the imperial expansion. The democratizing writing technologies like paper and print fuel
this expansion
We aren’t done with these inventions of writing
- We are changing all dimensions of literature : e paper.
- How literature is distributing is also changing.
- We still use our old writing codes: alphabet.
- We can compare this stage to the invention of paper and print AT THE SAME TIME.
- Different inventions allow different formats:
o Parchment: book
o Today’s technologies: twitter, statuses…
 - The scroll is coming back! We are scrolling again . At the tablet: the history of writing is
cyclical; we keep rediscovering techniques.

Goethe in Weimar, his garden house

Castle of Weimar: center of Goethe’s social and work life: The Duke brings him. He begins to
assume public functions: in the theatre and he even becomes the minister of finance and Warfare.
Goethe´s garden house: he spent significant periods of his life there. He met Christiane Vulpius here:
she had little formal schooling and came from a working-class background. The court was
scandalized: he was vanished to live in his garden house instead of his house in town. It would be 3
years until he was allowed to return. They had a son. It was here he wrote the roman elegies: homage
to the elegies and to Rome.

Johann Peter Eckermann: he travels to Weimar

1823: the aspiring poet sent his manuscript “Reflections of poetry” (included reflections on Goethe) to
Goethe. He grew up in poverty. Began to attend school between work. All did not go well: he got
distracted from his law studies by literature. It is then he wrote his reflections.
He travels to Weimar: he did not wait for Goethe´s answer. He walks: he spends here the rest of his
life Here; he would write his conversations with Goethe.
- Goethe agreed to publish the manuscript: he was looking for an assistant and so E remained in
Weimar and took this post free of charge. But he was happy to be in the presence of his
master.

Conversations with Goethe

Eckermann begun to write their conversations
- Goethe told him to wait to publish them until his death.
- Almost like interviews: prompts him to speaking
- He is not passive: he responds puzzled or agreeing.
- These conversations are like portraits.

The birth of world literature: Eckermann’s role

- Took place in January 31 1827: thanks to Eckermann.
- Goethe had been reading a Chinese novel: it was not “strange” as E said it was.
o “more decent than the French”.
o They were not an “exception to the rule”: their novelistic tradition is older than the
European
- “The time has come for the epoch of world literature : and everyone must seek to accelerate
it.” Especially Eckermann.
- Eckermann ended up reading some of these novels: magic, coincidences, Adventures: in
novels like The Story of the stone. Few were already translated
o He was prejudiced: he asked to be shocked. Which is why Goethe pressed him to read
all of them
- We owe world literature to Eckermann: to his work as his assistant, but also as his ignorance
respecting Chinese novels.
o In order in order for world literature to be born, we didn't just need a Goethe. We also
needed an Eckermann-- someone who played the straight man to Goethe's provocative
thought.
 o World literature depends on the straight man, it still does.
- The Grimm brothers were confused by Goethe’s attraction to world productions.

Goethe’s corpus
His work, his vision
- His horizon was much wider than his contemporary’s.
- Chose to live in a small town for most of his life.
o Goethe made himself indispensable there, he was sent by the Duke of Weimar. He took
care of finance, theatre, warfare…
o Big fish in a small pond
- Another side to Goethe: his interest in WL.
o Not just a matter of reading, also of writing.
o He wrote more and more about travelling
o Collection of poetry: West eastern Divan: breaks the distance to Persia through poetry.
o Faust: he can fly through the air with the devil.
 Prefaces to Faust: one inspired by his far-flung readings: the Sanskrit play
Abhijnanashakuntala.
- Imaginary travel through poetry was not enough. He fled: travelled to Italy.
o Changed everything: made him take up writing: founded Weimar Classism, in which he
rethought his literary style in light of his travels to Italy.
o It also laid the foundation for world literature.

Goethe’s poetry
Pivotal experiences for Goethe and his conception of world literature:
- Encounter with Persian poet Hafez: decided to not only read him but to respond to him with
his own poetry
- West Eastern Divan: encounter between east and west and is his response to Hafez: attempt to
initiate a conversation across the centuries and across culture.
- 2 poems in which he addresses Hafez and uses him as an inspiration for his own poetry about
the relationship between the West and the East. (open secret)

2: The epic of Gilgamesh

The Recovery of the Library of Ashurbanipal
First great work of literature that survived: most popular work of lit in the first millennium BC:
disappeared and reappeared.
How does it become a work of world literature in its context and in the modern world?
- Composed 1200 BCE: circulated in middle east. Wide distribution.
- It then disappeared by around 300 200 BCE. Until 19 th century: group of adventurers dig up
Nineveh: dig up palace of King of Assyria: it was in the ruins of his library.
- Clay tablets: burning actually preserved them.
- Austin Henry Layard: on his way to Ceylon colonial service (to which he doesn’t want to go).
Wants to make a long trip along the middle east as an excuse. He discovers mounds of mud
and rubble in what now is Iraq: where Nineveh was:
 o Finds the palace. Needs to raise money to dig up the place. Nobody cares about these.
o He is advised to write a bestseller novel to raise funds: “Nineveh and its remains”.
o Readership in 1849: interested in these topics. Hits adventure, Christians vs others,
imperialism.
o Becomes a member of parliament and does more excavations: writes a second book.
Digs up what turns out to be the library of the Assyrian king

Translating a lost epic

- Nobody knows how to read these clay slabs.
- Cuneiform was one of the earliest systems of writing, invented by Sumerians in ancient
Mesopotamia.
- Layard’s brings back the tablet fragments.
o Sir henry Rawlinson: he found in Western Persia at a place called Behistun an
inscription, which turned out to be by Darius the Great, in three different scripts. And he
began to think maybe he could figure out this cuneiform by comparing these scripts. He
figures out how to read it
- By 1870: George Smith: first one to decipher how to read the epic.
o Taught himself Acadian. Discovered by British museum: if he discovers something that
will connect tablets to bible then he will make a career out of it:
 Finds tablet about Noah: a man is sending doves in a flood.
o He translates the epic, what they had, and publishes it under the title the Chaldean epic
of the Deluge. Publishes the Chaldean accounts of genesis: bestseller.
o He persuades the museum to find the other parts of the tablet. Dies in this pursuit
 Odd relation to the story of Gilgamesh: he is searching for immortality; he is
writing his own story and he buries it in his wall which will be dug up

Gilgamesh as world literature

- This long-lost epic comes back into the world: Rassam: rival of George Smith: writes his own
adventure story.
- Once the epic is discovered it permeates the culture: Roth writes the great American novel.
- This epic existed in two different worlds: exists in a timeless forcefield: it speaks to us really
closely, even to Hussein.
- Originally the first version began with a heroic dramatic beginning: “surpassing all kings”
o The new version: this is not so much a story of adventure but of finding knowledge,
seeking antiquity to find a modern lesson: this shows us: NO ONE EVER LIVED IN
ANTIQUITY.

Episodes and themes from the Epic of Gilgamesh

How is it so compelling and intimate?
- It is truly a masterpiece; it is not awkward.
The history of these texts: and how they are now
- The standard form: 1200 BCE: attributed to a scribe called Sin lequi unninni.
o The historical Gilgamesh is an important figure, his city Uruk is a major center: very
likely place where literary writing first developed
o Story first circulates orally and then writing develops.
 o First patron of literature: King Sulgi of Ur, close to Uruk, starts to commission poems
about Gilgamesh, he sees as a brother figure, got adopted by his mother. Makes a
sequence of poems about Gilgamesh, his servant Enkidu who goes 2 underworld and
Gilgamesh brings him back. THIS CIRCULATES.
o Then there’s an early form of the epic: The Old Babylonian period around 1600 BCE:
fragments survived. More straightforward
- In 1200 BCE we get this final version: proper masterpiece. Much shorter that odyssey, very
dramatic, lots of characters. Dramatic combats, then friends: economically constructed:
difference to Greek epics, much more elaborated, repetitive.
o What is an epic? Qualities of relationships between god and humans, about the
foundation of a city, and it is the biggest story produced in the near east.
o Grows by incorporating early materials: like the Story of Noah: plays with the textual
history.
o Different cultures emphasize different forms: in the near east they focused on poems and
omen texts, interpreting dreams and signs.
o A lot of the expansiveness of Homer is the lack of competition: nothing else to read.
o In Babylonia there were plenty pf texts but there is a restriction by the writing method:
on clay. The medium shapes the form.

The wild man Enkidu

Episode 1: Enkidu appears
- Human mixed with an animal: lives in word, runs with animals, covered in hair.
- Seduced into civilization with the prostitute sent by G. once he spends time w her for 7 days
he will be rejected by animals.
- Things you can’t say openly in front of the king: G is abusing his power and population:
o Now, in the Assyrian and Babylonian chronicles, and the Sumerian ones before the
Akkadian ones, the King is like God, godlike, wonderful, never does anything wrong.
o The same happens in stories about gods who argue and fight in heaven, this is a way of
working tensions in earthly society that you can’t talk about openly.
 The townspeople pray the gods to help them in this epic.
o In the old chronicles, Babylonian ones, Egyptian, Assyrian, the king and his counselors
always know the story there in, there are no surprises.
- Here, the gods send Enkidu, who messes up the countryside: becomes G’s mirror in the
country. Country people pray to Gilgamesh to save them from E. G has no idea that his clever
ploy is the god’s ploy to have him under control.
o Suspicion of countryfolk with the sinful life in the city. But literature is always
somehow in the side of the city versus the country, and the country is written by people
in the city with a nostalgic feel.
o Literature is on the side of power. Writing developed for religious, economical and
imperial purposes.

Humbaba and the country

Country and city: episode G and E who become friends go out of the city to slay the monster
Humbaba who is protecting a wild forest
- Reinforces pro city prejudice of literature?
o What is the role of the king in the ancient near east? there is a sense of the city and the
country in a dialectic, the city needs the country for resources and serf population
 - Historical Gilgamesh was known for building a wall around city and well and irrigation
projects.
- Cedar is important: for grand building projects: if you want a palace you need more than clay,
you need beams and doors for big rooms: this cedar wasn´t in the area, they’d have to go to
forests of Lebanon and Persia.
o The journeys to get lumber were challenges to the kings. They needed to subdue the
population of the area to extract it.
o Complaints from architects and builders regarding the quality of the lumber. Developed
bureaucracy: the builders needed writing that proved the king demanded the building
with low quality wood for when the palace fell down.
- When Gilgamesh goes to look for cedar this denotes imperial ambition: building a palace
o This is where the transformation of the countryside through urbanization in this
celebration in literature of deforestation.
o We can question this from today’s perspective
o Book of Isaiah: centuries after: the forests og Lebanon celebrate the fall of the
Babylonian empire: “since you’ve laid low, no one is cutting us down”
 TENSION countryside and country
- In the city G acts unsustainably by raping his own subjects. In the country he rapes the
landscape.
- Humbaba: mythic monster: they start negotiating w him: political discussion. He is killed, G
and E act authoritatively,
o This is the course that leads to E’s death.
o Enkidu should be giving G better advice, but he eggs him on.

The flood
Flood in this book
- Cause: people are multiplying and getting noisy
o Much more ecological theme: dual problems caused by tension of countryside and city
o Boom years (economical, populational) and then drought
- Bible: people are sinful (difference)
- Interpolated tale: story within a story. Not the centerpiece of the drama.
o THIS IS an ancient tradition in the near east
- It is a reflection on the limits of culture: the story of humanity. You zoom out to the particular
story.
o Utnapishtim: “he who found life” is Noah. He confronts G with the limits of morality
that he has to face
o This story is counterpart to the Enkidu story: he becomes human at the beginning and at
the end of the epic he confronts the limits of humanity: acknowledges immortality
- the story is about the limits of humanity: between the underworld and the upper world and the
animals and the humans.
o The city is the image of the larger body of the hero: it is made of clay and can be
washed away in a flood.
o Utnapishtim becomes immortal: closest to the gods. Lives on his island, you have to
cross the waters of death to get there
- Death of Enkidu: stays w him seven days and seven nights (mirrors prostitute at the
beginning)
- At the end of flood story: U tells G the gods don’t turn people immortal anymore, their world
is not our world.
 o It was believed before the flood people could live for thousands of years. Everything
was mythically possible.
o After the flood the world becomes a human world: possibilities are limited.
o When G visits U the world of history visits the world of myth

The fall of Enkidu

Gilgamesh rebels against the gods: Ishtar in particular:
- After he slays Humbaba and cuts the forests: he feels he can do anything
- The goddess of the city offers herself to him and he rejects her. Insults her.
- Brings the downfall of Enkidu: he is punished by gods by killing his friend.
- Epic can probe tensions that couldn’t be expressed in court
o King is always the servant, echo or lover of the goddess of the city.
o His responsibility is to be diplomatic and to mediate between his people and the
goddess.
o But he is too confident in himself, he thinks he is so godlike he can reject a goddess.
- This and the Humbaba episode were enough to get E killed, you don’t need both.

Gilgamesh and the novel

Historical background
- Emerges from earlier material
- Feels very modern: we connect to it. what is the difference between this epic and novels?
- We can look at it through this lens: but they differ
o The original audience won’t look at it the same as us
o We cannot impose our values onto it.
o Few novels are purely in courts dealing with upper class: in G and in Homer there is no
interest with common people
o These people don’t give speeches for their motives: but the psychology is moved
through dreams. We the moderns can understand this psychological depth. They on the
other and saw dreams as a way for the gods to communicate with people and they were
predictive
 This is not novelistic in the sense of foreshadowing
 The mundane effects are not for the realistic effect of novels, but these details
mean something, they’re not merely descriptive
 We the readers project motivations in an empty space, in this sense it does engage
with the readers.
o This is a poem: each world is chosen poetically
o Not much about psychological development: G does not change; he just learns how to
behave.
o So many novels are about breaking from something: this is about holding order together

The drama of Gilgamesh and its conclusion

- Novels usually end up in a different place from where they started. Not the case in this epic
- The epic is a combination of what would later be described as a comic plot structure and a
tragic one
o Comedy: restoring an order that has been disrupted: comes back sadder and wiser
o Tragedy: don’t be like Enkidu, be like Gilgamesh.
 - Ending: describes the city lovingly, we know that he is the one who wrote this story rom the
beginning. He is not only the first hero of world literature; he is also the first writer of world
literature.

3. Homer and the Odyssey

The Iliad
- The odyssey was likely composed in the 700s BCE
- Troy: destroyed by Odysseus. Story about war told by Greek bards celebrating a great Greek
victory. Reserves space for the trojan side of the war.
o Homer and the oral poets coming before hum preserved some of the most moving and
modern scenes for troy for the past perspective of the enemy to speak
o Small intimate scene involving hector, great trojan hero, saying goodbye to his wife. He
won’t come back. Achilles kills him. His son cries because of his helmet, meant to
scare. The scene of terror switches again, he removes his helmet and laughs. Scene of
family happiness.
o Hector prays his son may rule troy peacefully: but Troy is destroyed.
- Schliemann: hobby archeologist. Discoverer of Troy. Goes to California for the gold rush:
founded a bank, manages his money in a dishonest way. Develops passion for classical
literature in Paris. Not so much a scholar: a practical man and an entrepreneur when he moved
to Greece for his marriage, he discovers Troy. He destroyed many of the layers because he
wasn’t trained.

A tour through the Odyssey

The odyssey
- Iliad starts with word “rage”: the rage of Achilles, greatest of the Greek warrior. Leads him to
abandon his companions to fight the Trojans on their own: many will be killed.
- Odyssey begins in a different mode: “man”. Introduced to the world not of a larger than life
hero but of a man. This epic is not about an epic battle but about the travels of a single man.
o Not just any man: he is a very particular man: specific set of qualities: “man of many
turns of phrases” he knows how to manipulate language. Through this ability he is able
to survive: use words cunningly.
o Polytropon is the word used 2 describe it: man, of many turns / men of many turns of
phrases: this synthesizes the drama of the odyssey:
 The one that speaks of the many places on which Poseidon forces Odysseus is the
one that causes the detours of which The Odyssey is composed. And this, of
course, immediately characterizes The Odyssey as a kind of travel tale. Unlike
Iliad which takes place in 1 place (Troy), odyssey goes from place 2 place, forces
readers and heroes to travel: not a voluntary travel.
 Also, the tale of a hero who uses worlds cleverly.
Calypso
- Odyssey like Iliad begins in media res. After Odysseus has been traveling for many years.
o Not unhappy being the lover of calypso, but he knows that if he stays, he will not return
home and will not have an epic: disappear from story. The gods intervene to stop this.
o Convince calypso to let him go: remind him he has a task to accomplish.
 o After he leaves, he is in the thrall of Poseidon.

Island of the Phaeacians

- Falls asleep ashore: hears the voices of young women: he is smuggled into the city.
- Is to be treated royally: according to laws of hospitality: important in ancient Greece: forbid
host from inquiring who the stranger is. He is to receive gifts.
- Singer sings tale of the trojan war and the hero Odysseus: he cries. He is praised, but he
knows the price he has had to pay: he as lost his companions and has been wandering around
the sea.
Homeric simile
- Weeping is central: homer highlights its importance through the Homeric simile: drawn out
comparison elaborated often in several steps all in the service of further and more specifically
characterizing a moment in the text. This is what happens at this moment:
o Specifics his crying: compares it to a woman being enslaved: the same pity. The scene
described is not one of a sea stories, but of a battle. Homer gives us a window into the
Iliad: this technique allows us to switch gears, proceed w a different tone, use a different
set of images in order to characterize what is at hand.
o He uses graphic images for the war: in order to present a certain amount of relief, he
uses the simile to transport us to a different world, like peaceful Greece.
Singer of his own tale
- Reveals himself to be the hero of the song. He is the same hero but he is also a wanderer
punished by Poseidon.
- Homer lets Odysseus sing the tale of his own adventure: many of the famous episodes of this
epic are told not by Homer but by the character: this is also another aspect of the Homeric
poems.
Written world vs. oral storytelling
- Homer is the oral poet who introduced the technology of writing of epic storytelling: he
changes the flavor of these tales by using this different technique, he will bring an oral
tradition to an end or will add the new technology: it is disruptive: there will be an authored
version instead of different variations.
o Homer himself makes this transition to the written word
o Yet in the story he tells he celebrates this oral singer: like the original singer and even
Odysseus. Preserves the glories of this older techniques.
o Odysseys returns us finally to the beginning of the tale: troy: tells us his story in
chronological order.
Island of the sirens
- His story begins in the real world, troy, and ends in Ithaca, real world.
o Between those places he takes us to a fantastic journey.
 Most iconic episodes
- The scene of the sirens: he is lucky, has been warned of the allure of the sirens: he can
circumvent the island, but he wants to hear the song and survive. His cunning leads him to
anticipate the scene more fully: he ties himself and also puts wax in the ears of his
companions.
- He operates with interlocking strategies. He is the only one to hear the song and survive.
 - He does not believe he is a hero larger of life: he believes he will give in, which is why he
takes precautions: his strength is to know his weakness and to guard against it
o His recognition of his own humanity will save him many times.

Land of the Cyclops

- Odyssey as a tale of a travel account and not of fantasy. We can mine it for cultural
information on how the Greeks interacted with foreign culture.
- O tells us in advanced what this one-eyed giant are: “lawless savages who leave everything up
to the gods”: have no assemblies, do not plant.
o None of this is actually true: according to his own tale, there is cheese, sheep (who the
cyclops cares for), and we see companionship we tween the cyclops.
o Their lives are not as pitiful as I describe them.
o He sees them as barbarians: term used by Greeks to describe foreign cultures. Cultural
arrogance.
o Odysseus is telling this tale, not homer: he is telling this story at a court. He is entirely
dependent on his hosts: a lot at stake for O in this tale and in how he tells it:
 We can forgive him for the self-aggrandizing tone. Is an unreliable or prejudiced
narration: this is made possible by Homer telling this story through eyes of O.
- Element of curiosity that drives O forward
- Make themselves at home in the caves. He wants to see whether he can extract hospitality
gifts.
- The giant appears and is unhappy: O tricks him, he blinds him. Escape on the underside of
sheep. Told him his name is nobody.
Mapping Odysseus’ journey
- We can read the O as an anthropological account just as Schliemann read it. Mine the O for
clues as to what cultures did O encounter. Not necessarily supposed to take these accounts
seriously. But these geographers mine a fictional tale for cultural information. These are
rooted in some form of historical experience.
o Capri Is the island of the Sirens
o Scylla and Charybdis are in the strait of Messina.
o Some speculate Circe is in Haiti.
- But probably these travels were close to Greece, the ships were small and the travels appeared
much longer and dangerous back then.
- The way in whack literature adds layers to actual geography and how the experience of
geography and travel allows us to read literature.

Homer and oral tradition

- How did it become a masterpiece? A masterpiece crystalizes a tradition, but Homer does not
come from a written tradition, comes from a purely oral tradition
o This became clear in the XX century. We owe this to Parry: interested in oral
composition, had studied Homer and his discovery will reveal a whole new
understanding of his epics based on these oral poets: 2 insights
 Scale: these oral poets had incredible memories, scales associated with written
world, with certain tricks they were able to memorize huge texts
 Structure and quality: these texts relied on certain formulas, shorter or larger,
which were building blocks to memorize these texts
 Dawn is always mentioned: you say it to memorize it what comes next
 - This is a story of oral performance, the performer can adjust a performance to an audience,
but there was a grit, a structure of memorizing that depended on the story.
o The Homeric similes allow you to evoke a different world and characterize an important
moment, this is another of the building locks.
o Recited with accompaniment and sung. Opera is a sort of recreation of Greek
performance.
- The written version is much more coherent than the oral one:

Writing and the odyssey

- Writing system that made this epic possible: breakthrough that changed everything about
writing: the ALPHABET. Cuts the number of signs down to two dozen: makes writing much
easier and causes a higher literacy rate
- The most salient feature of writing is meaning: the alphabet severs all contact to meaning,
only refers to sounds, the symbols don´t have meaning. Real abstraction.
o This tradition comes from ancient Mesopotamia. The same happens in Egypt
o The Phoenician alphabet that fives origin to the Greek adds more vowels
- The odyssey is very vowel based in order to get the poetic rhythm; this is allowed by the new
alphabet.

Homeric storytelling
Homer is in the cusp between oral and written.
- He was viewed as too naïve and primitive: but now he is more attractive than Virgil as an epic
writing
o Maybe this has to do with the oral nature of the story: some of the most important
episodes are narrated by Odysseus: Gilgamesh is the first writer, Homer is the first
singer
o Homer crafts these scenes through O’s voice.
o Many other epics just tell the story chronologically, but he employs cunning literary
techniques:
 Distinction between fabula and syuzhet: fabula is the chronology of events as they
happened. Syuzhet is what the poet does with this sequence: the two overlap. You
can change the order for effects
 One of these effects in the Odyssey is confusion, loops, meandering. Homer
creates the effect of Odysseus’ confusion by telling his story in a not
straightforward way.

Odysseus and the role of the hero

- O has a way with words. Cunning.
- He is a liar: becomes a storyteller at court of the Phaeacians: flatters the princess, asks for
help: knows he is dependent on Phaeacians, he needs their confidence, almost a conman so
they help him
o A lot at stake for him
o First antihero? He is a more ambiguous hero tan Achilles. (although in the beginning of
the Iliad he is the ultimate hero) O is slyer

Role of the Gods

 - Not yet an imperial world like in Gilgamesh: kind of a pre-colonial. Raiders of the
Mediterranean.
- Never respectful of people they encounter. Sometimes victims, more often perpetrators.
- Poseidon shuts off Phaeacian island: the world of human is related to the world of the gods,
they interfere. They aid in this colonialism.

Mapping the journey

- We know it starts in Troy: and it ends in Ithaca. In between: fantastic episodes. Starts and
ends in real world
o Why the detour: way in which Greek cultured tried to figure out their relation to other
cultures: had a hard time respecting them: “barbarians”, didn’t speak Greek.
o Athena: “I can never trust you, which is what I like about you” (To O)

Form and the epic

- Unusual structure: events narrated in an unchronological way.
- We don’t start with Odysseus; we start in Ithaca. his destination.
o Telemachus and Penelope: not necessarily important to the story
o Political crisis: suitors, needs resolution (Like in G).
o This is an interesting structure: novel like (sort of)
- Telemachus “fighter from afar”: the story starts setting the scene with Telemachus: not the
main character. This is also novel like
- O is finally home: has to prove he is him and the drama of his recognition begins. His wife
wants proof: 10-year war, 10-year travel: this drama of recognition Is a way of registering this
passage of time
o Maybe the most novelistic aspect of the story, these show the passage of time.
- Gilgamesh is searching for antiquity
o The oral tradition registers old stories, but they are changed according to the demands of
the audience, and once they are written down, they are fixed
o Maybe Telemachus is needed to illustrate this: he’s a youngster who learns the story
from Nestor.
- Underworld descent: at the heart of the epic. He goes from Circe, to the underworld, to Circe:
loop. But it’s a window onto the past and onto parallel stories. Agamemnon, his mother…
- Enkidu dreams about the underworld and sees Etana, but he just sees her: Homer expands
that, adds dialogue.

A rhapsode and the Gods

- These gods are different: not omnipotent, they quarrel, they mirror conflicts amongst mortals.
They know and can do more but are quite human.
- Move plot forward, provide objects needed…
- Beginning: man, and muse: ability of this goddess to control narrative she can “start whenever
she wants”. THE SINGER CONTROLS THE STORY.

The figure of Penelope

- No equivalent to her in Gilgamesh: she is cunning: refuses to marry, manipulates: that is how
we encounter her. Tries to seize control of her situation.
- She has a role.

The moral of the Odyssey

 - Both epics look backwards. Gilgamesh perhaps more fully. So, they are modern rather than
ancient.
- Ethics: ethic of survival, maybe the opposite of an ethic.
o Gilgamesh is about a bad ruler becoming a good ruler.
o Odysseus is punished for his trespassing; these experiences will hopefully turn him into
a better man and ruler.
 These cities are very spread out. Survival is something beyond good and evil, you
need pragmatism, loyalty, trust, cunning, to stay afloat in this seabound world.
- There is a question of how to rule: even these small city states. Begins with an absent ruler
and ends with O becoming a ruler again. We assume he will be good.
o Master of diplomacy with the gods: shown when leaving Calypso.
- THIS IS A COMEDY OF RESTORATION. Ithaca needs to be ruled by a proper king. We
don’t know whether he is improved, but he is changed.
- Gilgamesh is between world of animals and world of gods, Odyssey positions us a sa polis
between these wasteland people (cyclops) and empires: Odysseus struggles to make a place in
between these 2.

Alexander and the dissemination of Greek culture

- Pergamon: one of the capitals of the Hellenistic empire in Asia Minor
o Hellenism: immense political and cultural effects of Alexander the great. Empire that
stretched from Egypt to India. He was aided by the Greek phalanx (wall of warriors) and
a trained cavalry. He combined both
- Empires also need soft power: Alexander found Greek culture. In the century before
alexander Greek culture exploded. Part of his strength was the ability to export these cultural
products.
- Cultural inventions that helped A:
o The alphabet: Greeks perfected Phoenician alphabet, allowed grater part of the
population to become literate, partly cause of the literary explosion
o New techniques that preserved the written texts: libraries. Library of Alexandria:
established in his empire. The second most important is the library of Pergamon. They
copied the Greek texts, interpreted them and used them 4 education.
 This disseminated Greek culture. This is How Homer became the founding father
of Greek culture. He exerted influence on the arts of the entire empire.
o The invention of pergamentum: invented in this library. Invention as a product of
necessity. Most important medium was papyrus. They needed independence, and so
they developed the techniques of parchment (sheepskin) still more expensive than
papyrus, but more durable and flexible. This created independence from Egypt
- Theaters: alexander was one of the greatest promoters of theater. Theaters were built all over
Asia minor: he imported Greek theater, to be performed in open air. Also, a part of his soft
power: the dissemination of Greek culture.
o Other cultures developed their own forms of drama.

4. The 1001 nights

1001 nights in relation to the epic
- We’ve encountered other storytellers: Utnapishtim in G, Odysseus in Odyssey.
 - Scheherazade is the patron of storytelling: and the frame of the Arabian nights is the most
important: because it fives place to the storytelling.
o There are other frame tale narratives. But she is the most famous storyteller of them all.
- She has a second goal: to re educate the king, she needs to escape too. If she continues
storytelling, she´ll be trapped.
o She needs to save not only herself and her fellow women but also the entire kingdom,
which is falling apart: this is related to the previous texts. Gilgamesh is a terrible king
and then he ends how to be the proper king of Uruk. The Odyssey begins in Ithaca in a
political crisis, by the end of that epic, O returns and restores order.
o The way the crisis in 1001 is resolved is through storytelling: most stories revolve
around kings.
- Arabic core: feature Harun al Rashid, a good king, she holds this example onto the king.
o This king created the first paper factory in the Arabic world. Created in China,
transformed literature in Arabic world, lowered cost of producing it. The Arabic nights
were popular literature. Most stories revolve around common people.
o Paper and the Arabian nights thrived together. Paper also allowed it to travel easily
around the Arabic world and ultimately to Europe.

Origin of the tales

- The 1001 becomes world literature in translation
- Status before Europe: oral literature, doesn’t have an official status. Didn’t even originate in
Arab world, probably from India, the names of characters are Persian names. Then traveled
through the Arab world. The longer tales came from Egypt
o Illegitimate text status in Arab world: not high literature
o The addition of poetry appeared in Egyptian and Syrian tradition: to add more literacy,
improve the quality, also for the storytelling to show their literary gifts.
- The first full written edition is in 19 th century. The first fragment of a manuscript is in the
ninth century, but these are just noting towards the stories for oral performance.
- Galland: discovered the Sinbad story in a manuscript in Syria, heard it was a part of the core
of stories 1001 nights, but S is not part of the core, incorporated later. He translated it; he
went on to search for more of these stories. He found a 14 th century manuscript
o Originally it had 4 volumes, but we have 3 today. Begun translating it in 1704.
o He relied on an oral source: Hanna Diab: Syrian.
o But he started completing stories himself, only referring to notes.
o T
- The great 1001 stories: Ali baba, Sinbad, Aladdin, are not part of the core.
o Sinbad: an ethnographic account. Describes different cultures. There is interest for this
in Europe at the time
o Aladdin and Ali Baba: different narratively. These are much more complex than the
other 1001 stories, more novelistic and interested in life and in the civilizing impulse
literature can have. (Perrault’s fairytales: this literature serves a civilizing purpose).

Orientalism, translation and colonialism

- Oriental tales that spread around Europe: the frame tale and the embedded stories, and the
power of narrative portrayed are attractive. Also, the fantastic element is attractive. The
oriental splendor, the exotic: these are qualities that are more appealing than the stories
themselves: a fantastic realm that is appealing.
 - The enlightenment looks for an alternative to Christianity: the prologue invocates Allah and
Muhammad: some translations includes this and others not. Some translations are concerned
with Islam, others not.
o The stories are often not aware of an Islamic context, there is no common thread about
Islam being communicating
- They are fascinating for the way they talk about storytelling: sourcebook about why and ow
we tell stories.
- 19th century translations:
o Lane: in English they became “The Arabian nights entertainments” Lane establishes this
title: he is a great ethnographer. His translation is illustrated, he expurgates translation:
no erotism. This is a way he shows how to understand this culture they are colonizing.
Much more scholarly work, not as embellished.
o Burton: much more interested in erotic elements: investigating sexual practices.
Embellishes it widely: Borges: the translators rewrite it to their own liking. Burton
claims Lane omits the poetry and oral quality. “return the text to its uncastrated status”.
“how can we colonize these people if we don’t understand their poetry and their
language”.

Comparison of the translations

- Haddawy: sober and modern. Based on 14th Syrian manuscript used by Galland. Only has 221
nights, doesn´t have ending of frame tale. Stripped down, literal translation. Reflects earliest
Arabic manuscript. Describes Scheherazade as a well learned woman.
- Burton: based on the Calcutta II manuscript: fairly full and complete. Described S with
alliteration, much more embellished and poetic.

Scheherazade, Dunyazade and Harun al- Rashid

- Scheherazade: Heroine in a patriarchal society: she is a savior of womankind. But she returns
the world to its status quo, not revolutionary. Uses storytelling as therapy for the king
Shahryar.
o she is married at the end: gives birth to 3 children.
- Dunyazade: the ideal listener: model for how you can learn to listen to stories. Teaches the
king how to be the ideal audience. Creates a balanced relationship between the teller and the
listener. Until the king learns how to ask for stories himself
- Harun al Rashid: in relation to the frame tale figures. He is a historical figure. Both a tyrant
and a listener of stories: combination of both frame tale listeners. Asks people to tell their
stories, dangerous curiosity.

Reading in historical context

- Is the Abbasid Caliphate real?
- We can read these stories for their interest as narrative constructions: the power of telling and
of listening.
o To read them as historical documents or commentaries on Islam can be dangerous
- Certain descriptions tell us something about these society: gives an account of the lifestyle of
the era. It can function as a social document. But we cannot take these as an exact account of
history, especially for historic characters as Harun al Rashid.

Modern adaptations
 - Poe: thousand and second night: ironic and parodic: she tells stories of real things but in
fantastical ways, the king does not believe her and kills her. Only believes the fictional one:
plays the idea that to a story the truth is stranger than fiction. Borgesian.
- Gautier: runs out of stories, asks Gautier to tell him a story, but the story fails and she is
killed.
o These stories are interested in the Orientalizing potential of the 1001
- Naguib Mahfouz: Arabian days and nights: uses characters but doesn’t follow through for the
stories: to talk about contemporary politics in Egypt, would ¿not be able to talk literally.
- Leila Sebbar: Scheherazade: feminist adaptation. Trilogy. Uses Orientalizing tropes of the
exotic woman against the people who are stereotyping her to find an essential identity of her
as a woman. Looks at S as a woman who has had her gifts used against her
- Films
o Early film is fascinated with these stories: Melies: experimental film
o Pathe Freres brothers: fascinated by the metamorphic value of these stories. New
medium to portray this.
o Great thief of Baghdad: establishes visual tropes related to this story. Silent film that
uses the visual element.
o Disney: had some anti Arabic commentary. Very American movie (Genie). American
prototypes for the heroes.
- These unnational original texts become inserted into these national contexts. The 1001 is
adaptive.

1001 nights as world literature

- The stories have not been returned to their original ways; they are a product of the west.
Nothing would have happened without Galland and his translation
o 1001 is captive of its translation
o Not refined language according to the Arabic world.
- Burton uses it to push against Victorian sexuality: uses text to attack his own culture: most
world of western texts or most western of worldly texts.
o Maybe that’s why it is such a good work of world literature, it serves to attack different
cultures.

Goethe’s Arabian nights

- 1001 nights was important to him for is conception of world literature: had read it at the age
of 10. Compared himself to Scheherazade.
- Goethe would go to his grandma and told her how he imagined the story would continue, and
his mother would tell it that way. Kind of co author of the Arabian night.

Authorship, transcription, curation

- No author. 200 stories, not 1 story for night, needs cliffhangers.
- Never a single complete version of 1001 nights
o More promising title than a description. It says “countless” nights.
- Galland: uses most reliable manuscript. Early 18 th century. Partial manuscript, doesn´t have
1001 stories. Maybe there are missing volumes, maybe not. The title promises more stories
o Many different canons of 1001 nights, they complete the promise by borrowing different
texts.
- Muhsin Mahdi: scholarly modern edition, largest canon: 280. They are coherent, belong
together, are they authentic? Close interweaving in this “original cycle” between the framing
 narrative and the embedded stories. The other cut and pasted stories generated by scribes
don’t take this interweaving into account, this reflection of the narratives.
o Scholars are trying to track down this original core.
o Mahdi: describes the work of Galland as gunk, needs to strip in down to its original
element.
o The translators played a similar role to the scribes who added to the canon, had only 280
stories and needed to complete them. Galland found the additional stories in Ali Baba,
Aladdin, Sinbad. The most famous aren’t in the core.

Influence in the East and the West

- Why are these not seen as high literature in the middle east: sexual content, status, (written for
common people). Low literature of high inspiration, adulterated versions from historical
romances which have lost their refinement, which is why they become middle literature.
o Do not play a major role in the canon in the Arabic world, but in the west, they are the
quintessential example as Arabic literature.
- Coincidences and references in Western literature: taming of the Shrew by Shakespeare:
Sleeper and the Walker. Resonance between these works.

Influence on contemporary authors

- Pamuk: avoided the 1001 nights as an author, didn´t stay that way. He wrote a frame tale in
the Black Book. Not unlike it: prose collection, jewels strung together.
- Rushdie: politically engaged: Scheherazade defying the tyranny through storytelling: the
political writing: there’s a reference to the Arabian nights in his novel.
o Midnights children: the 1001 serves his narrative of needing to answer power. Dystopic
novel about Pakistan. Didn’t express optimism, Arabian nightmare, parallel Arabian
nights, the references are reversed.

Frame stories
- Galland needed more stories, desperately. Diab told I’m the stories of Aladdin, Ali baba.
o This is a hidden source, a sort of coauthor.
- What many of these reflections on 'The Thousand and One Nights' have in common this
weaving together. That there are scribes who pick and choose and weave together and here
even individual stories are woven together by these storytellers from other bits of stories. So,
it's almost like there's this "sea of stories,"
o The very multiplicity of these stories is what turns them into a symbol of hope.

Worldliness of the 1001 nights

- Perhaps one of the most circulated texts.
- But how do we decide what is worldly about the 1001?
o In the Arabic world they didn’t circulate as world literature, and the most well-known
stories only exist in the west as written stories (Alibaba.)
 So, does this belong in French literature?
- Two alternative conceptions of world literature at work here.
o On the one hand, world literature as a collection of typical literature from various
countries. And then it makes sense to collect, perhaps, the stories from the original
Arabic cycle.
o But if world literature is a set of texts that circulate then we should collect the more
peripheral, or the ones that don't come from the Arabic core.
 - So: let’s bring our conception of the Arabian nights to speed with what we’re actually
practicing in world literature.
o Arabic scholars complain of the Arabic night’s syndrome: over representation of the
nights in culture. Equalizing Arabic with the 1001, Arabic with magic.
- This is not true. for a lot of European novelists, these were an inspiration to write about
everyday people: Dickens, not necessarily supernatural.

5. The tale of Genji

The world of Genji
- Court society: full of rules and rituals: gossip and judgement. Unwritten and explicit rules.
Different society to ours.
- Same scenarios play with different people
- Ukiyo e: floating world: this is a floating narrative, the book doesn´t flow in a normal way, it
teaches us its own rules. When a pattern repeats, a rule is laid before us.
o Patterns and variations: a way of testing the limits of these rules. Test how much we can
bend these rules.
o Murasaki: explores the limits of what’s possible.
- Particular rank of Genji: hierarchal society.
o Great psychological novel: structural analysis of society.
o Son of a consort not of the first rank, the prophecy says he’ll be a success but that he
can’t rule the country, turned into a Genji, someone of imperial lineage but made into a
commoner so he won’t be killed by his rivals.
o It’s a tale of A Genji. He cannot rule this country not because of his education, but
because its not his place. Is a semi illegitimate child.
- Murasaki: the author is named after the character; the author is anonymous.
o She is a woman of middle rank (Character) THE PERFECT DATE is a middle person
(Chapter 2)
- Shock: the love between Genji and Murasaki. Holds off having sex until she’s 12. He had
been married off at 12.
o Marriage and romance aren´t related.
- You have rules but also frustrations: tension. Emotional psychological sensation: seems
modern. Great interiority in characters.
o 1001 nights: these characters don’t have interiority but actions.
o Example: the subconscious of a woman kills Genii’s wife
- Often works of world literature are very cosmopolitan works. They are really connected to a
very wide world. This one is an insular world inside an island culture in the medieval world
1,000 years ago.

Form, reception and translation

- Technological advances that turn a work into world literature
- Paper reached Japan from China in the Han dynasty. PRINTING TECHNOLOGY from the
seventh century also was created in china. In wood.
o Genji starts to circulate in Japan out of court through this system
- Doesn’t get out of japan until late 19 th century and early 20: European fascination for japan
aristocratic art
 o European society needed inspiration: realism had exhausted itself. Artists were looking
for other models, more abstract, stylized art.
o Beautiful multi colored paintings: popular art in japan, not serious. Also created through
wood.
o The first wave of japonaiserie and chinoiserie had to do more with crafts, lacquer wear,
furniture. A culture where everything is art. Europeans start to collect and imitate these.
o They get the Genji screens with the stories: first translation is by Waley: 1925-33. first
known for translating Chinese. Fairy tale for Edwardian aesthetes. His epigraph is
French in an English translation: a Cinderella reference. Brings back the Galland
translation
 Not accurate. Leaves out all the poetry, cuts chapter. Murasaki Shikibu was one
of the greatest poets.
o Seidensticker: professor of modern Japanese culture in 70s. modernizes the translation.
o Royall Tyler: 2001, further into the world. Each translation brings it closer to us. Expert
in medieval japan. Warmer style in between the 2 translations.

Poetry and the aesthetics of courtly life

- Role of poetry in court society: the primary role of communication. Fits the aesthetic in Heian
Japan. What japan brings from China
o M. develops the vernacular prose and poetry: not the high Chinese- oriented poetry,
although she knows it well. The Chinese will always be more luxurious: Japan develops
a spare, elegant restraint. Speaking via poetry, you can hint things to allude to other
poems.
o One of the marks of a hero or heroine: is a good poem
o Calligraphy: the literary education is crucial, a sign of their education and character.
Graphology in the ancient world.
o The matter of paper and ink is also important. The quality of the writing indicates as
much as the poem itself. A fine line of ostentation.
- Genji teaches Murasaki how to write.
- Now: exchanging text messages is a similar practice: how short? How long? How sly?
- The poems are short and the text is long.
- Fixed structure: waka has 5 lines of 31 syllables. Every poem has to have a seasonal
reference.
o Haiku: 3 lines: 5 7 5 syllables.
- In japan they would rarely read it from back to back: these chapters are self-contained. A
transition may not be explained.
o Medieval or early japan: people would read a chapter according to the poems: the story
exists 4 the sake of the poems.

Tale of Genji as a novel

- This is an early novel: would be an unusual western novel:
o continuous prose narrative of considerable length, but the hero dies two thirds of the
way through and the novel just continues and picks up the next 2 generations
o Ambiguous ending: not clear whether the story ends or if she simply stopped writing.
o This a modernist method: open ending.
o Not driven by plot, what matters is how actions are reflected in characters:
psychological value
Major themes
- Rules
o Harem: this is acceptable, but there are rules of how attached he can be to them
o The emperor isn’t allowed to call on aristocrats, they aren’t servants. Commoners can be
called into service more often.
o Rules are relative: getting your stepmother pregnant / less horrible than wearing the
wrong robe
o Screens: hide the improper.
- Religion
o Buddhism of Heian period: the romantic attachments interfere with their intention to
renounce to the world.
o Murasaki’s situation: Genji can ruin her but he can also be her only chance, she’s an
orphan: Buddhism prohibits it because of her age tension: but you can think about it a
couple of years ahead.
- Women and men
o At first glance, patriarchal world: but women are equal partners to men.
o Sei Shonagon: another writer: pillow book, reflections on what makes a good or bad
lover.
o Society of discretion but no prudery as long as they keep it a secret.
- Romance
o Take a darker tone at the ending: the beauty of evanescence: you can’t find happiness in
the world: “grief does not correspond to love; the love will be shorter”
o The natural order is not acceptable: when Genji dies “The bright spring was dark that
year”: the seasonal order is the natural order in Japan: if that is annulled, we are at the
limits of the world.

The Chinese context of the Genji

- How Chinese is this novel: it’s the quintessential Japanese world, its japaneseness has been
neglected.
- China appears in many different ways: the song of everlasting sorrow, underlying master text:
Chinese emperor who lost his favorite concubine. Longs for her: image of transcendental and
impossible love.
o China is a faraway country that had a lot of authority in this japan, the soothsayers are
Chinese
o When he is in exile: starts building a hut that looks Chinese.
o Exile: lots of references to Chinese poetry: China as a rich culture: an outlandish space
- How different are the aesthetics between japan and Chinese writer?
o Murasaki Shikibu writes in 11th century: not part of the decorum for women to write
Chinese. An extremely educated woman: eavesdropping on her brother’s lessons. She
couldn’t bring in Chinese poetry. The poems are all waka poems (vernacular poems)
with a Japanese aesthetic
 The Japanese poem is shorter.
 Japanese is an agglutinative language: a word has plenty of syllables: density of
meaning. In Chinese one syllable is usually one word
 Japanese tradition involves a rhetoric of place names. Places are associated with
different themes: epithets: plans symbolize people. Much more coded language.
Suggestive, indirect, decorous.
  Usually don´t write about certain topics: liquor, which is really important in
China (associated with friends and poetry) love is not present in Chinese poetry,
but in japan they did.

The perspective of Women in the Tale

- How M registers women’s experience
o Sometimes powerful, sometimes pawns.
o Not an activist: with the rise of these tales or diaries, a lot of women writers appear:
whole phenomenon: has to do with political structures: these women are the bait for the
emperor: were hired as women in waiting to serve the Fujiwara family (aristocratic): this
clan was happy to have girls: brought up with exquisite education would be offered to
the emperor so that the family would control the imperial lineage and the grandson
would be the emperor.
o She was a female writer but it was a part of a patriarchal system
- This world: these powerful men have lots of women around. Women aren’t as active to see
their lovers. The world of love is male dominated.
o Rape in this language is not portrayed as such an ugly moment
o How does M express this world: shows the harsh reality: Genji is beautiful but he made
mistakes, had no self-control, slept with everybody? More feminist voice.
o But there are some moments where Genji appears to be perfect.
o Women are sometimes very passive. (Akashi lady)
- Women’s space: glass ceilings: M couldn’t compose in Chinese, lots of spaces women can
never go: but she as a narrator can adopt the male perspective.
o This is a work of fiction, not in the platonic sense, but in the sense that she imagined
spaces where she wasn’t allowed to go.

Questions of Genre
- Historical tale: European novel is usually about the contemporary world: not the case here.
o In contrast to the epic: it’s an antiestablishment literature: satirical parallel world. The
tradition of the novel in Europe works like this
o But in japan is different: the Japanese import genres from China and develop their own.
The one genre that didn’t exist in china was a long novel: there was no vernacular prose
writing: all was in Chinese.
- Characteristics of these early monogatari
o The emperor became a patron or vernacular poetry.
o Writing prose in Japanese is difficult
o A couple of other monogatari before Genji: tale of Ise: but these are much more
episodic: no string that collects them
 Episodic comes from the writing: comes from an oral appreciation
o Sophistication in the repetition: that creates themes. M manages to bind episodes
together in this way.

Historiography and politics

- The provenance of the tale comes from historiography
o In china the epic was huge, it adopted a historiographic purpose. The Japanese adopted
this model. The court appointed people in the early period of Heian to compile histories.
o But tales fill in what histories leave out
 o This tale is a historical novel, because it gives a sense of the politics of the time: semi
historical. The father of Genji is ´plotted on the Daigo emperor. (100 years before M
wrote) the exile is plotted on another figure.
o But there are of course invented factors.
- The tale opens “in a certain reign, whose could it have been?” this brings us back to the
question of episodes: gives us a sense that there is a specific reign, but it isn’t fixed.
o The novel positions itself as a historiographical novel but a vague one.
o Some episodes serve to criticize the Fujiwara: they abuse their power.

Genji and the varieties of Buddhism

- How Buddhist is this novel
o Criticizes both Confucianism: state and social relations system and Buddhism: the belief
system for personal salvation
o The novel is Buddhist in a cultural sense: in this period the Pure Land Buddhism there
was a sect: you don’t quite have to reach nirvana right away, there is a intermediary
role, the pure land, you can reach that by copying sutras, pilgrimages… (period in which
women leave)
o Buddhism is the way out: of mistakes and faults… third princess for example.
Becoming a nun is an escape from pain and faults.
- Buddhism in the last third of the Genji: Uji chapters
o Gets more implicitly philosophically Buddhist: the themes of evanescence: present in
Mahayana Buddhism: helping others to obtain salvation, not just focusing on your
enlightenment. Oriented towards this world. Free yourself from attachments from
attaching yourself as much as possible.
o Popular and externalized Buddhism. But there are also retreats to get away from this.

The modernity of the tale

- Because this is a court world and now, we live in democracy it seems foreign to us.
o But there is an immediacy about it: of romantic interaction. The poems aren’t old
fashioned, because their witticism and indirectness seem familiar to us (text messages).
o The indeterminacy of life is also modern: the level of psychology is contemporary.
Genji has to negotiate his love for Murasaki with outside factors. Nothing is perfect.
Although Genji is flawed, he isn’t a Don Juan, he negotiates his conflicts and tries to
priorities his ladies. The richness of these relationships and lives is truly modern.

5. The Lusiads
Camoes and the Global Imaginary
Luis Vaz de Camoes: great writer of 16th century: less well known
- Why is it good to teach this lesser known work? To what extent is it world literature
o Portugal is a small country; Camoes is the first great writer to think globally.
o He represents this global imagination: the world is opening out through expansion and
exploration: he lives in Asia, this word is out globally from its very inception
- What were the Portuguese explorers looking for? How did they get east?
 o Fall of Constantinople: pivot point in the discovery of new world. So, when the Turks
and their Muslim allies take over Constantinople, it restricts and even closes the land
route to the spice trade in India, which is extraordinarily profitable.
 Columbus: America
 Vasco da Gama: tip of Africa:
o Mapping technology developed in Portugal, get from one port to another. These were
developed in 15th century.
o The Lusiads is a global mapping of this “new” world.

Invoking the epic tradition

- Odyssey: also does mapping and exploration
- This is a new departure for global imagination, it is a national work but also a returning to
Homer
o It begins the same way Virgil did.
- There is a whole series of rewritings and this is the most recent one: this writer isn’t looking
back at a great national literature, but at Greek ancient literature
o Create prestige by emulating Homer.
o Strategic that it goes back more to Homer than to Virgil: Camoes rivals are in the Virgil
line (more romantic)
- Admires homer: how does he treat him
o “do you think Ulysses ever ventured so far?” there is also rivalry, in two ways
 Who knows where homer ever went?
 How far did he go? The Portuguese have STRATEGY.
They draw from him but also rival him
- This difficulty we had mapping Homer is wat Camoes is criticizing. Homer is fantasy. This is
real exploration. He doesn’t have metaphors, fantasies or great language: he has the real.
o Excitement and pride about bringing the world into an epic text: never done before
according to him

Mapping reality
- Literary mapping of the world that goes along the cartographic. How does he do that
o Starts in media res: maps the southern coast of Africa, the Indian ocean ant then goes
across it and then to Asia
 Very much like a portolan chart: highlights ports
o Epic ends with all the Asian places he came to know.
- He sets epic 75 yrs. before his own time: years of Vasco da Gama and Columbus, and also
infuses his own experience: he tells the things HE knows.
o Narration not only geographic but also ethnographic interest in different peoples
- First attempt of a European to confront cultural multiplicity in a global scale. (not always in a
positive way) they try to reduce different things. They encounter
o Native
o Muslims: religious rivalry. Islam is not seen in some places as a religion but as an
empire. One emerging Christian empire encountering an Islamic empire.
 Some of these barbers are more civilized than us.
 When they encounter non-Muslims, they suppose they are Christians: they think
in a binary.
- The Africans they meet: good and bad. The good ones bring you dinner, the others are
cannibals. They are navigators, help them get into Indian ocean.
Realism and the Classical genealogy
- Two monotheistic rivals: but we also have classical antiquity, the Greek and roman gods.
There is emphasis in that this is reality, but we have Bacchus as the enemy and Polyphemus
in Africa.
o There there for that literary genealogy he is trying to draw, not because of actual belief.
- The Europeans understand paganism, like India: relating it to ancient Greece. This then leads
to the connections we now see between India and Greece: remember that Camoes lives in
Asia and probably related the two.
o Bacchus, the Greek god Dionysus, is in Euripides's The Bacchae seen as an Eastern god,
an Asian god. He comes to Greece, is rejected at first. There's a big struggle about
whether this foreign, Eastern Asian god will be accepted. He finally is.
- The classical reference gives him the chance to stand alongside from Homer: what’s the value
added by “realism”
o It seems artificial, like a literary embellishment, but also: he adds realism slyly to the
epic: you get modernity pressing against fantasy: Adamastor: wants to rape the nymph
but because of scale its impossible.
o Curse of Adamastor: like P. these implications are different: it´s not like he won’t be
recognized. Vasco will get famous, but his successors will be cursed. Very grim and real
curse. He will be punished for pride: hubris: a classical value that still works in the
Christian ethic.
o The ancients didn’t know about Africa: a bold way to connect old and new: he discovers
a mythical creature (Table Mountain) absent from the Homeric epic: discovers a new
antiquity.

Colonialism, nationalism, critique

- The Polyphemus episode is an interesting interpretation of the encounter with other cultures.
Arrogant Odysseus that narrates the tale of the “barbaric” cyclops and they aren’t as barbaric.
o The Adamastor curse gives voice to those who think the Portuguese colonization is not
the best for the colonized. Mixed blessing
o Not necessarily the best for the colonizers: because of the curse.
- A man in Lisbon: warns them not to do it: you are gonna harm people. And Adamastor says
THEY are gonna end up harmed.
o Stark realism from the old man: like the one in Gilgamesh in Uruk: just about to enter
the cedar forest.
- Pride in exploration: fear that it is hubris. There was an economic decline at the time of
Camoes writing. Luxury items brought back from the new world: economic world. But then
there is decline by the time Camoes writes: 1560-1572 (publish).
o Ambiguity of the enterprise: is what he’s thinking about.
- Portuguese nationalism: it seems boastful, but there is a reflection, a moment of uncertainty
and ambiguity of the enterprise.
o Nationalism is created not just by developing your nation, but by a rivalry: a relation to
a wider world.
o They enter the epic as Lusitanians (classical term for Portuguese) and come back as
Portuguese. They get tested: become themselves abroad
o Local rivalry: Spain. Also, with Germany, that separated itself from Catholicism.
Counter reformation.
o Religious rivalry: Islam (economic)
 o Exploration: they aren’t out to colonize, they open trade routes, they don’t have enough
people to colonize. Not concerned with conquest or conversion (unlike Spain) much
more about trade, identity. The good native doesn’t want to become a Christian, e wants
to trade and show the trade routes.

Portuguese and the form of the epic

- The globe is becoming one: Camoes is transforming that into literature.
- Creates Portuguese as literary language: wasn’t considered as such. A Shakespearian showing
of language: speaks about “sludge”; something that classical poems wouldn’t write about
since they wouldn’t experience it
- Cervantes: makes fun of the romance tradition: plays with the unreality principle.
- Camoes is thinking about the comedy but also the tragedy of realism: he is also a great poet.
Haunting literary moments. “easy to die”.
o There’s this move towards realism, but in terms of the language, the sonnets are in a
modern Portuguese, whereas this epic harkens back to classical tradition: uses archaic
Portuguese in the epic, in contrast to the sonnets
o Torn between embracing the modern world and the classical world

World literature and the decline of Portugal

- This work made a disaster for Portugal: Camoes addresses young king: Dom Sebastiano. He
thinks the imperial adventure are causing death on both sides. Distraction from the Arabic
rivals that are menacing: both Constantinople and northern Africa are Arabic
- He has a geopolitical project that’s different from the one that got him to southeast Asia.
- Epic ends with a double appeal: pay me, put me in an adviser position (of the young king) I’ll
write world literature about your next conquest
o He listened to him: tragically. Was a religious fanatic, and was unstable? Starts a whole
expedition to conquer morocco and north Africa, hideously defeated. Entire nobility is
destroyed, Spain takes over Portugal for decades
- In a geopolitical world where civilizations clash on various senses: timely text. We can map
our modern world from this work. Has a global perspective.

Geography and cartography

- Camoes is the first great poet who is living this first global perspective.
- Opening canto: role of geography of mapping the new world and the imperial prowess:
o Taprobana is mentioned: Camoes uses a spatial imagery, goes back to Ptolemy. His
treatise was written around 150 CE in Greek: lost for centuries and rediscovered in the
renaissance period. Became most important treatise on Geography. Taprobana is his
name for Sri Lanka.
 Was considered the world’s most eastern edge: when he says he´ll discover it, he
ways he´ll travel to the edge of the world.
 He sets to narrate Vasco da Gama´s travels: he will discover seas which had never
been explored.

Portolan Maps
- How did they use maps?
o Vasco da Gama when circumnavigating Africa used portolan maps: they were already
being used in the middle ages: in the 16 th century there is an expansion in their use: the
idea is to map out port cities: the interior of the continents is unexplored.
 - One of the first maps that mapped out the new world and the Indian ocean is the Cantino map:
1502 designed in Portugal and top secret: strategic political knowledge. Portugal had the
monopoly over spice trade.
o Stolen by an Italian spy.
o It shows brasil but doesn’t have name America: invented by Waldseemuller: he created
the first map with the word America for the south American continent. 1507: Ptolemaic
map
- Waldseemuller makes another 1516: portolan chart. Creates the carta marina: shows king
Manuel the 1st riding the sea monster: domesticating ocean.
o While the Spanish were discovering the new world in the west, Camoes was writing
about Vasco da Gama in the East.
 We will build a new reign: competition for dominion and expansion in the ocean.

The world of the Lusiads

- The ap of the Lusiads:
o Spatial imagery in the Lusiads is very complex: we have two different sets of maps:
portolan charts (practical) Ptolemaic maps: who is very present from stanza 1 to canto
10:
 Thetis the nymph actually shows to Vasco da Gama what was the Ptolemaic
world: a world of three continents: Oikumene: Africa, Asia, Europe.
 Hardly ever does Camoes reference the New World, very brief reference. Its
really about the discovery of continents already known to Ptolemy.
o Cartographic imagery: the zonal map, a tradition from Macrobius and which delineates
the world, divides it not into continents but into climatic zones. He references the torrid
zones: there was a tradition in the renaissance to think about the world in terms of
inhabited and uninhabited zones.
 Vasco da Gama traverses the torrid zone: the equator, goes beyond the
inhospitable climatic zones
- All these cartographic images conflate in the epic. Fantasy of discovery: of course, these seas
were explored before: by Arabs, Chinese. he needs these guides. What he proposes is the
fantasy that Europeans explored this part of the world.
o Established the myth that the renaissance is a European invention, and that they were the
first world explorers.
o Global epic, and at the same time, the first global myth producing epic: first European
fantasy
- Cautionary tale: Adamastor is a retired sailor. “I was lord of the seas, look what has become
of me” epic ends with Thetis explaining future deeds to Vasco da Gama: how many battles
will there be?
o The old man warns them. Don’t go beyond the human boundaries. Ambivalence, also
urges king to conquer Africa.
o Camoes writes at a time when the Portuguese empire wasn’t at its height: lots of things
happened, fierce competition with Spain for dominion. There is an under Castilian
undertone in the epic. While Camoes sings about processes of Portuguese heroes, he
writes in a time where everything was going downhill. The king to which it was
dedicated died 4 years later. Leaves Portugal without an heir.

Appropriation and empire

- What happens to this epic after Camoes dies and it goes out to the world
o The year Portugal became Spanish: it was translated into Spanish
 o What was a Portuguese national epic becoming this transportable commodity used for
all different purposes?
- Luis Gomez de Tapia: translated the work into Spanish and had other people magnify its
importance
o First published text by Gongora: attempt to make Camoes Spanish
o Why: the work gave the Spanish a possibility to think of it as a marker of the translation
of empires. While the Portuguese expanded at the beginning of 16 th century, the Spanish
take up at the end of the century. They co opt the power they had absorbed and build on
that.
- At the end of the poem Tenochtitlan was mentioned: easy for the Spanish to think of this
poem as leading to the incorporated Spanish expansion.
o Big deluxe edition: annotates version by Manuel de Faria e Sousa: published it in 1639
in Madrid. Explanation on how to read it for the Spanish public. Published the year
before Portugal regained its autonomy and became Portugal again.
o Manuscript of e Sousa: 1622. This manuscript belonged to Hohn Batterson Stetson.
o Spanish appropriate Camoes for their own imperial purposes almost immediately after is
death. He´s considered a national poet in Portugal.
- Camoes as this national poet is a 19 th century invention. Up until then, he´s being translated
and appropriated by different countries: in England there’s a translation by Richard Fanshawe
1655: to celebrate the rise of the British empire.
o Second translation of 1776 by William Mickle: dedicates translation to the shareholders
of the east India company.
o Lusiads becomes a poem of commerce and trade. We first have a dedication to the king
and then to a world wide web of commerce subscribers. “Lusiads is the epic of
commerce” changes not only language but also function.
o England’s rise is only possible by the defeat of the Spanish armada. Epic being
regenerated by the translation.
- Traditional Portuguese scholarship reads it as a monument of the Portuguese discoveries,
o Critique: scholars now read it as a criticism of empire. What we see is an irony of
Portugal’s imperial endeavors
o We can read it as both: there’s a tension between his enthusiasm for the new commercial
spaces and also as a critique of empire.

6. Candide
Biography of Voltaire
- One of the first great comic fictions to embrace the possibilities of a newly global economy
- Voltaire: was a professional writer. Unusual at the time. Late 17 th century. Oroonoko is a
source for Candide. He was incredibly productive. Philological work, historiographer, poet.
He is a scientist. He is also into finance: he invests, markets his own work. Madame du
Chatelet: his lover, was a philosophe. Essayist. She dies in childbirth
- Voltaire takes an offer from the Prince of Prussia. Bromance. But then is thrown into jail.
- Begins to write Candide in Fernery. Relationship between philosopher and ruler usually
doesn’t go well.
o Theme of Candide: satire of the prince (Baron)
o Dissolute nobleman Pococurante: translation of his palace
The literary marketplace
- Changing book market: mixed market, people struggling, people competing: liberation from
the patron pattern (if you weren’t rich). You can write for the public not needing to write for
court or church
o Good for V: he is edgy towards authority.
- He is amazed by Britain: because of freedoms and their TRADE. Imperialism where imperial
adventures yield riches. They had the east India company: private enterprise: V is interested
in private enterprise: because it escapes the hands of larger govt.
- If something he was writing was too controversial for Paris, he goes abroad: international
market: chaotic free market, no regulation. You have copyright which you sell in your
country. He publishes in French in 4 countries (Candide) he protects himself and his
publishers, no publisher or author is mentioned, and the store where you can buy it. Evades
censorship, hopes to evade piracy. He´ll hit the market first. Everybody knew, but as long as
he didn’t admit it an ok. Makes money from tis copyright.
o Voltaire published Candide simultaneously in several different countries in order to
prevent publishing houses with which he had no relationship from quickly reproducing
the work without paying him royalties.
- An English translation appears and they out him: mentioning him will increase sales. Best
seller: he doesn’t get money from this version.

Candide, Satire, Leibniz

- What does it criticize?
- Lisbon earthquake 1755: inspires V. destroys 85% city. In Candide it happens during mass on
All soul’s day: with the rise of enlightenment: what causes natural events: is there a good god
or is it all random or did god create the watch and later disappear?
o This inspires debate: Leibniz, like many philosophers struggled with the justification of
the world “theodicy” how is god justifies given than terrible events happen?
o There would be alternative theological explanation (Manichean explanation: good things
happen and bad things happen). Conflicting forces: more physics talk. Leibniz is also a
mathematician and physicist. Practices metaphysics, things that can’t be measured:
theoretical conception (natural philosophy and metaphysics: are both his work).
o Problem of monotheism: how can a perfect god create a flawed world?
o For Leibniz theodicy is the answer: we live in the best of all possible worlds: satire
Pangloss. The world was created, he believes that, and since this god is a good god, it
must be that this is the best world. Has a monotheistic conception that this is only one
world and it is a good one: no Manichean tensions?
- How does he account for bad things happening?
o Theodicy is more an abstract philosophical question that thinks of different possible
worlds: alternative universes, this thinking comes out of logic. Some claims are true in
this world but not in another conceivable worlds: he questions what’s necessary, what
isn’t, and he transfers this to the physical and metaphysical worlds.
o How should we deal with these bad things: he values harmony, order? Let’s decrease
disorder and increase harmony. Moral value.
o Monad: develops a strange form of atomism, thinks about the smaller units of the
universe: what things can you cut into smaller pieces with nothing lost. There’s
something indivisible: soul (you can’t cut people into smaller pieces)
- Micromegas: Voltaire plays with these alternative universes (satire): first science fiction. El
dorado is also a utopian space. Africa is another possible world (Camoes)
 o Voltaire combines real possible words (Buenos Aires) with a utopia. El dorado is
somewhere in between, it was in maps.

Best of all possible worlds: el dorado and utopia

- Voltaire’s values in el dorado:
o rich place, of luxury, but no aristocracy. Communal space.
o Technology: jewels are common property.
o Religion: Voltaire is a deist (watchmaker) if there’s a watch, there has to be a
watchmaker. Despite his satire on “the best of possible worlds” he believes the world
has to be in harmony wit the rest of the universe. In el dorado, there is religion but no
priests: they worship god, but not to get their own needs met (selfishness) no point in
praying to the watchmaker, he just built the match. We´re too small to know our creator.
You’re better off if you’re in youth wit the harmony of nature.
- After the Lisbon earthquake, he writes a poem. “anyone who thinks this is the best possible
world is stupid” Rousseau complains: stop putting the blame on god, put it on human
relations: people stayed.
o Voltaire changes genres from a philosophical poem to a satire. What does he gain from
that?
o He tests the statement “this is the best world”: compares brazil, turkey, Germany… pulls
back on the melodrama, uses comic devices, instead of having himself say this is the
best world, he makes his character SAY IT despite all that happens.

Comedy and Philosophy

- But its not the worst world: it’s silly to say it’s the best no matter what, but this is a critique of
a certain kind of philosophy.
- Comedy and philosophy are related from the beginning of philosophy. Aristophanes in The
Cloud
- Candide shows philosophers fixed in an idea no matter what, unflinching.
- Big benefit of Candide compared to the poem: instead of having an authoritarian voice,
Candide is dialogic, various perspective: we have models of practical philosophy
o Particularly people who are outside of the power structure: goes along Voltaire’s
political critique: the ones in authority are the less to know reality: Cacambo,
Cunegonde and the old lady are actively philosophical. Pangloss is inactive.
o What was wrong about Pangloss is that he was an authorative teacher, his student never
questions him. Whereas practical philosophy so born out of life, allows characters to
carry on no matter what
- Older woman: suffered plenty: and yet I loved life. Philosophic awareness and distance.
Cunegonde is a survivor, has to accept compromises, sins a lot, does what she needs to do to
be in control of her life. “my inquisitor and my Jew” agency within the straight limits of her
life.

Cultivating the garden

- The ending: Candide decides to tend to his own garden in turkey.
o No longer going on a ship, they’re going to stay put.
o Turkey is a limbo space: between Europe and non-Europe. Place of conflict now is a
conflict where there’s balance and harmony: his version of the best of possible worlds
o Retreat from the world? It’s a slowdown of pace, it was really fast.
o Struggle with finding the middle between being rigid and chaotic
 o A garden is nature but controlled, harmonized. Aesthetic and moral cultivation.
- “our garden” creates a minimal community: they are all together, they’ll pass the superficial
obstacles of physicality and sexuality
- Pre established harmony Leibniz: there has to be a connection between our minds and the
world, since we can apprehend the world, it has to be constructed in some way that both have
to be connected
o Different kind of homecoming from Odyssey. From the palace (a parodic garden of
Eden) we go to a humanist garden: within a divine frame, we have to create.
- Technology: in el dorado the real value added in the utopia is technology, they construct
things: the cultivation is becoming industrialized. Beginning of periods of scientific
agriculture. Books are like new forms of navigational aids: an instrument for navigating
world.
- Pococurante ’s library: Candide compliments him in Homer, but he says he has to have it:
luxury. For Voltaire a book is technology, a moral tool. Building a new world (freemasonry)
- New form of world literature: tries to negotiate conflicting forces and tries to bring them into
harmony.

7. Lu Xun and Eileen Chang

Lu Xun in context
- Greatest writers of modern china: Lu Xun is a previous generation
- Xun
o Great Chinese modernist: the literature reflected in the revolutionizing of China
o Changes in China
o He is international modernist: wants to connect to the wider world. Japan is progressing
and has ambitions in china. There is fascination towards japan and world
o He studies medicine: the new western way. Sino Japanese war: turns to literature to push
culture forward and make Japanese people oppose this violence towards Chinese.
o Absorbs western culture: even though he opposes Japanese imperialism. Becomes fluent
in German and Japanese. Translates plenty: from Greek, German, Russian.
 How are we to deal with the decaying tsarist regime: serf population: we are
behind in western Europe.
o Becomes part of a group. New culture movement: may 4 th movement (1919) protests
about the Versailles treaty: lands handed to japan. Political movement
 He is interested in cultural politics: how culture and literature can reform china
and make it independent: both independent and international at the time. Much
like world literature
 Ambivalent: starts magazines.
o Writes diary of a madman: based on Gogol: writes for a friend’s magazine: New Youth.
Start a magazine to change the world:
 Movement based on Beijing: plenty of students
 Shanghai: most international city on the mainland.
o Publish poetry, translation, manifestos… WORLD LITERATURE

China and modernism

- Magazine tradition: also happening in Europe: people trying to change things. Inspiring
themselves from the east (two-way street inspirational route) European culture at a dead end.
 - Chinese compilators appreciate Wilde: because of comedy and strong female characters.
- Diary of a madman: doesn’t seem like a satire.
o Gogol: has a mixture of seriousness and hijinks. Very Russian.
- Modernism wants to shake up language: rectify language: needs to reflect spoken language
o Hu Shih: a preliminary discussion of literary reform. “do not groan if you’re not ill”
ELIMINATE OLD CLICHÉ, EMBRACE POPULAR EXPRESIONS.
o Interweave with classical international works
o The alphabet: seems to them much simpler that Chinese characters: using the letters in
“The true story of Ah Q”
o But they remain quite loyal to classical tradition: do not turn in to the west: wants to
connect modern Chinese culture to great tradition of vernacular prose.
 Dante and Luther are models: made vernaculars a living language: rejected Latin.
 Europe as a model for what they should do with China

The diary of a Madman

- 2 parts: note that presents it in classical Chinese: presents it as a document: psychiatric case
study, not literary work. Modelled on Freud’s case studies.
- The madman then writes in vernacular: we can do a serious story in street slang. The fact that
it’s a document on paranoia helps make that transition.
- Create a different reader:
- The craziness of the madman: people try to be nice and he misinterprets: running joke
- Perceives problems: abusive landlords, women sex slaves: goes unnoticed.
o Allegory or trains readers to read around margins for moments of social critique.
o Can be interpreted as allegory, but he actually is reading about Chinese cannibal history:
which are actual people. THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING.
- Relation between introduction and document:
o Modernist thing: shakes up form of story: frame tale, but no closing frame (1001 nights)
breaks off
o Very subversive: funny in creepy way. you think you have a sober report, but there is a
strange play between madman and brother: in intro they are unnamed. NARRATOR
DOESN’T KNOW which brother the diary is from.
 Could be the older brother who handed it in: he ate is brother and claims to be
cured. Maybe the madman wrote the preface since author was eaten.
 Madman has been cured and brother hands it in: not likely.
- Surrealism before surrealism, psychology before Freud
- Fear of being cannibalized by past: old Confucianism, its patriarchy. NEW YOUTH who
might subvert it.

Imperial bureaucracy and the Story of Ah Q

- Puts new spin on new youth movement: reverts the honor of the elders.
- Story of ah Q: eldest sons of richest families are the only ones to make it: and they make it
how people would have for 1000 yrs. in china: imperial examination system.
o Examination tat starts on local level, moves to regional level, province, imperial
academy: the way to get to government jobs. Exam involves literature: old texts, edited
by Confucius: poetry collection. Grueling exam. Write 8-line poetry… why would that
train you for service? high level of literacy, created meritocracy, instill values different
from warrior class: precursor to SAT. test of character
o System degenerated for only the privileged: meritocracy corrupted. For eldest sons of
richest families.
 - Poetry as key to understand human behavior. Something similar in Genji.
o Never think of literature as some separate realm of pure aesthetics. Same happens in
modernist writers.
- In the story, the exam is abolished: what happens to elder sons? From the perspective of Ah Q
(lowest of low) the richest still receive privilege for passing exam.
o Interesting perspective on revolution: communist party is being established. But eldest
sons join revolution and try to coopt it
o Lu Xun is accused of being a fake foreign devil: he had gone to Happen.
o Revolution isn’t quite a change: they don’t cut their hair, just tie it higher. Those who
passed exam are now the loudest revolutionaries

What is to be done
- Co operative factory system is the answer to this question.
o Also, a feminist perspective
- Lu Xun probes the limits of what can happen: re writes Candide: Ah Q is Candide and
Rousseau’s natural man: satisfies wants, isn’t moral or immoral, goes through misadventures
and thinks the best. “sometimes man is meant to have his head chopped off”
- A bit like Rousseau’s critique of Voltaire: Voltaire afforded a satiric distance and melancholy.
Lu Xun believes that he doesn’t have a stance outside. There isn’t a happy resolution like in
Candide.
o We don’t have a utopian space outside: but we can hope for the future, wake the
sleepers: optimism despite everything
o Political ambiguity. But he does support change.

Lu Xun’s place in literary history

- Lu Xun park in Shanghai. Community park. Captures his importance as a literary figure in
20th century
- Mao rehabilitated his figure: he was too tainted by japan.
- Lu Xun escapes all categories: even the one of the great writers. “these attempts of mine are
not works of art”.
- Work that refuses closeness and completion. Infused literature with lots of other language:
vernacular, medical language: made that acceptable for literature: Modernist trailblazer for
China. Almost anti literature.

Interview with Yanping Zhang: Lu Xun

- He was a critic of educational system: the way in which literature was taught. He is now
canon.
- Very ambivalent, uncertain and at times dark. Also, funny, nostalgic. Not repulsed with
Chinese tradition but fascinated with it. But is critical with Chinese classical literary tradition
o Uses a more vernacular language. Biting and sarcastic. Sometimes doesn’t read as
smoothly: wants to render things directly: not comply to standard readers.
o Uncertainty in reliability of narrator and in the narrative (madman)

Eileen Chang in context

- Tumultuous time in history: she gets caught up in this history.
- Grows up in Shanghai: writer: part of the late new youth movement.
- World is falling apart. Chinese civil world: WW2. Married to a traitor with Japanese. Also
betrays her on a personal level
 o Double treason: recurring theme: entanglement between politics and personal
- Claims to be apolitical but politics meddles with personal life: the politics of romance (Lust,
Caution)
- Earlier stories, this is never there. In Sealed off: something has caused streets of Shanghai to
be sealed off. Some political thing: in the background.
- A military language used for courtship: in another story. Impossible to separate love and
warfare (Tolstoy, war and peace, she mixes these)
- Politics in Chang is oblique and sometimes explicit: not an explicit war and peace: life
between war and peace.

Irony and modernity

- She is aware of herself as a writer: also present in Lu Xun. Satiric aspect: ironic distance. We
see this is distance
- In sealed off the theme of writing:
o In the buns with print: he reads his bun. Like in Joyce’s Ulysses. Traditional food
wrapped in western style newspaper. Writing as a local and physical phenomenon: in
cosmopolitan cities that encapsulate the world.
o She is figuring out how to be global writer from a peripheral location. Peripheral to
china and to the rest of the world: “life was like the bible, translated from….” Life as a
multiple translation.
o Peripheral to mainland china but much more connected to rest of the world because
Shanghai and Hong Kong are very international.
o Sharp eyes to customs: wat people are wearing. Cheongsam: mixture between west and
east for an elite
- She moves to America: makes this cultural transition. Marries script writer: she was always
very cinematic: visual sense in her stories. Love in a fallen city: chiaroscuro. Lots of darkness
and glimmering things.
- Brilliant modern dialogue. Reflects her own experience in diplomacy and negotiation in the
war in china, in the French influence in Shanghai
o Like in Candide: bombardment is like earthquake: how do you survive? Happiness in
the face of tragedy.

Yanping Zhang: style of Eileen Chang

- Eileen Chang cult in 1990s and 2000. Reception of work in mainland china. Avoided writing
about politics in 1940s. not leftist. Work banned in mainland china after 1949. CT Hsia:
professor of Chinese in Columbia university: founder of modern Chinese literature studies.
- Her language: uniqueness and difference in her language. More reminiscent of traditional
vernacular novels: Ming and Quing dynasty. Like Hu Shih said: go back to traditional
vernacular workers and then write Chinese. Reappraises modern Chinese writers. Book
became available in 1980. Paradigm shift with anti-leftist shift.
o Her work became at first better known abroad. (1001 nights) also had a hard time
breaking into English market. Tried to render her language into a plain English, reduce
or minimalize and eliminate idioms and metaphors.
o The American audience was used to the images of Pearl Buck, they weren’t ready for
Chang’s version of Chinese life
o She’s concerned with a society in transition: novels of manners in western tradition
(Jane Austen) female genre: but she’s different in her concerns: the setting is very
cosmopolitan.
 o Shanghai cosmopolitan: English concession, French concession, German concession.
Western works entered. In her depiction the world is a world in limbo. The old world Is
dying and the new world is unsure of its birth.
o “Virginia wolf who wanted to echo world concessions”: underlying schizophrenia:
treacherous peacefulness: figures on the verge of a nervous breakdown, especially
women.
- What keeps this from being depressive: she is as comic as Austen and as sorrowful as
Wharton.
o But there is a primitive passion at the background: related to her deep anxiety as a
modern or semi colonial subject caught between east and west, and tradition and
tradition.
o Interested in depicting husband hunting protagonists: manipulate relationships.
- Like Chinese poetry: importance of images there. Use of language is different from may 4 th
generation (they were still experimenting with modern vernacular Chinese)

8. Borges
Origins of Borgesian modernism
- Fictional worlds made out of literature:
- Comes from early XX century: composed of literary movements and revolutions: small
journals and manifestos: tried to revolutionize culture, politics, writing. Comparison with Lu
Xun.
- There’s this provincialism of the 19th century that he wants to break with.
- Stuck in Europe during the world: immerses himself in the world of manifestos and journals.
- Founder of Sur: emphasizing France and French culture: becomes place to recreate argentine
literary culture.
o In Europe he is part of the ultraist movement: Avant Garde world
o In Buenos Aires: develops his new world literature orientation

The library of Babel

- He imagines the entire world composed of books.
- He worked as a librarian: knew this world. Takes it to an extreme: hexagonal rooms that go
on to infinity. Imagines a philosophical and mathematical debate on the dimensions of the
library.
- Leibnitz and Voltaire: universe mathematically conceived: he refers to Leibnitz: shares
interest for combinations: he carries out is quest
- Who created this infinite world: A God, (Leibnitz) theology and philosophy created this
world?
- Borges was not progressist: different librarians look for different books, insanity and suicide
lurks. Borges as a mix of Kafka and Leibnitz: fairy type castle, closed off. Kafka has labyrinth
like stories.
- Grew up surrounded by literature.

Universalism and Genre

 - Detective stories: was a sub literary genre at the time. Death and the compass: heavily based
on detective stories. Sets up reader in a way that makes you think the detective is looking for
clues and is trapped at the end: not conventional, is a meta detective story
- Doesn’t shy away from a genre that wasn’t considered literary enough.
- Argentine popular culture: he was interested in crossing geo cultural barriers
o Lu Xun: his answer to the Chinese crisis is to figure out how to become Chinese. Borges
wants to become universal
- That goes along with the world made out of libraries: international books
- This is part of his universal success: much more successful overseas: world literature
phenomenon: he absorbs the culture of translation
- He is interested in world literature: what’s happening in the world through books.
- Sur: network of marketing for books all over the world.
- The local is also very important to Borges. At first, he doesn’t know whether he wants to be
“More French than the French” but then he immerses himself in localism, and later on goes to
universalism. This helps him to capture the local feeling (argentine writer and tradition)
- Death and the compass: in a surreal setting: but it captured a local color that his official local
literature didn´t
- Anti-nationalist, communist and fascist: not a nationalistic writer. “the cult of local color is a
recent European cult which the nationalists ought to reject as foreign”: much deeper level:
common humanity. He can see the world whole that you can’t see if you’re stuck in Europe.
o Common to Lu Xun
o Camoes: you become Portuguese by becoming global

Metafiction: Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote

- Pierre Menard: often read purely as metafiction: detective story on what did PM did.
- Opening paragraph: “the visible oeuvre”. He was blind.
- Strange language: in opening of story. translation of the severe cultural politics going on in Bs
as in 1930s. “infamous decade”: coup after another. Borges is figuring out in this story how to
universalize local problems by translation and bringing them up to fictional level. Takes
irreconcilable tensions ant translates them into crazy speculation that someone re wrote Don
Quixote
o Imaginary Frenchman: lives in Nimes: Borges writing in the center of the periphery and
refers to periphery in center.
- The text of Cervantes and that of Medard are verbally identical, but the second is almost
infinitely richer: we can’t invent anything new but we can make things better.
o Truth is the mother of history: before it was a cliché, but now this is radical historicism.
Is this a joke? As a reader you have to be a detective. Cervantes starts out writing satire,
Quixote goes crazy by reading so many books (Borges would know) chapter 8 Q is
about to fight but manuscript breaks off, Cervantes apologizes in chapter 9. Completes it
with a Moore manuscript: a Spanish founding text finished by a Moor? You want to see
the rest of the story: but it is by a moor: then he says “truth is the mother of history”
 This lying dog has written his truth. And this is rewritten by semi imaginary
Frenchman. Instead if imitating, he is a postmodernist Cervantes.

The garden of forking paths and the politics of literature

- We have artificial pure literary world, but if you read around the edges and follow literary
references, they aren’t quite abstract: inscribed in religious and political conflict.
o Huge emotional content: there are social, personal, religious issues: not at all just word
worlds.
 - He isn’t melodramatic, doesn’t play into emotions. “nothing Is more argentine that the
reserve, the fatalism”. This is clear in the detective like stories: end in death.
- In garden of forking paths: WWI: a secret agent communicates by killing someone. World of
secrecy and double agents.
- Chinese garden: there is a detective plot and another dimension much more metaphysical.
Labyrinth symbol: it’s the art of the Chinese garden.
o Post Leibnizian idea: Leibnitz fits well with the garden of his era. Symmetrical: this
labyrinth messes that up. Disorientation is part of Borges’ aesthetic: orientalist
disorientation.
o An orientalist is murdered: part of the world literature interest.
- Imperial China as parallel to Argentina: also, the periphery: but its not a desert: it’s a place of
totality, excess. Super Buenos Aires.
o Uncanny interplay between words and murder: Dr Albert believes the labyrinth isn’t
physical: its all words: it´s just words according to him, but it comes back and kills him:
world literature is interwoven with colonialism and imperialism.

Fiction and Futurity

- Dimension of the fake, the copy between the original, the unreal within reality: the fictional
world is connected to the real world.
o Moments in which the fictional world infects real world: Tlon: conspiracy of scholars
start to plant it in the encyclopedia: comes out of French enlightenment, comes to order
the world but now it gives out sense of disorder
- Shelley: poets cast shadows of futurity in front of them: Kafka anticipates the holocaust;
Borges anticipates that the rage for rational order can create its own disorder: anticipates
conflict that will arise from the enlightenment (Holocaust).
o Has to do with repressive utopianism of fascists and communists: reconstruct a
romanticist past. Create a fictional world.
- He really believes that the world doesn’t have to be this way: literature can change it, not
merely reflect it.
- Believed that writing long books was futile: so, he wrote books about books. “let’s pretend
these books already exist”. Don’t add another world literature masterpiece, but let’s construct
these smaller stories that are footnotes so they can intervene in the world more effectively.
o For him the map of WL is like a portolan map: you have a compass: you go from one
master work for another and that’s how you find yourself: by zig zagging.
- Deals with book makers: professions that have brought upon these masterpieces.
Encyclopedias: he also studies them. Our encyclopedia has changed: no longer organized
from A to Z, crowdsourced: in the future Borges might be seen as the last great witness to the
world of analog books and everything this implied: THE PROPHET OF WIKIPEDIA.

On first reading Borges

- Certain commonality in the experience of first reading him: “I don’t understand but its special
how language is being used”: mixing of cultural imaginaries.

Populism and politics

- His politics: he wrote over a span of 50-60 years. His literary death was in 1970. Historicize
different aesthetic, political and cultural moments: this is not a monolithic oeuvre
o He began writing poetry and essays. Didn’t care if he published in populist newspapers.
Never changed his style according to where he was publishing
 o 1920: young populist, interested in popular culture and how its being defined in
literature: Criollista: working on the vernacular: localist literature: sophisticated
literature but orthography echoed orality. Inventing a language to speak about popular
culture. Interested in mass popular political parties. Interested in limits between city and
countryside.
o 1945: Peron ascends. He was never nationalist, interested in local culture, but local
didn’t mean nation for him. Cultural particularity is identified with nationalism. He was
scandalized by WWII like much of the Argentinean elite. He immediately identified
Peronism with the local form of European fascism. Became anti Peronist and populist:
negated his 1920 ideas. His writing was much more complex than rejection of popular
and local culture, and he still enjoyed it. He still enjoyed the tension between letter and
the popular. But his public persona outside of literature was very anti populist.
 Great part of the intellectual field was Peronist. He celebrated the cup that took
out Peron: so, he was rejected as an oligarch. He didn’t fight that.
o Borges sided with the military in the 60s. also sided with Pinochet’s dictatorship. This
makes sense with the literary work, didn’t receive the Nobel because of this. He didn´t
think about consequences. He was blind. Young in terms of his engagement with the
literary world, but not in terms of political processes: more detached.
o By 1980 he repented about his positions. His friend Harold Conti disappeared under rule
of Videla.

Conceptual fiction and the nation

- This resonates with the debate about his literature: he creates a purely literary world,
(metafictional, seems detached from location. But he isn’t in a world of his own: the problem
of his place in world literature depends on the sample that you choose.
o Metafiction: he writes about literary ideas without absolutely developing them and he de
localizes his work. At the same time there is always an interest about the riot de la Plata
culture. Local and regional interest: languages, popular culture.
- In 19th century, Argentina has the literary tradition of “gauchos”: intellectual construction
reproducing the vernacular language of the Gauchos. Instrumental In the formation of the
national myth.
- Throughout his entire life, he still inscribes this localist language and stories in his work.
Values of a lost world that he tries to invoke and reinvent. Piglia: Borges is the best argentine
writer of the 19th century: gives closure to this tradition.
- He was self-conscious of his place in argentine literature. Great manipulator: always rewriting
older pieces. Some of his fictions are also about corrections by editors, re ordering works.
Redirect interpretations of the new readers: self-conscious. Interested in sustaining tension
between popular culture and elitism.
o He intentionally maintains this tension. Never resolved. Aporia. Wants to sustain
tension of his own place in literature.

Borges and Form

- His pieces are short: “the great masterpieces have been written, we pretend they have ALL
been written and we make commentary on them”: that is the premise of his stories. Make
these smaller pieces that are more popular. But is this lazy.
o He is materially interested in the craft of writing. Economy in his writing: interested in
aesthetic efficacy. Interested in effects it produces on readers.
- Tradition of the short stories: Poe: mechanics and economy of the story: interested in this
craft: his stories are like swiss clocks: every word is obsessively placed for an effect. It isn’t
 possible to write a novel in that style: the attention this requires is enormous in a short story.
Concentration is part of the craft.
o He didn’t like the novel very much. He negated his Avant Gard years but he still is very
much interested in the experimental approach to literature. His thing was conceptual art,
conceptual literature: “ill tell you the concept, and somebody else will write the
literature”.

7. Death and the King’s horseman

Wole Soyinka and the Colonial History of Nigeria
Wole Soyinka
- Biography is bound in the colonial history of Nigeria
- British colony until 60: N is a colonial creation: colonial districts merged: dozens of etnic
groups and languages. Different groups forced together.
o English as glue? Imagined country: educational administrative system is in ienglish: that
serves as glue. But local kingdoms are retained: to administrate the colonized.
- Independence. Tese different groups have to figure up how to live together: civil war, very
bloody, genocide of igbo.
o Soyinka. Caught up: tries to intervene, proposes a third way to retain igbo as part of
Nigeria and give them more rights: thrown into jail. Seen as treason. Not the first time
hes sent to jail.

Drama and Classical education

- In prision: writes poetry and prose: work is opposite of solitary confinement
- Comes to drama: colleges are set up are anglophone and Christian: immerse colonial subjects
in western tradition: Greek inglish and European tradition: this is his upbringing. Remains
very interested in that.
- Experience in England: the most accomplished students can come to the metropolis: studies in
Leeds: not high class, more open to 3 rd world than oxford. In leeds he becomes more
interested in his own African heritage: tries to combine both. Same as Otphan Pamuk,
Borges..
o Moves to London: immerses in theater world. DOKH has elements of European theater
- Returns to Nigeria tries to find himself as a writer: lives collaboration of drama, not a literary
solitary genre. Writes a first version, sees ow it works, changes it according to audience…
only after it has this life he publishes the work.
o Way of recovering oral tradition in Africa. Connection to Homer:
o Marketplace scene is the theater of everyday life
o Theater is multi media art: movement, art, music, dance, lighting, poetry
- The plot is not te most important: maybe music is: allows him to connect to ritual African
tradition.
- Robert ferris Thompson: African aart in motion:
- DOKH unusual play for S: play wrote on exile trying to unite tradition
o Euripides: trying to bridge: eerie similarities between Bacchus and Ogun /Yoruba god)
life and destruction. Dyionisius is god of teater. Euripides, grek playwright, writes a
play called Bacchae, play about Dionysius: foreign Asian power coming to civilize
Greece. S writes an adaptation for it:
  the ritual origins of the western theatrical tradition is through D and te ritual
origins of African performance traditions through Ogun are shared: parallel
inheritance.

Death and the king’s horseman

- based on a historical incident: colonial officer intervens in a ritual suicide by the kings
hordseman: prevents suicide and forces the son of the kings horsemen to commit suicide to
continue that important tradition: not the first play based in this incident
o not unlike Borges: both real life and literature made out of literature that creates this
play
o play a decade earlier early 60: “the king is dead” by Ladipo: musical theater, very
important, dance and music were very important, folk opera. Being performed in
commonwealth.
o S changes his friend’s play: the original play wants to show idiocy and ignorance of
British colonial officer: don’t understand importance of ritual and tradition: requires
suicide after King has died: clear political points, not interested in mediating between
cultures: colonial is terrible, messes everything up.
 Officer’s wife: like lady Macbeth: if you don’t do this I wont sleep w/ u.
- Clash of culture: inevitable consequence of colonialism. Colonialism manifests itself in this
intervention. Adds ambiguity that makes it clear that whatever went wrong with Nigeria post
independence it wasn´t just something that had to do w colonialism: many ambiguities and
important moral struggles.
o Firs big change: wife of officer that becomes a mediating character, not lady Macbeth,
unlike husband is more sensitive to local customs. Is in the kitchen and hears from there:
she is WILLING to hear: something husband cannot do.
 Thinks suicide is inpermissible
o Son of king’s horseman: olunde, had been sent to England for medical school. Gets a
cable: becomes a mediating figure between Africa and europe, leaves A against father’s
wishes. Not unlike S, in school he recognizes importance of tradition and has to come
home. He is willing to carry on tradition of killing himself,
 Thinks there is heroism in suicide and also happens in England. Play is set in
WW2

Theatricality and form

- Various forms of performance he works with: allows im to work with Nigerian tradition:
o 2 kinds of ritualistic moments
 Preparation 4 suicide: one theatrical form: goes with music, dumming and singing
that leads to marriage and suicide (2 different drum patterns) something goes
wrong: involves partially improvised dialogue between praise inger and king’s
horseman: enter ritualistic space supposed to lead to death of horseman
 Before being willing to go with suicide, horseman demans one night of
pleasure, marries someone he is not supposed to marry, leads to trouble,
weakens resolve to go through w suicide. In agitprop version the
interruption of ritual happens only thtough officer. He’s too attached to life
 Marketplace scenes: everyday life: but this interest in ritual and performance is
also turned towards british: the british actually have the same level of scripted
dance and ritual. Culmination is a masque ball: stage direction uses irony:
decadence in ball. Ritualistic entrance of royalty. Anthropological interest in these
foreign customs. Goes both ways.
Aesthetics and politics of ritual
- There are these different forms of literature: but interrupted: suicide is interrupted. Masque is
interrupted. In bringing them into collision theyre interrupted: general point about theater
made about this: all theatrical traditions are erived from religion.
o Theater is also something different, not ritual: on the stage nobody is worried someone
will commit suicide. In his adaptation of Bacchae this is made clear. T in itself IS the
interruption of theater: autonomous art emancipated
o This is a meditation on nature of theater: is and isn’t theater.
- Theatricality, Artaud: there is a turn back to ritualistic origins, actual bodies on stage. Also
explores limits of that: Brecht. S is interested in him: he adapts a Brechtian play.
o 5 scenes and acts more like Shakespeare, but the abruptness feels Brechtian
- Reaction against corrupt political theater: nazi
o Not all mixing of traditions is good
o Tango scene: colonial officer and wife have masks: ritualistic masks associated wit
death: ignorance expropiates item: unsensitivity. Not all borrowings of theatrical
traditions should be condoned: S is aware of different logics and integrity of tradition.
- Step back: like Boltaire: theatricality does what satire did for Voltaire. Attack indirectly. Take
into consideration present and past
- Nigeria is now going through another transition: now becoming democratic. S has set up a
party. Remains local eventhoug he’s global.

Soyinka as teacher/colleague
- Biodun Jeyifo: Soyinka called oponents leftocrats: said they were dogmatic.
- Period of military dictarotships: trying to get military out, but there was repression: secret
police: end of civil war 1970 up until mid 80s. debate on what leftist forces needed to do.
o S: wanted to dialogue and negociate with military. B no. militady had to be out. S said
they were terrtrising young writers: with ideological purity. Bad influence on students.
The military did attack lots of teachers.
 Things fall appart: texts like these show crisis, but the programs were not
supposed to showcase that.

Soyinka as playwright
- First play published before it was ever played. Exception: was in exile in UK: father died: this
prompted writing of play: couldn’t produce it until he came back to Nigeria.
o More literary feel
o But also has performative feel: and performative take on western rituals: masque, tango:
costumes. Has an attatchment to western classical and modernist traditions of theater.
 Was part of a generation of westernized Christian elite who began to look towards
indigenous forces.
o Emphasizes interest in Greek theatrical rtual.
- Ogun and Sionysisus: culmination of themendous joy of life: savage brutal (all seen in the
Bacchae and his adaptation) connection between 2.
o Takes issue with the reductive opposition between west and Nigeria: the play is about
death: that’s the main theme. The binary had become a legitimating factor for
approaching African literature in general, and drama in particular. To him, it was too
simplistic. Look at me! I’m no contradiction, and I’m a mesh of two.
o Western was seen as modernizing: absurd. And the play showcases this absurdity
produced by the dichotomy.
The Road
- Professor: composite of the figures of western christian elite. Speaks an English that is very
Nigerian but also invented. Lives among lower class: explores clash between technological
means of production in Africa and attachment to ritual: these were supposed to merge.
o The energy and poetry matters: life and death.

Staging death and the king’s horseman

- Most of his play came out of these theatrical workshops. DAKH: has been produced many
times. How was it staged?
o Chicago: S was the direct edit: had a hard time with the hard time with the actor that
played Elesin. Tried to get him to simultaneously dance, sing, speak the lines. The play
ombines these instances that usually stay separate.

Contemporary Nigerian political landscape

- The roots to a stable democracy: where political parties concede defeat.
o Nigeria is one of the places in Africa that hasn’t been compared with india: Indian army
is powerful but has never staged coup.
- West is still very much interested in themes of africal ritual and corruption: but other things
are happening. The simplifications obscure real issues.

Anti-ritual
- In every play of S, te ritual element is interrupted. Why is this? He loves ritual elemnts.
o In most of Greek plays, ritual goes through (expcept Antigone, funeral interrupted)
o Because of legal, philosopgical consideration, ritual scapegoating is no longer possible
o Also: in terns of theater as form, always interrupts the theater. Third scene of DALHH:
has Elesin moves into trance, but in theater you know you are a performer: you aren´t
possessed.
o Play has been translated to Yoruba: maybe there can be a confusion between acting and
possession. The confusion is showcased on the Bacchae (adaptation)