Literature and the Work of Universality

Alice Duhan, Stefan Helgesson, Christina Kullberg, Paul Tenngart, Alice Duhan, Stefan Helgesson, Christina Kullberg, Paul Tenngart

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9783111208527
• eBook ISBN:
  9783111209159
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The book series Beyond Universalism | Partager l'universel problematizes universality after Western universalism. Globalization does not necessarily entail a universal awareness. Rather, we witness a wide array of cultural, relativistic, and racist contestations of a common world. But how can universality be addressed after the necessary epistemic and ethical critique of Western universalism? Building on the importance of such concepts as materiality and reparation, narration and translation, this series seeks to understand how a new consciousness of universality is under way of being produced. How do contemporary cultural and social practices open up concrete settings so as to create experiences, reflections and agencies of a shared humanity?

The volumes of the series are peer-reviewed.

La collection Beyond Universalism | Partager l'universel pose le problème de l'universalité après l'universalisme occidental. La mondialisation n'implique pas nécessairement la conscience de faire partie d'un monde commun – en témoigne un large éventail de contestations culturelles, relativistes et racistes. Mais comment aborder l'universel après la nécessaire critique épistémique et éthique de l'universalisme occidental ? En s'appuyant sur des concepts tels que la matérialité et la réparation, la narration et la traduction, cette collection cherche à comprendre comment des pratiques culturelles et sociales contemporaines produisent, à partir de contextes concrets, des expériences, des réflexions et des agentivités qui contribuent à faire émerger une humanité partagée.

Les volumes de la collection sont soumis à l'évaluation par les pairs (peer-review).

Editorial Board
Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Columbia University, NY)
Tammy Lai-Ming Ho (Hong Kong Baptist University)
Christopher M. Hutton (University of Hong Kong)
Ananya Jahanara Kabir (King's College London)
Mohamed Kerrou (Beït el-Hikma, Carthage)
Soumaya Mestiri (Université de Tunis)
Olivier Remaud (EHESS Paris)
Sergio Ugalde Quintana (El Colegio de México)

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• The Fire This Time: Working with Universality
• Part 1: Modes of Reading
• The Singularity of Literary Production: Verma and Borges in London, 1976
• Reading for Nobel and the Idea of the Universal
• African Vernaculars and the Universal in Translation
• Multiple Vernacularizations
• Part 2: Aesthetic Universalizations
• (Im)personal Style: James Baldwin, Joan Didion and the Inscription of the Universal
• Surface Listening: American Accents, African Agendas
• Circles of Change: Concrete Universality in the Aesthetics of Protest and Revolution
• Erotics of Revolution: Mongane Serote and the Black Cosmological Archive
• Part 3: The Human in and After Globalization
• Peasant Modernism: World Literature and the Future of Agriculture
• Post-global Aesthetics in Latin America: Beyond Universality?
• Overcoming the Cosmopolitanism–Vernacularism Opposition in Latin America: Juan Rulfo and the Nordic Countries; Juan L. Ortiz and China
• Fashioning Universality in Literature: Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s La plus secrète mémoire des hommes
• Part 4: Planetary Universality
• The Aesthetics of Global Realism: Scales, Models, Technology, Ecology
• Pluviality and Drought in J. M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K
• Amitav Ghosh and Twenty-First-Century World Literature: Climate Change and the Collective Imaginary
• Whose World? Whose World Literature? Looking for Climate Fiction in China
• List of Contributors
• Index