Aijaz Ahmad, "On World Literature: Chronicles of European Time"
Department: Comparative Literature
Date and Time: November 5, 2014 | 5:00 PM-7:00 PMEvent Location: Humanities Gateway 1030
Event Details
Aijaz Ahmad: "On World Literatures: Chronicles of European Time"
Vigorous debates over the category of 'World literature' have raged over roughly two decades now. Initial articulations of the category go back to Goethe, Marx and others in the 19th century. Professor Ahmad's lecture is an intervention in more recent debates that arose very much out of a sense of a crisis of the academic discipline of Comparative Literature as such ("Death of A Discipline" in Spivak's provocative phrase), some of it provoked by the much discussed work of authors such as Franco Moretti in English and Pascale Casanova in French.
Aijaz Ahmad, Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature in Fall 2014, has taught in universities in the US, India and Canada. In New Delhi, where he resides, he has been a Professorial Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. He has also held the Rajiv Gandhi Chair at Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan Chair at Jamia Millia. Currently, he is on the editorial board of the Delhi-based publishing house, LeftWord, and Senior Editorial Consultant for newsmagazine Frontline where his political essays appear frequently. His analytic and theoretical work appears in a range of journals such as Socialist Register, New Left Review, Race & Class, and Social Scientist. He writes in English, Urdu and Hindi, and his writings have been translated into other Indian languages as well as languages such as Turkish, Portuguese, Korean, French, and Arabic.