Nissan Seminar: A Dislike for Translation: How Natsume Sōseki Disowns World Literature

Convenor(s): Dr Jennifer L. Guest, Dr Linda Flores, and Professor Bjarke Frellesvig

Speaker(s): Professor Michael Bourdaghs, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

These seminars will occur live and will not be recorded. Unauthorized recording is strictly prohibited.

Please click on the seminar title to register in advance and receive the meeting details.

A Dislike for Translation: How Natsume Sōseki Disowns World Literature

Abstract:

In this talk, Michael Bourdaghs will expand on ideas from his recent book, A Fictional Commons: Natsume Sōseki and the Properties of Modern Literature (2020), exploring the implicit theory of World Literature in Natsume Sōseki's theories of literature in relation to the novelist's aversion toward having his own works of fiction translated. Reading the 1906 sketch "The Carlyle Museum" together with more recent theorists of World Literature, the talk will sketch in the temporally open-ended model Sōseki devised for understanding literature as one of the fundamental modes of human cognitive experience.

Michael Bourdaghs is the Robert S. Ingersoll Professor of East Asian Languages & Cultures at the University of Chicago and the author, most recently, of A Fictional Commons: Natsume Sōseki and the Properties of Modern Literature (2020).