“History is, as it were, sacred, because it must be truthful,” Don Quixote reminds us, “and where there is truth there is God, because he is truth; and yet in spite of all this, there are those who toss off books as if they were pancakes.” As the Danish writer Karen Blixen perceptively observed: “I see, today, a new art of narration, a novel literature and category of belles-lettres, dawning upon the world … But it is a human product. The divine art is the story.” Do we, people of the 21st century, still have access to the divine art and sacred truth of literature?
Whereas what constitutes today our object of study spans some four millennia, our concept of littérature crystallised only in eighteenth-century France and took hold more broadly in the nineteenth century. Since then, literary scholarship has increasingly been based on assumptions of a disenchanted secularism as the hallmark of modernity, and this emphasis has contributed to the marginalization of non-secularized works, and of early modern and premodern works in general. The diversity of texts grouped today under the name literature were produced in highly different contexts with completely different functions than they have today.
How equipped are we, as scholars, to understand texts produced in and for non-secularized worlds by using secularized concepts, literature being one of them? This is the overarching question that our seminar aims to address.
While the discipline of Comparative Literature is no doubt more diverse than ever, our discussions are increasingly confined to literature of recent decades. Moreover, much of the conversation in our field is dominated by a strictly materialist discourse brought to the fore by neo-Marxist criticism. Our object of study is considerably impoverished if works that do not correspond to our postmodern, secularised, and disenchanted ideas about literature and its functions—for instance, most antique and mediaeval texts—are either misinterpreted or excluded outright.
We invite papers that challenge received ideas in contemporary critical discourse about literature and the other arts and address the deep history of our object of study—especially pre-19th century—by going back to its different functions across time and space, including, but not limited to:
a. Literature and/as meditative and spiritual practice;
b. Literature and/as a dream, vision or inner journey;
c. Literature as a form of meaning-making in non-secularized societies.