The specter of Hegel looms large over contemporary scholarship. Debunking overhasty dismissals of Hegelian thought as vulgar panlogism or reductive teleology, recent work has presented Hegel as a theorist of modernism avant la lettre (Pippin 2013), mapped his filiations across Euro-American theory (Cole 2014), redrawn his influence over twentieth-century anti-colonial thought (Brennan 2014), and underscored the aesthetic register of dialectical thinking (Ngai, forthcoming). However, although such scholarship has done much to redefine Hegel’s legacy for the humanities in the twenty-first century, within the field of world-literary studies his name is rarely evoked. This is all the more surprising given that two of the earliest proponents of Weltliteratur—Goethe and Marx—were close readers of Hegel’s philosophy. Setting out to remedy this disconnect, this seminar asks: What is the significance of Hegel for the study of world literature today? 

To respond to this question, the seminar brings together two interrelated perspectives: one to do with formation, the other with method. The first approach seeks to draw out the literary resonance of Hegel’s language, reevaluate his relation to German romanticism, and reconstruct his theories of culture and aesthetics. Alongside Hegel’s own presentation of the system of the individual arts in his Aesthetics, the seminar also invites reappraisals of the aesthetic foundations of Hegelian philosophy more broadly. How might this reconstructivist approach allow us to repicture Hegel as a theorist of world literature? 

A second, more speculative approach considers what Hegel’s philosophy has to teach us about the practice of interpretation. Particularly significant for this side of the conversation are Hegel’s statements on ‘absolute method,’ in which speculative truth is presented as a result to be achieved, not something to be supposed in advance. What, we ask, does the style of world-literary criticism have to learn from the successive resolution of ‘shapes of consciousness’ in the Phenomenology, or the systematic dialectic of the Science of Logic? If, as Gillian Rose argued, ‘Hegel’s philosophy has no social import if the absolute cannot be thought’ (1981), can the theory of world literature be defined as an effort to think the absolute?

Putting these approaches into dialogue with one another, we invite abstracts on topics including but not limited to the following: 

• World literature and the ‘end of art’


• Hegel, Romanticism, and the avant-garde


• Black radical readings of Hegel


• Hegel’s literary style


• The theory of ‘objective form’


• World literature and dialectical criticism