Princeton University Press Lectures in European History and Culture I: The Challenge of World Literature

Martin Puchner, the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at Harvard University, gives the first of
the Princeton University Press Lectures. On January 31st, 1827, the
German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe shocked his secretary by
uttering a new word: world literature. Goethe had just read a
Chinese novel and concluded that Europe needed to rethink its
relation to the rest of the world. Humanity was entering a new
phase: the phase of world literature. Coined in provincial Weimar,
the idea of world literature soon caught the imagination of Marx
and Engels and was subsequently used by those seeking to promote
national literatures, from Yiddish to South Asia, within an
international context. What can we learn from this history? And
what does the term world literature mean today? The guest speaker
for this event is Martin Puchner, the Byron and Anita Wien
Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard
University. His writings, which include a dozen books and
anthologies and over sixty articles and essays, range from
philosophy and theater to world literature and have been translated
into many languages. Through his best-selling Norton Anthology of
World Literature and his HarvardX MOOC Masterpieces of World
Literature, he has brought four thousand years of literature to
audiences across the globe. His most recent book, The Written
World, which tells the story of literature from the invention of
writing to the Internet, has been widely reviewed in The New York
Times, The Times (London), the Financial Times, The Times Literary
Supplement, The Atlantic, The Economist, among others, covered on
radio and television, and is forthcoming in over a dozen languages.
In hundreds of lectures and workshops from the Arctic Circle to
Brazil and from the Middle East to China, he has advocated for the
arts and humanities in a changing world.