As invited, Professor Thomas O. Beebee gave the lecture on the topic of “What the World Thinks about Literature” on Sipailou Campus of Southeast University on June 29, 2016.
Professor Beebee is currently head of Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literature of the Pennsylvania State University, and he is also editor of the journal Comparative Literature Studies and general editor of the Bloomsbury series of German Literature as World Literature. His areas of research cover literary theories and criticism, epistolarity, 18th-century literature, translation theories and practice and the relationship between law and literature. His main publications include Ideology of Genre (1994), Epistolary Fiction In Europe (2008), Nation and Region in Modern European and American Fiction (2008), Conjunctions and Disjunctions of German Law and Literature (2011), Transmesis: Inside Translation’s Black Box (2012) and the edited volume German Literature as World Literature (2014).
In his lecture, Professor Beebee talked about some of the 20th-century world-famous theorists such as Jameson, Said, Foucault and Derrida. He also illustrated the paradigms of 21st-century renaissance of literary and cultural theories and explored some phenomena in literary studies such as Euro-centrism, asymmetry between world literature and world literary theories and criticism and the methods of literary translation, especially the specific techniques to handle those untranslatable elements in ancient Indian and Japanese literary texts.
Professor Beebee also put forward four constructive and insightful suggestions for literary studies in the end of his lecture.
1.Literary theory should understand itself in the same expansive and cosmopolitan ways that world literature does.
2.Postcolonial studies could benefit from becoming more comparative.
3.The vocabulary of theory and criticism should be expanded to include some untranslatable elements from ancient literary texts of India, Japan and other countries.
4.Including world literary criticism in syllabi can help dishomogenize the study of world literature.
(Reported by Zhao Jianhong)
