Pre-modern literary transnationalism from a historical-comparative perspective
The international Scientific Research Group (SRN) ‘Literatures without Borders’, funded by the Research-foundation Flanders (FWO) organizes a conference on premodern transnational literatures in the Palace of the Academies in Brussels on 19 and 20 June 2025. The conference aims to investigate how transnational/cosmopolitan literatures function, and if a conceptual framework could be devised that better characterizes, defines, and understands premodern literary transnationalism. Keynote speaker will be Prof. dr. Karla Mallette (U-Michigan), whose work on premodern literary cosmopolitanism (e.g. Lives of the Great Languages, 2021) forms an important cornerstone of the current scholarly debate.
We seek 250-word proposals for 30-minute papers that examine the phenomena of cosmopolitanism and transnationalism in premodern Arabic, Byzantine-Greek, Hebrew-Yiddish-Ladino and Latin literatures, as well as their interactions with various vernaculars. We invite scholars of all career stages to submit their proposals to info@relicsresearch.com by December 31st, 2024. Selected participants will be notified by the end of January 2025.
Some possible areas that might be explored during the conference include, but are not limited to:
– The conceptual problem of applying a transnationalist framework to premodern times. How can we understand (trans)nationalism in premodern times, when nationalism is a nineteenth-century conception?
– The transformation of Byzantine Hellenism to a newfound ‘Greekness’ initiated by displaced Byzantines in Renaissance Italy and soon spread throughout Europe.
– The role of Latin as a cosmopolitan language amidst the rise of Romance vernaculars in the literary domain.
– The influence of interest of Christian scholars in post-biblical Hebrew literature on readings of the Old Testament by non-Jews.
– Translation practices from one cosmopolitan language to another (e.g. Arabic to Latin).
Premodern literary transnationalism
While there have been some studies on the transnational functioning of literatures over the past decade, their historical, geographical and material scope is usually fairly limited. The very few frameworks that are available have mostly been developed to function for post-nineteenth-century literatures and, as such, are often difficult to reconcile with pre-modern situations; the very concept of ‘transnationalism,’ with its implicit idea of a nation, is even anachronistic from a long-term historical point of view. The great exception is Sheldon Pollock’s book on Sanskrit cosmopolitanism, The language of the gods in the world of men : Sanskrit, culture, and power in premodern India, that already dates from 2006 and has inspired much discussion but did not have as much consequences.
This conference wants to respond to these knowledge gaps by exploring the following topics:
(1) Transnational awareness: To what extent do premodern literatures exhibit an awareness of their own transnational functioning? For instance, how do they present and negotiate the relationship between transnational functioning on the one hand and more local/regional contexts on the other? How do texts reflect on other traditions? What does this say about the specific ways in which transnationalism was shaped and conceptualised in individual traditions?
(2) Transnational actors: Which cultural actors determined the transnational functioning of the four literary traditions? The organisation of literary systems in the pre-modern period strongly differed from the way this is done today. After all, actors that we now take for granted and that often appear in explanatory models about modern transnationalism, such as the commercial book market, internationalized translation or digitalized authorship, did not yet exist before the nineteenth century. Which cultural actors shaped the transnationalist nature of a given tradition?
(3) Transnational aesthetics: In what ways is the transnational functioning of premodern literatures reflected within and shaped by aesthetic and narrative tendencies? Can we denote specific approaches to characterisation, storylines, styles and genres, linguistic register, etc.? What does the literary style in a given tradition tell us about its transnational functioning and connection with other literatures?
(4) Conceptual framework: What could be the central pillars for an explanatory model of pre-modern literary transnationalism? Can we develop an overarching model that still leaves enough room for the respective particularities of different traditions and also critically rethinks the already extant yet deficient models based on modern literatures (with related concepts such as cosmopolitanism, world literature, global literature, etc.)?
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