David Damrosch

Global Literary Leaders: Keynote Speakers

Abstract

Writing systems have always been prime markers of national and cultural identity, forming a “scriptworld” that is the centerpiece of a system of education and a bearer of cultural memory. Some countries treasure a national language written in a unique national script, while others have chosen a cosmopolitan writing system or have had one thrust upon them by imperial conquerors. This talk will consider the key role of writing systems in times of cultural conflict. I will begin with the consequences of the displacement of Norse runes by the Roman alphabet in medieval Iceland, and the contrasting case of the alphabet’s imposition in colonial New Spain by the conquistadors. I then turn to the shifting relations between scripts in Eastern Europe (in the rivalry of Cyrillic versus the Roman alphabet) and in Asia, as Japan, Korea, and Vietnam first adopt versions of the cosmopolitan Chinese script and then revise or reject it in the era of rising nationalism and colonial/anticolonial conflict in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In all of these cases, I will focus on the role of literature in negotiating these conflicts. Sometimes writers seek to heal these conflicts (Snorri Sturluson in Iceland), sometimes to exacerbate them (Milorad Pavić in Serbia), or employ multiple scripts (Ho Chi Minh) in the struggle for independence. Writers from Snorri Sturluson to Nguyen Du and Pak Tu-jin have meditated on what their culture has lost as well as gained in these language wars.

Bio

David Damrosch is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University. He is the founding director of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a past president of the American Comparative Literature Association. He has written widely on world literature from antiquity to the present, and has lectured in over fifty countries worldwide. His books include The Narrative Covenant: Transformations of Genre in the Growth of Biblical Literature (1987), What Is World Literature? (2003), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007), How to Read World Literature (2008), Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age (2020), and Around the World in 80 Books (2021), and he is the editor or co-editor of twenty-two other books. He is currently writing a book on writing systems and cultural memory.