Ep.31. David Damrosch

In this episode, I talk to Prof. David Damrosch, the director of The Harvard Institute for World Literature (IWL) and Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. I attended this year's edition of the IWL, where I got to lead the World Literature & Cinema colloquium and, more importantly, got the chance to see David in action, teaching his seminar on Globalization and its discontents.   David Damrosch has written widely on comparative and world literature from antiquity to the present. His books include The Narrative Covenant: Transformations of Genre in the Growth of Biblical Literature (1987), We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University (1995), What is World Literature? (2003), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007), How to Read World Literature (2d edition 2017), Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age (2020), and Around the World in 80 Books (2021). He is the founding general editor of the six-volume Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004) and the editor of Teaching World Literature (2009) and co-editor of The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature (2009), The Routledge Companion to World Literature (2011), and Xin fangxiang: bijiao wenxue yu shijie wenxue duben [New Directions: A Reader of Comparative and World Literature], Peking U. P., 2010. He has just completed a translation of a Congolese novel, Georges Ngal's Giambatista Viko: ou Le viol du discours africain, for the MLA's "Texts and Translations" series.