World LiteraturesCosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics

Moving between different scales of analysis as well as distant and close reading methodologies, this group addresses an understudied dimension of world literature: the theorisation and conceptualisation of the vernacular. The term “vernacular” is here understood both in its narrower linguistic sense and as an aspect of locality. If literary forms register and are shaped by various transnational flows, the presupposition here is that vernacular literary cultures demonstrate how cosmopolitan formations are resisted, accommodated and transformed. Focusing on periods from the early modern onwards, the researchers explore how the vernacular can be used as an operative concept to understand local and global dynamics in such diverse locations as China, North America, France, the Caribbean, North and West Africa, and the Finno-Baltic region. With theoretical support in, for example, Françoise Lionnet’s and Shu-Mei Shih’s notion of minor transnationalism and Édouard Glissant’s archipelagic thinking, the case studies undertaken by this group question the assumption that the vernacular is by default turned inwards (the land, the people, a language) and incommensurable with cosmopolitan dimensions of world literature.

Participants: Christian Claesson, Christina Kullberg, Katarina Leppänen, Irmy Schweiger, David Watson

The terms locations and orientations appear, at first, to have very different qualities: a location operates as a fixed, spatial dimension whereas an orientation implies movement across both spatial and more abstract dimensions, such as ideology or identity. Sub-group 2 posits, however, that the two terms might be productively read as co-constitutive. That is to say, the ways by which literature locates itself reveals various orientations that may reinforce or, indeed, destabilise that very location. Alternatively, literary orientations, towards say, a home, a diaspora, the world, might reveal surprising aspects about how literature registers its locatedness. The wager here is that in attending to the centrifugal and centripetal movements back and forth between location and orientation one might mobilise insights into the ways in which the cosmopolitan-vernacular exchange operates in world literature. Geographical foci to be developed in the group include new urban literary forms in eastern and southern Africa, "migrant" writing in Sweden, African women's writing and American muslim novels.

Participants: Bo G. Ekelund, Ashleigh Harris, Louise Nilsson, Adnan Mahmutovic, Paula Uimonen, Helena Wulff