Visiting speaker, 30 Mar 2011: Claire Parfait on global literature and American publishing

Claire Parfait will be presenting her paper, ‘Global Literature and American Publishing’, at 1pm on Wednesday, 30 March 2011. The talk will take place in the Cardiff Humanities Building, Room 2.48.

Abstract
This paper looks at the evolution of the American book trade over the last decades, with a special focus on: 1) the best seller system and its consequences and 2) the ‘translation gap’. While few foreign authors are translated and published on the American market, the common complaint that American works monopolize best seller lists in European countries seems to have been greatly exaggerated.

About the speaker
Claire Parfait teaches American studies and book history at the University of Paris 13, where she heads the Centre de recherches sur les aires anglophones et francophones (Centre for the Study of Intercultural Relations in English- and French-Speaking Countries). She is the author of The Publishing History of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852–2002 (2007), and co-directed with Marie-Françoise Cachin, Diana Cooper-Richet and Jean-Yves Mollier, Au bonheur du feuilleton: naissance et mutations d’un genre (2007). She has published various articles on book history and African American studies and is currently, with Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, working on an annotated translation of the Narrative of William Wells Brown, A Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself (1847).

Download a flyer for the talk (PDF).

Visiting speaker, 7 Dec 2010: Maria DiBattista on native cosmopolitanism

Maria DiBattista will be presenting her paper, ‘Native Cosmopolitanism’ at 5.15pm on Tuesday, 7 December 2010. The talk will take place in the Cardiff Humanities Building, Room 2.48.

Abstract
The contemporary fascination with cosmopolitanism as a moral and political ideal is one response to the widespread, seemingly irreversible changes in the way human beings think about their relation to their family, tribe, community, country.  What we can discern behind the headlines, in the marketplaces, and through the literature of the present day is that the era of identity politics is waning and the age of ‘global’ character is struggling to be born. What form it will take is a riddle the novel can help solve. The novel has more and more been absorbed in chronicling the emergence of a new social type that DiBattista calls native cosmopolitans. Their growing prominence, which has aroused the curiosity, anxiety and imagination of novelists like V. S. Naipaul, J. M.Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, Zadie  Smith, Edwige  Danticat, represents a new form and hope for character: formed in the enduring ethos of local traditions and habits, but marked (stunned, traumatized, exhilarated) by the consciousness that one is more connected to, yet less at home in the global cities in which their destinies are often decided.