Description

Historians and literary scholars have struggled with the question of comparison as well as notions of world history and world literature. Their efforts both on the question of comparison and on the broader scale of writing about history and literature have largely run parallel with each other. This lecture will explore the possibility of considering the two sets of efforts together as a means to elaborate on a new method of comparison.

Shu-mei Shih is a professor of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies at UCLA. She is the author of The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937 (2001), Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (2007) and the co-editor of Minor Transnationalism (2005), The Creolization of Theory (2011), and the forthcoming Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (2012). She also edited a special issue of PMLA (Publication of Modern Language Association) on the special topic, “Comparative Racialization” (2008), among other publications.