https://gns.wisc.edu/staff/mani-b-venkat/ Phone: +1 608 262-2192 (German Department) Address: Department of German University of Wisconsin-Madison 818 Van Hise Hall, 1220 Linden Drive Madison WI 53706 USA
This essay focuses on the contemporary German literary public spheres, zooming in on the relation... more This essay focuses on the contemporary German literary public spheres, zooming in on the relation between a republic and its reading public. In the fraught political topography of contemporary Germany, marked by the arrival and eventual acceptance of over one million Syrian refugees since 2015, the rise of the extreme right-wing party Alternatives for Germany, resurgence of discussion on German colonialism in Africa, and extended public debate around the controversial Humboldt Forum in Berlin, the essay centralizes questions of race, colonialism, and migration. Connecting these key terms with current debates on decolonizing and diversifying the literary canon, the essay argues that decolonization is a direction, not a destination; it is a method, not a product, and attempts to decolonize a national literary canon must be conducted in connection with the larger public spheres, indeed by decompartmentalizing the classroom and the society.
This essay explores strategies of world literary comparison when ultraminor literatures are juxta... more This essay explores strategies of world literary comparison when ultraminor literatures are juxtaposed with dominant literary traditions such as the global Anglophone. By bringing an English and a Hindi novel in conversation, the essay underlines their "multilingual" composition, whereby one language becomes a vehicle for several other languages, dialects, sociolects, regional linguistic variations and creole, thus calling for a new critical framework of evaluation within the national and the world-literary sphere.
Modernist registers of innovation, transformation, and dissociation from
the ancient and the clas... more Modernist registers of innovation, transformation, and dissociation from the ancient and the classical are particularly suited to augment the role of libraries as sociopolitical texts; the collector and the collected, the consumer and the consumed, the object and the subject undergo various transformations.
“Bibliomigrancy: Book-Series and the Making of World Literature” [The Routledge Companion to Worl... more “Bibliomigrancy: Book-Series and the Making of World Literature” [The Routledge Companion to World Literature, 2011] introduces the concept of “Bibliomigrancy”—the physical and virtual migration of books--as key to our understanding of world literature. The essay focuses on the movement of books in the late 18th, early 19th Centuries as key to understanding Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's giving traction to the term "Weltliteratur" (1827). The essay foregrounds public sphere construction of world literature and the question of "access" through print-cultural histories.
This article surmises the position and ambition of a non-native speaker/teacher of a European lan... more This article surmises the position and ambition of a non-native speaker/teacher of a European language and literature as an ostensible facilitator of cultural difference in the US foreign-language classroom. It tries to further open a space to think through pedagogical conceptuality and the practice of assisting and guiding students in their perceptions of cultural difference in the specific situation when the instructor carries visible inscriptions of his/her “Otherness.” Through an investigation of the adjectives ‘native’ and ‘non-native,’ the article critically reconsiders privileges of birth, affiliations through residence, education, and ethnicity. The article sutures two different streams of scholarship. First, by engaging with scholarship on German as a foreign language in the US, the article construes the ‘position’ of the non-native speaker vis-a-vis the native speaker/instructor. Next, through a discussion with cultural theorists, the article puts to test the ‘ambition’ of...
This essay focuses on the contemporary German literary public spheres, zooming in on the relation... more This essay focuses on the contemporary German literary public spheres, zooming in on the relation between a republic and its reading public. In the fraught political topography of contemporary Germany, marked by the arrival and eventual acceptance of over one million Syrian refugees since 2015, the rise of the extreme right-wing party Alternatives for Germany, resurgence of discussion on German colonialism in Africa, and extended public debate around the controversial Humboldt Forum in Berlin, the essay centralizes questions of race, colonialism, and migration. Connecting these key terms with current debates on decolonizing and diversifying the literary canon, the essay argues that decolonization is a direction, not a destination; it is a method, not a product, and attempts to decolonize a national literary canon must be conducted in connection with the larger public spheres, indeed by decompartmentalizing the classroom and the society.
This essay explores strategies of world literary comparison when ultraminor literatures are juxta... more This essay explores strategies of world literary comparison when ultraminor literatures are juxtaposed with dominant literary traditions such as the global Anglophone. By bringing an English and a Hindi novel in conversation, the essay underlines their "multilingual" composition, whereby one language becomes a vehicle for several other languages, dialects, sociolects, regional linguistic variations and creole, thus calling for a new critical framework of evaluation within the national and the world-literary sphere.
Modernist registers of innovation, transformation, and dissociation from
the ancient and the clas... more Modernist registers of innovation, transformation, and dissociation from the ancient and the classical are particularly suited to augment the role of libraries as sociopolitical texts; the collector and the collected, the consumer and the consumed, the object and the subject undergo various transformations.
“Bibliomigrancy: Book-Series and the Making of World Literature” [The Routledge Companion to Worl... more “Bibliomigrancy: Book-Series and the Making of World Literature” [The Routledge Companion to World Literature, 2011] introduces the concept of “Bibliomigrancy”—the physical and virtual migration of books--as key to our understanding of world literature. The essay focuses on the movement of books in the late 18th, early 19th Centuries as key to understanding Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's giving traction to the term "Weltliteratur" (1827). The essay foregrounds public sphere construction of world literature and the question of "access" through print-cultural histories.
This article surmises the position and ambition of a non-native speaker/teacher of a European lan... more This article surmises the position and ambition of a non-native speaker/teacher of a European language and literature as an ostensible facilitator of cultural difference in the US foreign-language classroom. It tries to further open a space to think through pedagogical conceptuality and the practice of assisting and guiding students in their perceptions of cultural difference in the specific situation when the instructor carries visible inscriptions of his/her “Otherness.” Through an investigation of the adjectives ‘native’ and ‘non-native,’ the article critically reconsiders privileges of birth, affiliations through residence, education, and ethnicity. The article sutures two different streams of scholarship. First, by engaging with scholarship on German as a foreign language in the US, the article construes the ‘position’ of the non-native speaker vis-a-vis the native speaker/instructor. Next, through a discussion with cultural theorists, the article puts to test the ‘ambition’ of...
Measuring through comparison and contrast is and has always been a way of relating to the world. ... more Measuring through comparison and contrast is and has always been a way of relating to the world. As the historian Sebastian Conrad succinctly observes in What is Global History? (2016), modalities of world histories developed in the nineteenth century “were a result of global hierarchies and asymmetrical geopolitical structures” (28). A model of teleological progression of world history that originates in Europe and manifests itself later through adaption in non-European societies can hardly capture our current world order, which is marked by decolonization, migration, and globalization. The seismic shifts of financial and political powers from old centers of the West to new and rising global powers such as China and India cannot sustain a derivative idea of progress and development. Conrad proposes a “relational” model of global history, which underlines that “a historical unit—a civilization, a nation, a family—does not develop in isolation” (65). The essays published in this special issue of Monatshefte augment this relational model. Instead of examining the German cultural space in isolation, these essays study “Germany” in relation to other geopolitical units. The authors engage with different incarnations of the tensions between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, as well as between universalism and particularism, both retrospectively and prospectively. Through a relational— rather than an essentialist—comparison, the essays in this collection open up multiple, mutually entangled lines of inquiry. These essays were first presented at the 47th Wisconsin Workshop, “Measuring the ‘World’: Formation, Transformation and Transmission of the ‘National’ and the ‘Universal’ from the Eighteenth Century to the Present” at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The purpose of the workshop was to conduct an interdisciplinary inquiry of concepts, structures, and terms used widely in literature, music, visual and performing arts, history, political science, geography, and sociology, and to locate stations of their growth and development, first within and then beyond Germany. The concepts, structures, and movements the workshop examined were all products of specific historical and cultural moments in German history, when a cosmopolitan orientation to the world was emerging parallel to a focused investment in a cultural organization around the German language, arts, and dissemination of knowledge. The papers, some of which are included here, explored Germany’s role as scientific and artistic power-broker and scrutinized the political, cultural, and moral dimensions of the numerous ways the world can be measured, giving rise to the following questions: How was Germany’s conceptualization of the world politically charged and historically conditioned? How and why did Germany become a forerunner in the ways of conceptualizing the world? What are the positive and negative legacies of the modes of situating the Self and the Other in German intellectual history? How do historical contingencies and political realities impact the origins and proliferation of conceptual terms and frameworks in transnational contexts?
This is a co-authored Introduction to “What Counts as German Literature?” a special issue of Mode... more This is a co-authored Introduction to “What Counts as German Literature?” a special issue of Modern Language Quarterly 74.2. 2013), co-edited with Caroline Levine. This collection includes eight papers selected from the World Literature/s Workshop’s 2009 conference “In a Few Wor(l)ds.” This conference celebrated the 50th anniversary of the 1959 conference on world literature at UW-Madison. The Introduction identifies four “flash-points” of world literary studies since the nineteenth century.
This Special Topic presents a collection of scholarly essays which emerged from a multi-and inter... more This Special Topic presents a collection of scholarly essays which emerged from a multi-and interdisciplinary panel series at the 49th Annual Conference of the German Studies Association, and which represent the continuation of a collaborative thought process about transnational and cosmopolitical interventions that re-position the nation as text, performance, and pedagogy. From multiple critical perspectives, these articles examine anthropological, historical, cultural, linguistic, literary, and political reactions to German self-imagination and German imagination of the non-German/non-European " other, " thereby raising many questions pertinent to scholarly inquiry in the interdisciplinary field of German Studies.
From the current vantage point of the transformation of books and libraries, Mani presents a his... more From the current vantage point of the transformation of books and libraries, Mani presents a historical account of world literature. By locating translation, publication, and circulation along routes of "bibliomigrancy"--the physical and virtual movement of books--Mani narrates how world literature is coded and recoded as literary works find new homes on faraway bookshelves.
Mani argues that the proliferation of world literature in a society is the function of a nation's relationship with print culture--a Faustian pact with books. Moving from early Orientalist collections, to the Nazi magazine Weltliteratur, to the European Digital Library, Mani reveals the political foundations for a history of world literature that is at once a philosophical ideal, a process of exchange, a mode of reading, and a system of classification.
Shifting current scholarship's focus from the academic to the general reader, from the university to the public sphere, Recoding World Literature argues that world literature is culturally determined, historically conditioned, and politically charged.
When both France and Holland rejected the proposed constitution for the European Union in 2005, t... more When both France and Holland rejected the proposed constitution for the European Union in 2005, the votes reflected popular anxieties about the entry of Turkey into the European Union as much as they did ambivalence over ceding national sovereignty. Indeed, the votes in France and Holland echoed long standing tensions between Europe and Turkey. If there was any question that tensions were high, the explosive reaction of Europe's Muslim population to a series of cartoons of Mohammed in a Danish newspaper put them to rest. Cosmopolitical Claims is a profoundly original study of the works of Sten Nadonly, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Feridun Zaimoglu, and 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature recipient Orhan Pamuk. Rather than using the proverbial hyphen in "Turkish-German" to indicate a culture caught between two nations, Venkat Mani is interested in how Turkish-German literature engages in a scrutiny of German and Turkish national identity.
Moving deftly from the theoretical literature to the texts themselves, Mani's groundbreaking study explores these conflicts and dialogues and the resulting cultural hybridization as they are expressed in four novels that document the complexity of Turkish-German cultural interactions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His innovative readings will engage students of contemporary German literature as well as illuminate the discussion of minority literature in a multicultural setting.
As Salman Rushdie said in the 2002 Tanner Lecture at Yale, "The frontier is an elusive line, visible and invisible, physical and metaphorical, amoral and moral. . . . To cross a frontier is to be transformed." It is in this vein that Mani's dynamic and subtle work posits a still evolving discourse between Turkish and German writers.
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Papers by B. Venkat Mani
the ancient and the classical are particularly suited to augment the role
of libraries as sociopolitical texts; the collector and the collected, the
consumer and the consumed, the object and the subject undergo various
transformations.
the ancient and the classical are particularly suited to augment the role
of libraries as sociopolitical texts; the collector and the collected, the
consumer and the consumed, the object and the subject undergo various
transformations.
shifts of financial and political powers from old centers of the West to new and rising global powers such as China and India cannot sustain a derivative idea of progress and development. Conrad proposes a “relational” model of global history, which underlines that “a historical unit—a civilization, a nation, a family—does not develop in isolation” (65).
The essays published in this special issue of Monatshefte
augment this relational model. Instead of examining the German cultural
space in isolation, these essays study “Germany” in relation to other geopolitical units. The authors engage with different incarnations of the tensions between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, as well as between universalism and particularism, both retrospectively and prospectively. Through a relational— rather than an essentialist—comparison, the essays in this collection open up multiple, mutually entangled lines of inquiry. These essays were first presented at the 47th Wisconsin Workshop, “Measuring the ‘World’: Formation, Transformation and Transmission of the ‘National’ and the ‘Universal’ from the Eighteenth Century to the Present” at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The purpose of the workshop was to conduct an interdisciplinary inquiry of concepts, structures, and terms used widely in literature, music, visual and performing arts, history, political science, geography, and sociology, and to locate stations of their growth and development, first within and then beyond Germany. The concepts, structures, and movements the workshop examined were all products of specific historical
and cultural moments in German history, when a cosmopolitan orientation to the world was emerging parallel to a focused investment in a cultural organization around the German language, arts, and dissemination of knowledge. The papers, some of which are included here, explored Germany’s role as scientific and artistic power-broker and scrutinized the political, cultural, and moral dimensions of the numerous ways the world can be measured, giving rise to the following questions: How was Germany’s conceptualization of the world politically charged and historically conditioned? How and why did Germany become a forerunner in the ways of conceptualizing the world? What are the positive and negative legacies of the modes of situating the Self and the Other in German intellectual history? How do historical contingencies and political realities impact the origins and proliferation
of conceptual terms and frameworks in transnational contexts?
Mani argues that the proliferation of world literature in a society is the function of a nation's relationship with print culture--a Faustian pact with books. Moving from early Orientalist collections, to the Nazi magazine Weltliteratur, to the European Digital Library, Mani reveals the political foundations for a history of world literature that is at once a philosophical ideal, a process of exchange, a mode of reading, and a system of classification.
Shifting current scholarship's focus from the academic to the general reader, from the university to the public sphere, Recoding World Literature argues that world literature is culturally determined, historically conditioned, and politically charged.
Moving deftly from the theoretical literature to the texts themselves, Mani's groundbreaking study explores these conflicts and dialogues and the resulting cultural hybridization as they are expressed in four novels that document the complexity of Turkish-German cultural interactions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His innovative readings will engage students of contemporary German literature as well as illuminate the discussion of minority literature in a multicultural setting.
As Salman Rushdie said in the 2002 Tanner Lecture at Yale, "The frontier is an elusive line, visible and invisible, physical and metaphorical, amoral and moral. . . . To cross a frontier is to be transformed." It is in this vein that Mani's dynamic and subtle work posits a still evolving discourse between Turkish and German writers.