BUCSA Director’s Lunchtime Talk: Overstepping the Humanities Crisis: Reflections on Archiving and Conceptualizing Global Human Memory

DATE: Monday, February 27, 2017

TIME: 12:30-2 PM

LOCATION: 750 Commonwealth Ave, EPC Rm. 204

Abstract:

Models for studying cultural phenomena in various places and periods on a global scale have rapidly multiplied over the past decade and resulted in a wealth of new scholarship of ambitious planetary scope. Sweeping new paradigms of “global history,” “world literature,” or “world philology” have emerged as we face the much-invoked “humanities crisis,” the incisive drop in the image of the humanities, in enrollments and student interest, and in funding and support for humanistic inquiry. Vibrant new subfields such as digital humanities, environmental humanities, or pop culture and media studies have certainly contributed to proving the relevancy of the humanities to contemporary society, but how can we overcome the “humanities crisis” without losing the historical depth of human experience and memory?

This lecture argues that the archiving and careful conceptualization of cultural phenomena in various places and periods of history on a global scale can give us deeper self-understanding and enable meaningful action in our current historical moment. Surveying the practices of global comparisons over the past decades, the lecture addresses the ethical challenges and responsibilities in the study of human memory. Throughout, the lecture throws light on how in particular East Asia might shape global comparisons in a way that can energize, even reconfigure the study of Western antiquity and European cultural history.

Speaker Bio:

Wiebke Denecke is Associate Professor of East Asian Literatures & Comparative Literature at Boston University. She received her BA and MA from the University of Göttingen (Germany) and her PhD from Harvard University. Her research encompasses the literary and intellectual history of premodern China, Japan, and Korea, comparative studies of East Asia and the premodern world, and world literature. She is the author of The Dynamics of Masters Literature: Early Chinese Thought from Confucius to Han Feizi (2010), Classical World Literatures: Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman Comparisons (2013), and co-editor of The Norton Anthology of World Literature (2012, 2018), The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature (2017) and a three-volume literary history of Japan from an East Asian perspective (Nihon “bun”gakushi. A New History of Japanese “Letterature”) (2015-). She currently works on projects that situate early Japanese literature in relationship to China and Korea, on conceptual approaches to East Asia’s Sinographic Sphere, and on the global study of human memory.