Ep. 120: Around the World in 80 Books with David Damrosch

Talking Beats with Daniel Lelchuk

"We're living in a time of shrinking borders and a rise of ethnonationalism. Literature is a privileged means of accessing other parts of the world and other peoples."

World literature expert David Damrosch is here, armed with his new book Around the World in 80 Books. With the lofty goal of bringing the reader on an entire world tour through 80 literary works, Damrosch creates many hurdles through which he must jump. First off, how does one go about compiling such a list? How does one judge quality of works from far away places and times? How can great literature even exist in a world of cancellations and trigger warnings? This and much more is explored in the wide-ranging conversation.

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David Damrosch is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is a past president of the American Comparative Literature Association, and is the founder of the Institute for World Literature (www.iwl.fas.harvard.edu). He was trained at Yale and then taught at Columbia from 1980 until he moved to Harvard in 2009. He has written widely on issues in comparative and world literature, and is the author of The Narrative Covenant: Transformations of Genre in the Growth of Biblical Literature (1987), We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University (1995), Meetings of the Mind (2000), What Is World Literature? (2003), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007), How to Read World Literature (2009, 2017), Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age (2020), and Around the World in 80 Books (2021). He is the founding general editor of the six-volume Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004, 2009) and of The Longman Anthology of British Literature (4th ed. 2009), and editor of Teaching World Literature (2009) and of World Literature in Theory (2014). Co-edited works include The Routledge Companion to World Literature (2d ed. 2022), Approaches to Teaching the Works of Orhan Pamuk (2017), Futures of Comparative Literature: ACLA State of the Discipline Report (2017), Crime Fiction as World Literature (2016), and The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature (2009). His translation of Georges Ngal's Giambatista Viko, ou le viol du discours africain is forthcoming from the Modern Language Association in 2022. He has lectured in some fifty countries around the world, and his work has been translated into an eclectic variety of languages, including Arabic, Chinese, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Polish, Spanish, Turkish, and Vietnamese.