Though literature is not a technology, the historical models literary scholars use to describe literary history owe a great deal to the languages of originality, novelty, progress, and invention that core of the idea of technological development. No real surprise: putting progress at the center of historicity is one of the things that makes us moderns. But if you think like a modern person then it's very hard to ever really make a good case for why someone interested in the history of modern literary aesthetics ought to read the literature of the non-Western world. On Literary Worlds makes that case. It does so by rethinking from the ground up our concepts of literary history and progress, redescribing the history we know (or think we know) in a new language that requires us to be far more worldly and global in our arguments about literary change. To do, so, the book begins with an argument that literature is a world-creating activity. If that is true, then a number of scientific and economic discourses (globalization, e.g.) often considered as in some way outside of or "beyond" literature ought instead to be thought of as coeval with it, as partners in humanity's ongoing attempts to think about the nature of the world. The book reads those attempts as "cosmographies" whose social force, measured against the scientific, geographic, and philosophical history of world-concepts, shapes the "physics" of the socially possible. This theory of the cosmographical imagination leads to a claim that thinking worldedness revises existing models of literary history. Connecting the cosmographical imagination to the historical shifts in world-view caused by the Columbian discoveries and Copernican revolutions, On Literary Worlds shows how the very notion of the modern is, at heart, a cosmographical social form. The book does, therefore, three things: (1) it develops a vocabulary for the description of aesthetic worlds; (2) using that vocabulary, it rewrites the history of literature of the last 400 years; and (3) it criticizes the ways in which the institutional structures of literary study distort or limit our capacity to think about historical time.

Ask just about any humanist, and you will hear that the humanities are in a crisis. Facing utilitarian approaches to education, the corporatization of the university, plummeting enrollments, budget cuts, and political critiques from right, left, and center, humanists find themselves on the defensive. Eric Hayot argues that it is time to make a positive case for what the humanities are and what they can become. Hayot challenges scholars and students in the humanities to rethink and reconsider the work they do. Examining the origins of the humanist ethos in nineteenth-century Germany and tracing its philosophical roots back to Immanuel Kant, Hayot returns to the history of justifications for the humanities in order to build the groundwork for their future development. He develops the concept of "humanist reason" to understand the nature of humanist intellectual work and lays out a series of principles that undergird this core idea. Together, they constitute a provocative intellectual and practical program for a new way of thinking about the humanities, humanist thought, and their role in the university and beyond. Rather than appealing to familiar ethical or moral rationales for the importance of the humanities, Humanist Reason lays out a new vision that moves beyond traditional disciplines to demonstrate what the humanities can tell us about our world.

For decades, we have been told we live in the “information age�—a time when disruptive technological advancement has reshaped the categories and social uses of knowledge and when quantitative assessment is increasingly privileged. Such methodologies and concepts of information are usually considered the provenance of the natural and social sciences, which present them as politically and philosophically neutral. Yet the humanities should and do play an important role in interpreting and critiquing the historical, cultural, and conceptual nature of information. This book is one of two companion volumes that explore theories and histories of information from a humanistic perspective. They consider information as a long-standing feature of social, cultural, and conceptual management, a matter of social practice, and a fundamental challenge for the humanities today. Information: A Reader provides an introduction to the concept of information in historical, literary, and cultural studies. It features excerpts from more than forty texts by theorists and critics—including Walter Benjamin, Umberto Eco, Lisa Gitelman, Ian Hacking, N. Katherine Hayles, Friedrich Kittler, and Norbert Wiener—who have helped establish the notion of the “information age� or expand upon it. The reader establishes a canonical framework for thinking about information in humanistic terms. Together with Information: Keywords, it sets forth a major humanistic vision of the concept of information.

Eric Hayot teaches graduate students and faculty in literary and cultural studies how to think and write like a professional scholar. From granular concerns, such as sentence structure and grammar, to big-picture issues, such as adhering to genre patterns for successful research and publishing and developing productive and rewarding writing habits, Hayot helps ambitious students, newly minted Ph.D.'s, and established professors shape their work and develop their voices. Hayot does more than explain the techniques of academic writing. He aims to adjust the writer's perspective, encouraging scholars to think of themselves as makers and doers of important work. Scholarly writing can be frustrating and exhausting, yet also satisfying and crucial, and Hayot weaves these experiences, including his own trials and tribulations, into an ethos for scholars to draw on as they write. Combining psychological support with practical suggestions for composing introductions and conclusions, developing a schedule for writing, using notes and citations, and structuring paragraphs and essays, this guide to the elements of academic style does its part to rejuvenate scholarship and writing in the humanities.

Eric Hayot teaches graduate students and faculty in literary and cultural studies how to think and write like a professional scholar. From granular concerns, such as sentence structure and grammar, to big-picture issues, such as adhering to genre patterns for successful research and publishing and developing productive and rewarding writing habits, Hayot helps ambitious students, newly minted Ph.D.'s, and established professors shape their work and develop their voices. Hayot does more than explain the techniques of academic writing. He aims to adjust the writer's perspective, encouraging scholars to think of themselves as makers and doers of important work. Scholarly writing can be frustrating and exhausting, yet also satisfying and crucial, and Hayot weaves these experiences, including his own trials and tribulations, into an ethos for scholars to draw on as they write. Combining psychological support with practical suggestions for composing introductions and conclusions, developing a schedule for writing, using notes and citations, and structuring paragraphs and essays, this guide to the elements of academic style does its part to rejuvenate scholarship and writing in the humanities.

Ask just about any humanist, and you will hear that the humanities are in a crisis. Facing utilitarian approaches to education, the corporatization of the university, plummeting enrollments, budget cuts, and political critiques from right, left, and center, humanists find themselves on the defensive. Eric Hayot argues that it is time to make a positive case for what the humanities are and what they can become. Hayot challenges scholars and students in the humanities to rethink and reconsider the work they do. Examining the origins of the humanist ethos in nineteenth-century Germany and tracing its philosophical roots back to Immanuel Kant, Hayot returns to the history of justifications for the humanities in order to build the groundwork for their future development. He develops the concept of “humanist reason� to understand the nature of humanist intellectual work and lays out a series of principles that undergird this core idea. Together, they constitute a provocative intellectual and practical program for a new way of thinking about the humanities, humanist thought, and their role in the university and beyond. Rather than appealing to familiar ethical or moral rationales for the importance of the humanities, Humanist Reason lays out a new vision that moves beyond traditional disciplines to demonstrate what the humanities can tell us about our world.

The Hypothetical Mandarin begins with two simple questions: Why has the West for so long and in so many different ways expressed the idea that the Chinese have a special relationship to cruelty and to physical pain? And what can the history of that idea and its expressions teach us about the politics of the West's contemporary relation to China, and, more broadly, about the historical development of the universal subject of modernity? Insofar as it responds to those questions, the book is a history of the Western imagination. But it is also a history of the interactions between Enlightenment philosophy, the explosion in international commerce that dates from the eighteenth century and goes by the name of "globalization," theories of human rights, and the history of the idea of modernity. Beginning with Bianchon and Rastignac's discussion of whether the latter would, if he could, obtain a European fortune by killing a Chinese mandarin in Balzac's Le Pere Goriot (1835), the book traces a series of literary and historical examples in which Chinese life and European sympathy seem to hang in one another's balance. The representational and historical apparatus that produces these examples has organized the West's explicit relation to China and served as a crucial mode of expression for the West's most fundamental values. Through readings of novels, medical case studies, travelers' reports, photographs, and paintings, the book shows that in the West the connection between sympathy and humanity, and indeed between sympathy and reality, has tended to refract with a remarkable frequency through the lens called "China." Western responses to Chinese pain go to the heart of the relationship between language and the body, the social and philosophical experience of modernity, and the definition of a universal human subject. This analysis opens new possibilities for thinking the West's relationship to China, past and present, and concludes by showing how four terms-sympathy, suffering, economic exchange, and representational exchange-establish the network that frames the historical discourse on China, sympathy, and modernity, and continue to shape the economic and human experience of the present.

For decades, we have been told we live in the “information age�—a time when disruptive technological advancement has reshaped the categories and social uses of knowledge and when quantitative assessment is increasingly privileged. Such methodologies and concepts of information are usually considered the provenance of the natural and social sciences, which present them as politically and philosophically neutral. Yet the humanities should and do play an important role in interpreting and critiquing the historical, cultural, and conceptual nature of information. This book is one of two companion volumes that explore theories and histories of information from a humanistic perspective. They consider information as a long-standing feature of social, cultural, and conceptual management, a matter of social practice, and a fundamental challenge for the humanities today. Information: A Reader provides an introduction to the concept of information in historical, literary, and cultural studies. It features excerpts from more than forty texts by theorists and critics—including Walter Benjamin, Umberto Eco, Lisa Gitelman, Ian Hacking, N. Katherine Hayles, Friedrich Kittler, and Norbert Wiener—who have helped establish the notion of the “information age� or expand upon it. The reader establishes a canonical framework for thinking about information in humanistic terms. Together with Information: Keywords, it sets forth a major humanistic vision of the concept of information.

Bringing together leading critics and literary scholars, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism argues for new ways of understanding the nature and development of twentieth-century literature and culture. Scholars have largely understood modernism as an American and European phenomenon. Those parameters have expanded in recent decades, but the incorporation of multiple origins and influences has often been tied to older conceptual frameworks that make it difficult to think of modernism globally. Providing alternative approaches, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism introduces pathways through global archives and new frameworks that offer a richer, more representative set of concepts for the analysis of literary and cultural works. In separate essays each inspired by a critical term, this collection explores what happens to the foundational concepts of modernism and the methods we bring to modernist studies when we approach the field as a global phenomenon. Their work transforms the intellectual paradigms we have long associated with modernism, such as tradition, antiquity, style, and translation. New paradigms, such as context, slum, copy, pantomime, and puppets emerge as the archive extends beyond its European center. In bringing together and reexamining the familiar as well as the emergent, the contributors to this volume offer an invaluable and original approach to studying the intersection of world literature and modernist studies.

Bringing together leading critics and literary scholars, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism argues for new ways of understanding the nature and development of twentieth-century literature and culture. Scholars have largely understood modernism as an American and European phenomenon. Those parameters have expanded in recent decades, but the incorporation of multiple origins and influences has often been tied to older conceptual frameworks that make it difficult to think of modernism globally. Providing alternative approaches, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism introduces pathways through global archives and new frameworks that offer a richer, more representative set of concepts for the analysis of literary and cultural works. In separate essays each inspired by a critical term, this collection explores what happens to the foundational concepts of modernism and the methods we bring to modernist studies when we approach the field as a global phenomenon. Their work transforms the intellectual paradigms we have long associated with modernism, such as tradition, antiquity, style, and translation. New paradigms, such as context, slum, copy, pantomime, and puppets emerge as the archive extends beyond its European center. In bringing together and reexamining the familiar as well as the emergent, the contributors to this volume offer an invaluable and original approach to studying the intersection of world literature and modernist studies.

Since the mid-1980s, attempts to think history and literature together have produced much exciting work in the humanities. Indeed, some form of historicism can be said to inform most of the current scholarship in literary studies, including work in poetics, yet much of this scholarship remains undertheorized. Envisioning a revitalized and more expansive historicism, this volume builds on the tradition of Historical Poetics, pioneered by Alexander Veselovsky (1838-1906) and developed in various fruitful directions by the Russian Formalists, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Olga Freidenberg. The volume includes previously untranslated texts of some of the major scholars in this critical tradition, as well as original contributions which place that tradition in dialogue with other thinkers who have approached literature in a globally comparatist and evolutionary-historical spirit. The contributors seek to challenge and complement a historicism that stresses proximate sociopolitical contexts through an engagement with the longue duree of literary forms and institutions. In particular, Historical Poetics aims to uncover deep-historical stratifications and asynchronicities, in which formal solutions may display elective affinities with other, chronologically distant solutions to analogous social and political problems. By recovering the traditional nexus of philology and history, Persistent Forms seeks to reinvigorate poetics as a theoretical discipline that would respond to such critical and intellectual developments as Marxism, New Historicism, the study of world literature, practices of distant reading, and a renewed attention to ritual, oral poetics, and genre.

Although literature is not a technology, the historical models literary scholars use to describe it owe a great deal to the languages of originality, novelty, progress, and invention that characterize technological development. However this quintessentially modern mindset-putting progress at the center of historicity-makes it difficult for anyone eager to mount a case for why someone interested in the history of modern literary aesthetics ought to read the literature of the non-Western world. In this groundbreaking book, Eric Hayot argues that contemporary debates about world literature and world literary systems can be rethought through an attention to the world-creating force of aesthetic objects. As he rethinks from the ground up our concepts of literary progress and historicity, Hayot re-describes the history of modern literature as we know it (or as we think we know it), developing new concepts and new formal languages to describe the aesthetic "physics" of the socially and imaginatively possible. Connecting this physics to historical shifts in world-view ranging from Copernicus to Marx, Don Quijote to Battlestar Galactica, On Literary Worlds shows how the very notion of the modern is, at heart, a cosmographic social form and opens vast new directions for the future analysis of the activity and force of literature.

A novel way of looking at information challenges longstanding dogmas-from a preeminent German thinker It is widely agreed that we live in an "information age," but what exactly is information? This small, seemingly facile question is in fact surprisingly difficult, and it has occupied many of the best philosophical minds of the modern age. In this wholly original addition to the quest to understand information, German philosopher Peter Janich argues that our understanding of information is based in the much broader history of scientific naturalism-the belief that science is a fundamental aspect of the world and not a human contrivance. His novel critique of this widespread dogma grounds science in human life practices and wrestles with the very fundamentals of the scientific way of understanding reality. Offering new perspectives on the major contemporary fields of communications technology, neurobiology, and artificial intelligence, What Is Information? provides a deep look into humanity in an information age. Its arguments show ways of reconciling the sciences and the humanities, shining new light on the relationship of science to the natural world.

A novel way of looking at information challenges longstanding dogmas—from a preeminent German thinker It is widely agreed that we live in an “information age,� but what exactly is information? This small, seemingly facile question is in fact surprisingly difficult, and it has occupied many of the best philosophical minds of the modern age.  In this wholly original addition to the quest to understand information, German philosopher Peter Janich argues that our understanding of information is based in the much broader history of scientific naturalism—the belief that science is a fundamental aspect of the world and not a human contrivance. His novel critique of this widespread dogma grounds science in human life practices and wrestles with the very fundamentals of the scientific way of understanding reality. Offering new perspectives on the major contemporary fields of communications technology, neurobiology, and artificial intelligence, What Is Information? provides a deep look into humanity in an information age. Its arguments show ways of reconciling the sciences and the humanities, shining new light on the relationship of science to the natural world.

The essays in this thought-provoking volume investigate ideas of China and Chineseness by means of a broad range of texts, languages, and contexts that surround what the editors call the "various written Chinas" through history. Analyzing discourse of civilization, geography, ethics, ethnicity, writing, and differences about China-from within the country and from outside-this work deliberately disrupts the boundaries that have previously defined China as an object of study.
Sinographies" depends on a respect for the power of texts to shape realities both backward and forward, to create or foreclose possibilities not only of interpretation but of experience. To this end, the essays examine topics as various as colonialism, literary modernism, translation, anime, and Tibet. As a whole, the volume imagines sinography as a new methodological approach to the study of China, one that clears unexpected ground for new kinds of comparative work.
Contributors: Timothy Billings, Middlebury College; Christopher Bush, Princeton U; Rey Chow, Brown U; Danielle Glassmeyer, U of Alabama, Birmingham; Timothy Kendall; Walter S. H. Lim, National U of Singapore; Lucien Miller, U of Massachusetts; David Porter, U of Michigan; Carlos Rojas, U of Florida; Steven J. Venturino, Loyola U; Henk Vynckier, Tunghai U, Taiwan.
Eric Hayot is associate professor of comparative literature at the Pennsylvania State University.
Haun Saussy is Bird White Housum Professor of comparative literature at Yale University.
Steven G. Yao is associate professor of English at Hamilton College.