Jérôme David: Généalogies cachées de la littérature mondiale et quiproquos actuels

Jérôme David explores the aesthetic categories that define world literature. Is “world literature” simply a text that circulates in the global market, a book that can be found just as easily at the Frankfurter Buchmesse as at the local Barnes & Noble or Payot bookstore? Does “world literature” instead refer to a literary form, like the sonnet or haiku, or a trope, such as the wanderer, that recurs across continents? Does an author born in Tangier, living in Paris, and writing novels in French necessarily create “world literature”? Or is world literature defined less by the location and geographic origins of the producer/author of the text and more so by those of the reader/consumer? Does the mere act of translating Madame Bovary into English, Spanish, or Arabic, thereby making it available to a global audience, transform the text into “world literature”? Or could it be as David Damrosch suggests, that world literature is simply “the sum total of everything ever written?” *

Jérôme David is an Associate Professor of Modern French Literature at the Université de Genève. His research areas include comparative history of literature and the social sciences, literary theory, postcolonial Francophone literature and world literature.

Jérôme David earned his doctorate under joint supervision from the Université de Lausanne and the Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He has published numerous articles, among them:

• Balzac, une éthique de la description, Paris, Honoré Champion, coll, in Romantisme et modernités, 2010.
• Une réalité à mi-hauteur : exemplarités littéraires et généralisations savantes au XIXe siècle, in Annales. Histoire, sciences sociales, n° 2 («Savoirs de la littérature»), 2010, p. 263-290.
• Histoire globale, en coll. avec T. David et B. Lüthi, Traverse. Revue d’histoire, n° 3, 2007.
• Propositions pour une macrohistoire de la littérature mondiale, in Anne Larue, Christophe Pradeau et Thiphaine Samoyault, eds., La notion de littérature mondiale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2004.
• La “décolonisation de la littérature” : altérité mêlée et ethnologie de soi, in J. K. Bisanswa et M. Tétu, eds., Francophonie au pluriel. Québec: CIDEF-AFI, 2003. 99-109.
• Identité linguistique et construction culturelle d’une posture de parole: le conteur dans la littérature créole de langue française, in Laurent Adert and Eric Eigenmann, eds. L’histoire dans la littérature. Genève: Droz, 2000.
• Propositions pour une macrohistoire de la littérature mondiale, in Anne Larue, Christophe Pradeau et Thiphaine Samoyault, eds., La notion de littérature mondiale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2004.

More information on Jérôme David can be found here.

*“Toward a History of World Literature.” New Literary History, 2008, 39: 481–495. 483.