Comparing Literatures: Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Turkish, Urdu
Comparative Literature has spent the last few decades expanding its focus beyond Europe and the Anglophone Americas. But has it succeeded? Departments around the world include scholars working on Hebrew, Persian, Arabic, and to a lesser extent Turkish, Urdu, and other non-European languages. But the desire for coverage remains a chimera, always tempting with the prospect of inclusion: "if only we had somebody who did…" What would success, even if we subscribed to such teleology, look like?
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Curator

Intervention
Ma'na is not the same as “meaning” at all; it is its own story.

Resources
At this point in history, a focus on literature as an object of study is informed by administrative and pedagogical necessities.

Intervention
How do we speak and write in a way that is concise and accessible to a wider audience and that can make an impact on social movements and on life in society?

Resources
Here, the syllabus of Comparative Literature 305: Prospects for a Comparative Poetics.

Journal Article
I aim to explore in what follows the terms khuntha, mukhannath, and khanith, and their associated identities, along with their linguistic characteristics and literary uses.*

Intervention
Mixed forms are crucial not only to the understanding of khuntha, mukhannath, and khanith communities, but also to the very scaffolding of Almarri’s paper.

Journal Article
This essay examines an instance of media activism by members of a Karachi-based organization run by and for nonnormatively gendered people who are known as khwaja siras.

Book Chapter
The Untranslatable refers to how concepts assimilate actually existing ways of speaking and being and how ways of speaking and being interfere with concepts.

Book Chapter
Amichai’s poetry articulates an implicit theory of translation as the intertextual practice of a historical agent, an implicit theory that is poised to provide a new perspective on the critical discourse of contemporary translation studies.

Book Chapter
Wittgenstein’s theory of language provides a good methodology for making sense of maʿna in Classical Arabic.

Essay
Driven by his artistic sensibility, the poet might tear up a given rule, not to do harm to language, but to urge it forward. The poet or man of letters, then, is the one in whose hands language develops.

Resources
I want to talk about the future not of language teaching, but of language learning.

Resources
How might we move beyond the Europhone term "vernacular" to frame non-Europhone literatures and literary histories?

Intervention
Is methodological rigor all that is necessary to establish a humanities curriculum, or do humanists have a duty to center moral principles in our pedagogy? How might we bridge the two extremes of delineating humanities departments in American universities—rigidly bordered individual fields versus large umbrella programs like the Global Humanities? What could exist between the scales of the local and the global?

Intervention
When things fall apart, when societal deterioration accompanies imperial collapse, we become disillusioned, disenchanted, and this emerges in our literature, art, and philosophy. But how might this disillusionment extend to our pedagogy?

Intervention
What is the point of the humanities right now? Do they help us save the world? Become a better person? Develop empathy? Which line of reasoning do we use to justify our own existence to administrators, to students, to donors? This question and its subsidiaries form the center not only within our own discussions at HumCore, but of the larger discussion about core humanities curriculum design in the United States.

Intervention
How might one design or adapt a course to make it more responsibly global? How might we teach important texts, long disappeared into the morass of the “canon,” in such a way that highlights their inherent globality and renders them new?

Intervention
Though many of us are frequently concerned with what we’re currently teaching and why, and though we might have strong opinions about what ought to be taught in the coming years, fewer of us have a comprehensive understanding of how the past century of institutional approaches to curriculum design has contributed to our present circumstances.

Intervention
As we close out this series of reports on the Humanities Core (HumCore) Workshops, it is worth returning to the two questions that have driven every session so far:
1. Can we conceptualize the Global Humanities at all?
2. How have our ideas created teaching structures in California, Karachi, and Singapore?

Journal Article
While Hans Robert Jauss writes that “things which occur at the same time are not really simultaneous,” this essay argues for the simultaneity of things that occur at different times. In fact, it proposes multiple simultaneous temporalities as a constitutive feature of global modernism.