Jane Tylus | Who Owns Literature?

Jane Tylus, Yale University, Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Italian and Professor of Comparative Literature

Who owns literature? Or, how do we take leave of our work?

The subject of the talk falls between these two moments: the letting go of one’s creative work, and that work’s inevitable return as something different once it has left you. If Theocritus invokes Hades as the threshold that bars all remembrance, Derrida associates the experience of no longer recognizing a work as his “own” with death. In both cases, the issue is one of separation: how do we take leave of our words, and our works? And what happens when they come back in a different guise—as, according to Derrida, they must? Examples will include Torquato Tasso, Anne Bradstreet and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, three early modern writers from Europe and the Americas whose works were “snatch'd" from them—Bradstreet's word—and published without their consent, provoking powerful meditations on literary good-byes and estrangement.

Sponsored by the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL) Research Unit, the Department of French and Italian, and the Stanford Humanities Center

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