Ripped from the Headlines: Teaching Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Letters in the Context of 21st-century Controversies

In the long shadow of 9/11 and the ongoing COVID pandemic, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters connect with the lived experience of today's students, especially the cluster of eight letters dated 1 April 1717. By emphasizing parallels between Montagu's observations and the students' own lives, The Turkish Embassy Letters can add a modern dimension to the eighteenth century in general, challenges of gender, and texts written in and about the Muslim world.

Vengeance is whose? Applying the interpersonal theory of suicide to the titular character in Lev Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

Suicide is a leading cause of death around the world. Prior to Covid-19 suicide was the tenth overall leading cause of death in the United States, and the second overall amongst adolescents and young adults with a disproportiante impact on ethnic and social minority groups. Despite its unfortunate prevalence much remains to be learned about the underlying neurobiological factors implicated in death by suicide. From a psycho-social perspective, the Interpersonal Theory of Suicide (Joiner, 2007; Van Orden et al., 2010) posits three necessary factors leading to suicidal desire and behaviours, namely thwarted belongingness, perceived burdensomeness, and an acquired capacity for self-injury. Given the universality of suicidal behaviours, this theory should be applicable across both cultures and eras. In this article I aim to apply the Interpersonal Theory of Suicide to one of the most famous literary deaths by suicide, that of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

Henrik Ibsen and Conspiracy Thinking: The Case of Peer Gynt

Generating countless websites, books, films, series, and podcasts, and encompassing nearly every major negative event that has taken place since the end of World War II, conspiracies have become a phenomenon that anyone as a citizen and thinking individual has had to cope with in the last few decades, arguably reaching a peak during the Trump presidency, with the rise of QAnon and various conspiracy theories about the current Covid-19 pandemic (Barkun 2017;Amarasingam and Argentino 2020;Mitchell et al. 2020;Uscinski et al. 2020). Not surprisingly, the rise of conspiracy theories has also coincided with an increasing scholarly interest, especially within psychology and the social sciences, although studies of conspiracies in literature and film have also grown in number during the last two decades. Just to mention two famous examples, the same Brown's Inferno (2013) draws upon the long-standing tradition of conspiracy theories related to Dante's Divine Comedy, and the works of William Shakespeare have been subjected to a long series of conspiratorial readings, arguably reaching a peak-at least in a Norwegian context-with Erlend Loe's and Petter Amundsen's mashup of theories about Shakespeare's persona and the coded messages that the English dramatist allegedly left in his texts (Loe and Amundsen 2006). Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's rejection of a fixed identity in late modern society and cultural production, she makes a clear argument against two main avenues of scholarly interpretation of the play, a Hegelian and Cartesian one: "I argue that Peer Gynt should be understood as expressing a fundamentally non-transcendent world-view" (Rees 2014, 13, 19). [...]according to Rees, Peer Gynt's status as a "national epos" is highly paradoxical, and the play hardly seems to contain a clear-cut "message" or to allow a straightforward interpretation, be it about cultural identity or otherwise.

World Literature: Against Isolationist Readings

The global Coronavirus pandemic is just the latest trigger to ask us to reconsider the futures of terms such as globalization, transnational, and post-national. Conversations about the world and world literature can hardly be dis-embedded from the larger historical-political text of the world, or multi-perspectival, prismatic examinations of the many conflicting worlds that exist. In fact, as is well known, conversations and statements on the connectedness of the world and shared aesthetic affinities have always come at the heels of national or territorial isolationalism, material exceptionalism, and intellectual seclusion.

Pandemic, Space and Environment in Blindness by José Saramago

Mentioned and praised even by the Noble prize committee, in 1998, Blindness (published in 1995) is a complex novel dealing with the human nature and behaviour in the context of a crisis generated by a sudden and unknown disease. The relevance of reading this book these days, when the entire humanity (and I daresay our planet as an interdependent system) is facing a terrible viral pandemic, is obvious and helpful. The present paper aims to explore José Saramagos novel from a combined geo-ecocritical perspective, emphasizing the interrelatedness of humanity, space, and surrounding environment. The main research questions of this study are: how do humans interact with the places they live in and the ecosphere during a pandemic? and how does a pandemic affect the human behaviour? The geoecocritical approach is due to the interdependence between space and environment, one can hardly explore one of the previously mentioned components of the fictional world without referring to the other. Another aspect that this essay will touch is the alteration of peoples emotions due to the difficulties they face during pandemics and the importance of emotion management in these extreme situations. For the proposed analysis the following methods will be indispensable: close-reading, ecocriticism, geocriticism, and narratology.

Nights of Plague A Conversation

The following is an edited transcript of the opening plenary session of the Institute for World Literature in July 2020 -held online as a result of Covid-19. In this conversation with IWL's director and associate director, Orhan Pamuk discusses his understanding of world literature and his place in it, and his ongoing work on his novel Nights of Plague, then nearing completion.

The World Poetics of Lockdown in Pandemic Poetry

This essay uses contemporary theories on World Literature to discuss two anthologies of pandemic poetry: Singing in the Dark: A Global Anthology ofPoetry Under Lockdown, and AndWe Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again: Writers from Around the World on the Covid-19 Pandemic. These anthologies develop a new criticality on issues of migration, biopower, and inequality that have long "plagued" cultures of late capitalism. As they representvarious states of lockdown imposed around the world due to the spread of the coronavirus, the anthologies grapple with the paradoxical experience of the "singular -universal" that comes with living in a pandemic. By emphasizing the untranslatability of diverse bodies, races, cultures, and languages, these anthologies deconstruct the per-ceived synchrony of experiencing lockdown. This essay reveals how they attempt to deconstruct the Eurocentrism of "World Literature" by reconfiguring the category of the "global" and representing collective trauma.