The Lexicon Project will be meeting Next Friday Feb 18 at 9.30 am CST via Zoom. In this meeting, we will conclude with our quarterly theme of Comparative Vernacularizations. To this end, we will discuss various pieces on medieval world-literature, including Brandon W. Hawk, “Biblical Apocrypha as Medieval World Literature,” The Medieval Globe 2020 (pp. 49-83); Suzanne Conklin Akbari, “Modeling Medieval World Literature,” Middle Eastern Literature 2017 (pp. 2-17); Karla Malette, Lives of the Great Languages: Arabic and Latin in the Medieval Mediterranean, Chapters 1 and 13. [Supplementary: Rey Chow, “The Old/New Question of Comparison in Literary Studies: A Post-European Perspective” (pp. 289-311); Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability, Intro (pp1-27); Tim Harrison & Jane Mikkelson, “What Was Early Modern World Literature?” (pp. 166-188).]

In this meeting, we will be focusing on the issue of Comparative Vernacularizations. Particularly, we are going to discuss how a renewed focus on world literature can help us think about the emergence of different linguistic formations, and how those formations established bridges between audience, sacred texts, and literature as a category of reading.

The Lexicon Project will be meeting again on Friday Feb. 4 at 9.30 am CST via Zoom. In this meeting, we will be continuing with our quarterly theme of Comparative Vernacularizations. To this end, we will discuss Alexander Beecrofts’s An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to Present Day. We will take 1-36 and 145-193 as our primary focus, and we recommend 101-144 and the chapter “Rises of the Novel, Ancient and Modern” by the same author included in the volume The Cambridge Companion to the Novel edited by Eric Bulson (43-56).