Author of On Literary Worlds to Speak at UT Sept. 18

On Friday, Sept. 18, The University of Tampa will welcome professor and author Eric Hayot to discuss his book On Literary Worlds. The discussion, part of the University’s Honors Program symposia series and English and writing department’s Scholar’s Symposia series, will begin at 6:30 p.m. in the Crescent Club on the ninth floor of the Vaughn Center and is free and open to the public.

In On Literary Worlds, Hayot re-theorizes the literary history of the past four hundred years (more or less) by developing new ways of thinking about world literature and its historical function.

“Hayot’s exquisite little book does the very big job of rethinking the very terms on which we think about literature and which in turn, he shows us, reveal how we think about the world,” said Anne Anlin Cheng, author of Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface.

Hayot is a distinguished professor of comparative literature and Asian studies at Penn State University. From 2008–2012 he served as the first director of Penn State’s Asian Studies Program. He served as president of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2013-2014.

Hayot is the author of two books on China, Chinese Dreams and The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity and Chinese Pain, reflecting a decade of work on the ways in which China (and a variety of correlates each working to undermine the geographic, cultural or political singularity of the word “China”) have affected the intellectual, literary and cultural history of the West. His most recent book, The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities, was published in 2014.

For more information, go to https://utscholarssymposia.wordpress.com or contact Kacy Tillman, associate professor of English, at ktillman@ut.edu or (813) 257-1706. The event will be live tweeted using #utscholars.