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“Thomas Mann, Heinrich Zimmer, and the Locus of India in the Geo-Imaginary of Romanticism”

A Talk by G. S. Sahota (Associate Professor, Literature Department, UC Santa Cruz)

Thursday, October 17th
11am – 12:30pm
Kresge 5-531 (CLS Seminar Room)

Through a reading of Thomas Mann’s novella The Transposed Heads:  A Legend of India (1940) and the Indological research of Heinrich Zimmer which inspired it, this presentation will explore two interrelated sets of themes:  cross-cultural modes of identification and processes of de-particularization; and the challenges of writing Indo-German literary history against the grain of nationalist or civilizational paradigms.  One question that comes into relief in this interpretive exercise revolves around the geography of literary-historical categories.  What are, for instance, the implicit geographies of romanticism?  Where does India lie in the historical temporality of this phenomenon?  What does it mean to write into this category a locus that is both too early or too late for the times?  How might we fashion alternative paradigms to better grasp the simultaneity of the planetary event?

Provincializing Romanticism is a yearlong series of talks and workshop events bringing comparative scholars of global romanticism from within and beyond the Chicago area to Northwestern. The series looks at the cross-cultural exchanges, appropriations, and transformations that have shaped Eurocentric canons of capital-R Romanticism. We welcome faculty and graduate students interested in discussing literary, aesthetic, and historical itineraries of “the” romantic tradition in understudied contexts.

This series of Northwestern events is sponsored by Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, The Graduate School; the Departments of Spanish and Portuguese, French and Italian, German; and Programs in Critical Theory, Comparative Literary Studies, and Middle East and North African Studies.