Dancing on the Edge of the Volcano: Language and Writing in the 1936 PEN Club Congress in Buenos Aires

MÓNICA SZURMUK

DAVIS

Conferencia; DEPARTMENT OF SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE SEMINAR; 2018

University of California, Davis

In this presentation I look at the 1936 PEN Congress in Buenos AIres through the lens of the coverage in newspapers including those published by the British and Jewish communities. Through the lens of the PEN Congress of 1936 I look at a particular instance where literature provided a stage to represent the urgencies of political violence and racism, and the drama of living in a cosmopolitan society. The Congress is an event that allows for a reading of the different worlds of literature beyond the traditional categories of text, reader, writer and critic. By opening up the focus of analysis to literature?s producers and consumers as embodied multilingual presences, I hope to provide a more nuanced understanding of world literature. It is by exploring the centrality of middlebrow, highly politicized writers and their followers that we rethink the notion of world literature beyond canonical authors and institutions (publishers, translators) and within the framework of a ?lived? cosmopolitanism deployed at a time of political danger.