The Novel Project
In fall of 2016, eleven Duke faculty all of whom were working on their own within their respective language departments discovered that they shared a common object of knowledge and stood to benefit immensely from working as a group. The group included Nancy Armstrong (English), Miriam Cooke (Arabic), Roberto Dainotto (Italian), Anne Garréta (French), Shai Ginsburg (Hebrew), Aimee Kwon (Korean, Japanese), Cate Reilly (Russian), Anne-Gaëlle Saliot (French), Aarthi Vadde (English), and Leonard Tennenhouse (English, American). (Bill Donahue from German is now at Notre Dame.) Convinced this group provided the right intellectual environment for challenging such Eurocentric notions as “the world republic of letters” or “world literature” and their area-studies counterparts, we applied for a multi-year collaborative grant to fund a project to discover what, if any formal features identified those novels likely to thrive in the new global market regardless of t