Tanner Lecture on Human Values and Symposium
April 9–10, 2025
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David Damrosch Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Comparative Literature Director, Institute for World Literature Harvard University |
Tanner Lecture on Human Values
Wednesday, April 9, 7:00pm
Utah Museum of Fine Arts
David Damrosch
“A Rune of One’s Own: Writing Systems and Cultural Memory”
When writing systems spread beyond their language of origin, they bring literacy to formerly oral cultures or intrude on an existing system of writing. The process of learning a new script often entails learning about the source culture and its literature, sometimes overwriting earlier local traditions, other times creatively stimulating them. This lecture will explore the idea of scriptworlds through the interplay of runes and the Roman alphabet after Iceland’s conversion to Christianity in the year 1000. How did Icelandic poets and grammarians take advantage of the new writing technology to record previously oral traditions and to work against the loss of cultural memory threatened by the new alphabetic order?
Tanner Lecture Symposium
Thursday, April 10, 12:00pm–5pm
Gould Auditorium, Marriott Library
12:00pm — Keynote address
David Damrosch
“Language Wars: Scriptworlds in Collision”
The displacement of runes in medieval Iceland was a gradual and largely peaceful process, but changes can be imposed, either by an imperial power or, conversely, by a nation seeking to free itself from an imperial scriptworld. This lecture will begin with biblical writers’ resistance to Babylonian culture, and then turn to modern examples, focusing on the changing scripts in colonial and revolutionary Vietnam and “the catastrophic language reform” in Turkey during the 1920s. Closing with the role of scripts in civil and regional conflicts in the Balkans and in Israel/Palestine, the lecture will lead into a symposium featuring young scholars exploring “language wars” in the contexts of East Asia and the Middle East.
1:30pm — Panel I: East Asian Scriptworlds in Collision
Ashton Lazarus (University of Utah)
“The Middle Path: Wa/Kan Hybridity in Twelfth-Century Buddhist Popular Songs”
Will Hedberg (Arizona State University)
“Scratching an Itch Through the Sole of One’s Shoe: Script, Translation, and the Illegible
in Early Modern Japanese Fiction”
Cindi Textor (University of Utah)
“(Mis)Translation and the Crisis of Colonial Korean Literature: Illegibility in Kim
Saryang’s ‘Deep in the Grass’”
Raja Adal (University of Pittsburgh)
“The Global Script Regime: Foray into a World History of Scriptworlds”
3:00pm — Panel II: Middle Eastern Scriptworlds in Collision
Jordan Johansen (University of Utah)
“Egyptian Hieroglyphs as a Symbolic Scriptworld”
Annie Green (University of Utah)
“‘The New Script (al-khatt al-jadid)’: Transforming Arabic into the Language of Modernity?”
Liron Mor (University of California, Irvine)
“Scripting Disappearance: Erasure as Conflict in Palestine-Israel”
Rawad Wehbe (University of Utah)
“Poetry under Occupation: Arab Poets Writing Across Scriptworlds”