Held at the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center November 18-20, 2009, the conference brought together scholars from around the globe, as well as numerous UCSB faculty, to examine the notion of "foundational texts" in world literature. The keynote speakers were Sandra Bermann (Princeton University), who spoke on “In the Light of Translation: Some Insights from Dante’s Commedia”, and David Damrosch (Harvard University), who spoke on “Foundational Translations: The Worldly Origins of National Classics.” The goal was to reflect on canonical or “sacred” texts—from Homer’s Odyssey to Murakami’s Genji, from Cervantes to Mayan hieroglyphs, from Dante to Coetzee, from Goethe to Glissant, from the Thousand and One Nights to Jorge Luis Borges—in a global perspective: how they are translated, appropriated, transformed, how they travel across different cultures and languages, their foundational status evolving accordingly in a post-European world.

Organized by Dominique Jullien (Department of French & Italian; Director, Series in Contemporary Literature). Co-sponsored by: The UCSB Series in Contemporary Literature; The UCLA Comparative Literature Department; The French Cultural Services; The UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center; The UCSB Consortium for Literature, Culture & Theory; The UCSB English Department; The UCSB East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies Department; The UCSB Chicana/Chicano Studies Department; The UCSB German, Slavic and Semitic Department & the Program in Comparative Literature; The UCSB Center for Middle Eastern Studies; The UCSB Spanish & Portuguese Department; The UCSB Classics Department.