时间：2026年11月11日16:00

地点：仓前校区恕园19-205

主讲内容：

“Presentism” lends itself to various definitions. One definition is the philosophical one. This posits that nothing “really” exists beyond the present. In contemporary academe what we usually mean with “presentism” is an inordinate concentration on topics that are of immediate concern to our present and how this risks leading to various kinds of neglect. One such neglect is that of literary works, or literature in general, before some cut-off date. Broadly speaking and using what is admittedly a narrowly Western set of literary-period terms, this most often means works pre-dating Romanticism. Another form this neglect may take is that all works are read from theoretical perspectives exclusively geared to today’s concerns, bypassing their temporal, cultural, and geographical anchoring. I will look at how such presentism affects the interpretation of some Spanish poems and of Robinson Crusoe.

主讲人简介：

Theo D'haen is Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Universities of Leuven (Belgium) and Leiden (Netherlands). He is a long-standing Member of Academia Europaea, which he has served as a Trustee, Member of the Executive Board, and Editor-in-Chief of its journal European Review (Cambridge University Press). He has held the Erasmus Chair and been a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Harvard, Yangtze River professor at Sichuan university, Distinguished Visiting Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Visiting Professor at the Sorbonne (Paris), University of Vienna, University of the Dutch Antilles, and Tsinghua University. He has published widely on (post)modernism, (post)colonialism, and world literature. Recent publications include World Literature in an Age of Geopolitics (2021, Brill), Dutch Interbellum Canons and World Literature (2023, Palgrave), A History of World Literature (2024, Routledge), A History of European Literature (2025, Wiley - with Anders Pettersson), and World Literature as Geoculture (forthcoming, DeGruyterBrill).