Thursday, January 31 at 4:00, LC 319. Theory & Media Studies Colloquium presents: Professor Hayot is Professor of Comparative Literature at Penn State University. He has studied the ways in which China (and a variety of correlates each working to undermine the geographic, cultural, or political singularity of the word “China”) have affected the intellectual, literary, and cultural history of the West (similarly undermined). His first book, Chinese Dreams (Michigan, 2004), centers on the politics of translation and theatrical representation, attending to examples in English, German, and French. My second book, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (Oxford, 2009) ties the “invention” of the universal subject of a globalizing modernity to a series of legal, literary, sociological, medical, and photographic relations to Chinese suffering (here the national sites are England, the US, France, Austria and, though briefly, China itself). In some sense the trajectory of these two projects can be mapped as an expansion of my interests from “modernism” to “modernity.” His latest book, On Literary Worlds (Oxford, 2012) retheorizes the literary history of the past four hundred years (more or less!) by developing new ways of thinking about literary worldedness and its historical function.