َAround the World in Eighty Days

Around the World in 80 Books is the latest book of David Damrosch, Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is a leading theorist in this field and has already written several books to explain his theory of World Literature both in theoretical and practical aspects including What Is World Literature? (2003), How to Read World Literature? (2009), Teaching World Literature (2009), World Literature in Theory (2014) and Comparing Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age. Generally speaking, in all these works, Damrosch is focusing on two important notions: first, World Literature is a new trend in Comparative Literature studies which crosses national, linguistic and cultural borders and includes, in fact, the whole literature of the world; second, to get rid of the chronic Eurocentrism of Comparative Literature, we must take advantage of translation. Around the World in 80 Books is written with such an intention in mind.

The book is organized in sixteen chapters. Damrosch's itinerary starts from London, where Phileas Fogg started his journey in Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days (1872) and takes his reader to all around Europe, Turkey, Oman, Egypt and African countries, Near and Middle Eastern countries (including Iran, of course), India, and Far Eastern countries as China and Japan, and then to Central America and Latin America and comes back to London at the end of his journey. The Introduction of the book: "The Voyage Out" is a charming narrative of Damrosch's youth life when he decides to attend a chorus where he meets "an alto with a lovely smile" (10). Around the World in 80 Books is a project coming to fruit in times of Covid-19, a gloomy era in modern man's experience and an opportunity to travel the world around one's room. Damrosch's trip takes sixteen weeks from May through August 2020. The book "explores works that have responded to times of crisis and deep memories of trauma" (13). More importantly, Damrosch contends: "All of us who want to venture beyond the boundaries of our own country need to be vigilant in not succumbing to reductive cultural stereotypes, whether reflexively negative or patronizingly positive, and we need to push back against market mechanisms that limit the variety of works available to us" (14). One cannot agree with Damrosch more when he says that "influential translations can spur innovation in the host language itself" (16). "…literature can inform our sense of ourselves and our world, particularly in difficult times" (17). Around the World in 80 Books is a must-read book for those interested in World Literature. " Lector, intende: laetaberis" (17).