David Damrosch: Tanner Lecture on Human Values and Symposium on scriptworlds
Apr 15, 2025
Robert Carson
Neither transparent vehicles of meaning, nor expressions of authenticity, writing systems, or scripts, encode the contingencies of historical events and often exceed their intended purpose. This dynamism of scripts was the subject of the 2025 Tanner Lecture on Human Values, delivered by David Damrosch at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts on April 9, followed by a day-long symposium at the Marriott Library on April 10.
Damrosch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Institute for World Literature at Harvard University, presented “A Rune of One's Own: Writing Systems and Cultural Memory,” examining how scripts spread beyond their languages of origin, bringing literacy to formerly oral cultures or intruding on existing writing systems.
Using medieval Iceland as a case study, Damrosch explored the interplay between runes and the Roman alphabet following Iceland’s conversion to Christianity in the year 1000. Icelandic poets and grammarians took advantage of the new Roman alphabet to record previously oral traditions, while also working against the assimilation demanded by the new alphabetic order.
The lecture highlighted the work of poet and political leader Snorri Sturluson, who compiled the prose Edda in the early 1220s. Through this work, Snorri preserved the old Norse myths and poetic traditions that might otherwise have disappeared under Christianity’s growing dominance. Damrosch noted that Snorri, a committed Christian himself, defended these pagan stories not on grounds of religious truth but for their poetic value, allowing Icelandic pre-Christian culture to be preserved through the alphabetic technology that might otherwise have displaced it.
“Script systems profoundly shape people’s worldviews and the ways we make sense of our experience,” Damrosch concluded. “They do this not because of some mystical quality of a single writing system, but because scripts are never learned in a vacuum. In learning a script, people absorb key elements of literary history and its terms of reference, often transcending that of any one language.”
The following day’s symposium, “Script Worlds in Collision,” turned to historical and contemporary settings where writing systems can encode larger systems of political and cultural order. In his keynote address to the symposium, “Language Wars: Script Worlds in Collision,” Damrosch contrasted medieval Iceland’s relatively peaceful script transition with more contentious examples across history.
Beginning with biblical writers’ resistance to Babylonian culture, Damrosch moved to modern examples including colonial and revolutionary Vietnam and what he called “the catastrophic language reform” in Turkey during the 1920s. He examined how Turkish nationalists abandoned the Ottoman Arabic alphabet in favor of the Latin script as part of a broader Europeanizing political project. In quoting one scholar who described the Turkish language reform as a “catastrophic success,” Damrosch diagnosed the wholesale loss of cultural heritage that came with abandoning the Ottoman Arabic alphabet. This reform wasn't merely linguistic, he argued, but was also connected to an “enterprise of ethnic cleansing” in Ottoman policy.
Damrosch concluded his keynote with an examination of scripts in contemporary conflicts in eastern Europe and Israel-Palestine. He showed images of road signs in Israel where Arabic text had been covered by political slogans, and Russian occupiers in Ukraine replacing Ukrainian-language place names with Russian ones. “These are wars over language and culture as much as they are wars over territory,” he observed.
The symposium continued with two panel discussions featuring scholars exploring “script worlds in collision” in East Asia and the Middle East. The East Asia panel included Ashton Lazarus (University of Utah) on hybrid script forms in 12th-century Japanese Buddhist songs; Will Hedberg (Arizona State University) on translation and illegibility in early modern Japanese fiction; Cindi Textor (University of Utah) on colonial Korean literature; and Raja Adal (University of Pittsburgh) on “the global script regime” expressed in the ubiquitous character encoding standard, UNICODE.
The Middle East panel featured Jordan Johansen (University of Utah) discussing Egyptian hieroglyphs as a symbolic script world; Annie Greene (University of Utah) examining a failed attempt to create a new Arabic script in Ottoman Iraq; Liron Mor (University of California, Irvine) exploring erasure as both a textual trope in Israeli and Palestinian literature, and as a mode of political repression; and Rawad Wehbe (University of Utah) analyzing Arab poets writing across script worlds in depicting life in Gaza and the West Bank to global audiences.
Reflecting on the event, Tanner Humanities Center Director Scott Black noted Damrosch’s “kindness and generosity in his careful attention and engagement at the symposium.” Colleagues from Utah and invited presenters appreciated his thoughtful responses to their work. On the Tanner Lecture and symposium keynote, Black remarked: “Dr. Damrosch's concept of scriptworlds opens a fascinating new dimension to the study of world literature. As always, Damrosch’s deep erudition and the fascinating examples he offers make his work especially rich and compelling. In his Tanner Lectures, I was especially struck by how he demonstrates the inseparability of language, script, and stories. There's no neutral writing technology, but at the same time, there's no pure writing technology. If scriptworlds always bear the traces of their origins, they also bear the traces of their histories through cross-cultural contacts and conflicts.”
Indeed, the intellectual substance of this year’s Tanner Lecture on Human Values and Symposium speak to an enduring insight of Damrosch’s field-defining scholarship: The great literary works and figures which we might take to be the most authentic or culturally embedded are, more of than not, the results of historical contingency, artistic inventiveness, and unexpected global circulation. Like world literature, writing systems themselves are expressions of an ongoing dialectic of the universal and the particular, as human creativity moves across time and space.
Symposium progam
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”
Panel II: Middle Eastern Scriptworlds in Collision
Jordan Johansen (University of Utah)
“Egyptian Hieroglyphs as a Symbolic Scriptworld”
Annie Greene (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”
The Tanner Humanities Center neither supports nor opposes the views expressed in its events.
About the Tanner Lectures on Human Values
Founded by Grace and Obert Tanner in the mid-1970s, the Tanner Lectures are dedicated to enriching the intellectual and moral life of humankind. Annual Tanner Lectures are delivered at nine universities: Stanford, Berkeley, Utah, Michigan, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Oxford, and Cambridge. The program also sponsors individual Lectures at other centers of learning in the United States and around the world. More at tannerlectures.org.