Looking for Night, Literary Mediators and the Making of World Literature

The Kim-Park Program for the Study of the Book is pleased to present Looking for Night, Literary Mediators and the Making of World Literature with Quentin Rybak-Vaganay.

In this colloquium presentation, Quentin Rybak-Vaganay will discuss his upcoming article of the same name that explores the journey of Elie Wiesel’s Night—a work of literary non-fiction based on his experience in the Holocaust—from its original 1956 Yiddish publication in Buenos Aires, to its presence on the New York Times best-seller list for eighty weeks from 2006 to 2007. By drawing on archival records, Rybak-Vaganay tracks the key intermediaries and mediators who allowed Wiesel’s Holocaust testimony to become a work of world literature, understood as mode of circulation. Although Night has circulated worldwide since its first publication, Rybak-Vaganay argues that Night’s literary status was not established immediately and definitively. Special attention is paid to the records of Georges Borchardt, who served as Wiesel’s literary agent from 1959 onward.

This research contributes an enlightening case to the scholarship on world literature and on literary representatives, by showing how Borchardt engaged with the promotion and worldwide dissemination of Wiesel’s masterpiece. The presentation will also explore how the esthetic of the successive covers of Night determined its success and ultimately its circulations.

This event is open to all with registration and will be held in The Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center in Regenstein Library.

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