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Emily Graf examines social practices of commemorating writers as cultural heroes in memorial museums from a global perspective, placing the institutionalization of the Chinese writer Lu Xun (1881-1936) at the center of her investigation. She asks how writers are remembered and forgotten in and by space. If they are remembered, how does their display in memorial museums produce the image of the writer as hero? Author museums have been treated with much skepticism in literary studies, as they encourage an author-focused reading rejected by scholars of New Criticism and reader-reception theorists alike. The concept of the “author-as-hero” immediately triggers a scholar’s hermeneutics of suspicion, rejecting such institutions for their instrumentalization of the author (most visibly by the nation- or more intensely the so-called “propaganda-state”) and for seducing the naïve reader to become a literary tourist or unwitting worshiper. Thus author museums still form an under-researched field in (world/ comparative) literary studies and within museology go unnoticed due to their marginality as a museum genre. Thus the cultural-moral proscription that the author ought not be treated as hero continues to exist largely detached from a world-wide social practice of commemorating writers as heroes by societies around the globe. What agency do objects, human actors and institutional structures gain in the process of making a literary hero? And since a hero’s charisma is by definition volatile, how does this production change over time? Taking into account the interdependencies and inequalities within world literature, Graf also investigates how the display of one writer is connected to other writers in memorial museums across the globe. What kinds of material links can be found to other literary or political heroes in their living spaces, their collections of objects and books or their visual representations in photographs, paintings or sculptures? How can these connections within a larger hero genealogy hinder or facilitate ...
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