Premises and Problems: Essays on World Literature and Cinema

Abstract

The eight chapters present here in the essay collection Premises and Problems: Essays on World Literature and Cinema edited by Luiza Franco Moreira diversify the category of world literary and cinematic “text” by emphasizing the internationalism of exchanges between nonhegemonic languages, both within and outside the concept of secular modernity, and seemingly peripheral cinemas. The relation between world-system economic theory and literary traditions developed by Immanuel Wallerstein, then, becomes inadequate in accounting for the giddying transactional valence of literary traditions and cinematic representations across developed and developing regions. The collection studies the exchanges both cross-temporally, spanning across geographical delineations that are defamiliarized against modern cartographic representations, and appositely, revealing unlikely associations between places marked by the distribution patterns of world texts. What is most distinctive about the collection is its presentation of world literatures and cinema as a conceptual challenge to these economically sustained divisions between centers and their peripheries.The collection’s area of study spans geographies of the Iberian Peninsula and the Middle-East on the one hand and the United States and Latin America on the other. Intercultural literary and artistic relations across these regions, in the historic past and in the contemporary times, offer well-founded grounds for rethinking the pluralized signifier of the modern world. The collection remains attuned toward literary cultures that are present outside of the economically scaffolded production centers but are nevertheless imbricated within these spaces owing to the larger structures of literary exchange and the overlap of translated identities. The wide-ranging definitions of the international text—built through the inclusion of studies on world cinema—constitute another vital aspect of the collection and further the concept of the world as processural and polycentric, changing with shifts in the observational lens.The first two chapters study early practices of translation that expand the present-day concepts of the source and target languages. Tarek Shamma’s chapter takes the translation of Poetics into Classical Arabic by Abu Bishr Matta ibn Yunus as an instance of creative transposition produced without the desire of regrafting Greek grammar into the Arabic. Critical responses to this work from Averroes, similarly, think through ways of disarticulating translation as an assimilitative practice rather than a direct adaptation of one linguistic paradigm to another. The second chapter by Benjamin Liu constitutes a particularly perceptive study on the nonextant writing practices of Islamic Spain, specifically that of the aljamiado, and discusses how modern interpretations of such texts make concerns of territorial mobility, settlement, and resettlement of communities into continuous preoccupations. The chapter takes Itamar Even-Zohar’s statement in Polysystem Studies on the asymmetric relations of literary “interference” (Poetics Today, 1990; 56) between source and target languages in practices of translation and extends that to the displacements of power relations between dependent languages and their more prominent linguistic subjugators.The third and fourth chapters significantly contribute to the areas of comparative literatures, elevated through their close engagement with the difficult intersectional spaces between languages particularly indebted to their use in religious discourse such as Hebrew and Arabic, and the cross-cultural kinesis engendered by world literary discourse. With reference to Dov Sadan’s works on the untranslatable quality of Hebrew writings and the limits placed on considerations of Hebrew literature as world literature, H. Hever widens Erich Auerbach’s statements on the Europeanization of modern culture by looking toward philology and its modernization of Hebrew studies. Chapter Four looks toward recent writings that take Islamic works as the “episteme” (84) for articulating an alternate theory of world literature, separate from that advanced by Pascale Casanova; concepts of modernity and “literarity” (85) are transformed when viewed through such a lens. Karim Mattar’s observations on the English translations of Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book efficiently reworlds concerns of secularism and modernity in extant Middle Eastern writings from early to the late modern periods and makes them part of contemporary debates.The fifth and sixth chapters in the collection reframe world literatures through the dialogic interstices present between American and Latin American literatures. Luiza Franco Moreira’s chapter offers a distinctly inclusive statement on “world literature as a perspective” (112), by making translation into literary communication, thereby, reversing the commonly adjudicated structuring relations between prominent and lesser visible languages. Elizabeth Bishop’s translations of Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s poetry are taken as intercultural nodes of thought, seeking emplacement in the politics of Drummond and sounding out their own sociopolitical resonances. The sixth chapter by Patrick Dove articulates an absorbing discourse on the concepts of universality and the world as present in Jorge Louis Borges’s “El Aleph” and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. What ties the two texts together is Dove’s own interest in the referential capacity of languages and how Spanish circulatory signifiers—both common, such as, arkhé signifying foundation, and proper, such as the place name Ciudad Juárez—reconstruct the reader’s relationship to tradition as “ground” (154) and local histories as uneven, psychometric projections in the terrain of a pluralized world.The seventh chapter stimulatingly diversifies the genre of world literary criticism itself by looking into existing systems of world-scale labor management and geopolitical governance and locating their critical dearth in offering an abiding sense of the “cultural arena” (169). Particularly gripping is the range of texts that Richard E. Lee uses in order to reshape the canon of world critical “texts,” from administrative changes to the management of academic institutions to evolving cataloguing processes in the Library of Congress to the expanding structures of appreciation related to Western art forms, specifically, music. The two concluding chapters locates the field of world cinema as effective ground for studying the referent of the world as an unimaginable totality, what Levi R. Bryant calls in The Democracy of Objects “a bubbling excess within any whole” (Open Humanities Press, 2011; 272). The eighth chapter reads Argentine cinema (Headless Woman) and Turkish cinema (Three Monkeys) as duplicating the conundrums implicit in assessing world “texts” within cinematic techniques while the ninth chapter takes Brazilian academic debates on the national cinema responsible for shaping “new cartographies” (226) that are unconditioned by changes in market economy.