Concept Of World Literature Research Articles

Performing Distinction in Big Banana: Culture at the Margins of Visibility

Central American writers have perceptively engaged with the concept of world literature from their minor positionality. For instance, as implied in the mocking undertone of its title, Roberto Quesada’s Big Banana (2000) deals with being at the edge of the periphery, following a Honduran migrant in the Latin American community in New York. Quesada explores how the protagonist channels his “deseo de mundo”, to use Mariano Siskind’s words, into a strategy of performing distinction to carve out a place for himself in a cosmopolitan society. Compounding “banana republic”—an expression coined by O. Henry, inspired by Honduras—with “The Big Apple”, Big Banana’s title underscores the book’s play with cultural registers and national and worldly identities. The growing scholarship on Central American and U.S. Central American literature has analyzed the novel through the lens of coloniality, the limits of solidarity, the experience of the Central American diaspora, and as “denuncia social”. My article instead traces how cultural productions acquire different valences each time they cross the center–periphery border in the performance of distinction that Big Banana and its protagonist carry out in response to their doubly peripheral position. In other words, this essay is concerned with the novel’s problematic instrumentalization of Western hegemonic culture—both highbrow and commercial popular culture—to make claims of worldliness and carve a space for itself in world literary circuits.

World Literature and Defeat

This essay underscores the importance of seeking refuge in literary aesthetics by arguing that Goethe’s concept of world literature was formulated in compensation for the shock of military defeat, political collapse, and foreign occupation. The refugee became a figure of identification in Goethe’s writing in the 1790s and his Orientalist Nachdichtungen. The Goethean mode of reading distant literatures entails identifying with other writers who are often already marginalized within their own cultures. This manner of engaging with non-European texts refuses to establish a pantheon of great works precisely because it relies on a writerly interest in rediscovering one’s own identity by reading foreign literature from a position of insecurity and weakness. The goal of reading is always the reconstruction of the self through a strange text. With its eagerness to establish a monumental cultural figure, the nineteenth and early twentieth-century canon marginalized precisely those unGerman texts in which Goethe most effectively dismantled his own authorial status. Only with the demise of colonial empires and the defeat of Nazi Germany did a more modest, anti-hegemonic mode of reading remerge.

Epilogue

Abstract Ecocriticism offers a broader horizon than the concept of world literature. Instead of treating culturally bonded beings and political events of a zeitgeist, ecocriticism sees human history and lifeworlds as only one trajectory among myriad evolutions of species and the earth. The Anthropocene, with its focus on post-natural universals such as “man as geological agent,” obscures the fatal contradictions within capitalism, which has inherent eco-destructive tendencies. As a mode of production aimed at robbing the worker and robbing the soil, capitalism is destined to pursue capital accumulation, profit, and growth to the destruction of ecospheres and human communities. Alternatively, eco-socialism sees humans as an organism integral to nature but believes that human production must protect human lives and community from nature's blind forces in order to survive and to thrive. The utopian dream resonates with the myths of the goddess and ideas of substantial rationality imbued with aesthetic aura and ecological bonds with nature and the earth. This present work seeks to recover the utopian dream of the reconciliation of humans and nature.

On the concept of world literature

On the concept of world literature

The concept of world literature in Czech and Slovak comparative literary studies

The concept of world literature in Czech and Slovak comparative literary studies

Goethe’s “Welt” poet in Bengal: The Influence of World Literature on Jibanananda Das and other Bengali Poets of the 1930s-40s

This study aims to establish a link between the concept of “Weltliteratur” or World Literature, in terms of the free movement of literary themes and ideas between nations in original form or translation, and the Bengali poets of the thirties and forties who actively translated French and German poets. It identifies Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's (1749-1832) concept of World Literature as a vehicle for the Kallol Jug poets. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe introduced the concept of “Weltliteratur” in a few of his essays in the first half of the nineteenth century to describe the international circulation and reception of literary works in Europe, including works of non-Western origin. My emphasis will be on Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) arguably the most celebrated poet in Bengali literature who was well versed in the contemporary Western Canons of Poetry. Jibanananda’s defamiliarization of the rural Bengal Landscape, his use of exotic foreign images owe a debt to contemporary European poets. Interestingly, Jibanananda had reviewed an English translation of German author Thomas Mann’s novel “Dr Faustus’ for a Bengali magazine “Chaturanga”. In the Bengali review he states that despite prevalent misconceptions (some critics considering the novel to be superior to the original Faust epic by Goethe) Goethe’s Faust was the first text to capture the hope, despair and crisis in the modern world and articulate it in such a manner that “true” literature of the age was created in its new light. In Jibanananda’s estimation, Thomas Mann deserves credit for treating the Faust legend in a unique and creative way.

Anthrozoology, or

Abstract This essay looks at the relationship between the human and the animal with a particular focus on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. At the centre of the analysis is Ovid’s basic understanding of anthrozoology and his narrative about Lycaon. With continuous reference to the translations into English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish, this interpretation is concerned with the subtle linguistic phenomena that can only be derived from the Latin original text; and which, regardless of the obvious content of the metamorphosis, subvert the traditional distinction between human and animal. The anthropological difference is closely connected to the order of language, which has been considered a defining characteristic of the human being. It is therefore all the more remarkable that the plurality and convertibility of languages can be addressed in the light of Ovid’s anthrozoology. With this in mind, the essay concludes by discussing the concept of World Literature.

Vertical German Studies: The Significance of the Past for a Concept of World Literature

Vertical German Studies: The Significance of the Past for a Concept of World Literature

Locating Lumumba

Abstract This article builds on Joseph Slaughter's call at the 2017 American Comparative Literature Meeting to be more aware of the “locations of comparison” that scholars of literature inhabit. Slaughter reminds us of World Literature's problematic emphasis on global marketability and translatability as well as its lack of attention to enduring postcolonial inequalities. I argue with Slaughter that an alternative conception of World Literature can be and has already been imagined. I show how during the Cold War and in the wake of decolonization competing visions for World Literature were proposed on both sides of the Iron Curtain. I do this through a comparative study of three “peripheral” Cold War–era texts that foregrounded the figure of Patrice Lumumba, who was a recurring symbol of this other World Literature: Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), the Cultural Revolution–era propaganda play Chidao zhangu 《赤道战鼓》 (War Drums on the Equator) by Li Huang and his collaborators, and Valerio Zurlini's 1968 Third-Worldist film Seduto alla sua destra (Black Jesus). These historical texts, I argue, ultimately point to the horizon of a World Literature and a Comparative Literature that have the ambition to never stop “locating” themselves.

World Conspiracy Literature and Antisemitism

Conspiracy theory is a truly global form: Conspiracy narratives transgress the boundaries between cultures, media formats, and languages with ease, as is illustrated by the example of the US-American qanon-narrative, which is now a standard reference point for German Covid-19-‘sceptics.’ Conspiracy theory seemingly becomes a ubiquitous phenomenon and, at the same time, constitutes a global context of interchange between conspiracy readers and authors. My paper examines the example of the ‘Great Reset’-conspiracy theory. This narrative originated in libertarian circles and alleges the existence of a socialist world conspiracy. My paper investigates the roots of this narrative and shows that it has an antisemitic kernel. Drawing on Moishe Postone’s theory of structural antisemitism, I argue that conspiracy thinking is intrinsically connected to antisemitic thinking.In a second step, the paper discusses the narrative structure of conspiracy theories. Through means of narrativization and fictionalization, conspiracy theories conceptualize world as a text that requires meticulous interpretation to reveal its true meaning. Thus, instead of theorizing world, conspiracy theories mythologize it, constituting world as an affective context within a narrative structure. By discussing this complex, I propose the thesis that conspiracy theory resembles in many regards the concept of world literature, as it constitutes world as a function of narrativization. Conspiracy theory could therefore be understood as a clandestine undercurrent of the discourse of world literature, which, albeit seemingly connected to progressive values, is charged with its regressive other. Correlating world literature and world conspiracy literature, my paper seeks to establish a better understanding of the contemporary phenomenon and to challenge our concept of world literature.

Formations of World Literature(s) and Shaw’s The Man of Destiny in Chinese and Japanese Translation

Abstract: In "Formations of World Literature(s) and Shaw’s The Man of Destiny in Chinese and Japanese Translation" Shunqing Cao and Xin Chen expand Franco Moretti’s dictum that "world literature is not an object, it’s a problem" to elaborate that the concept of world literature(s) is in some sense a problematic one, which is itself under a process of problematization. Cao and Chen discuss how variation and heterogeneity contribute to a more in-depth understanding of formations of world literature(s). Taking the Bernar Shaw’s The Man of Destiny they discuss the writer’s presence in world literature from a bi-lateral perspective: Shaw’s work in the Englishspeaking West and Shaw in Asia. For the former, Shaw stands in a specific place in recent postcolonial Irish Studies and thus raise problems for their research paradigm. For the latter, Cao and Chen present an analytical comparison between a Chinese and a Japanese translation of The Man of Destiny. Cao and Chen argue that by such a bilateral approach we may recognize the importance of heterogeneity so as to obtain further reflections on present discussions of world literature(s).

Comparative Literature, Variation Theory, and a New Construction of World Literature(s)

Abstract: In "Comparative Literature, Variation Theory, and a New Construction of World Literature(s)" Wang Chao discusses Shunqing Cao’s "variation theory" as a framework in the discipline of comparative literature and its applicability for a new construction of world literature(s). Wang argues that Goethe’s concept of world literature can be expanded and developed for a new construction of the idea of world literature(s). Wang’s principal argument is that comparative literature in today’s heterogeneity and cross-cultural variabilities can be revived with the notions of variation and its connecting aspect of world literature. Both variation theory and perspectives of the concept of "new world literature" are based in recent insights in comparative literature, on variations of literary exchange, on interpretation in crosscivilization literary circulation, translation, and production. Wang proposes that these views broaden and adjust the boundary of comparability, thus injecting much-needed vitality into comparative literature and world literature research.

World Literature According to Wikipedia Popularity and Book Translations: The Case of Modern Italian Poets

Most studies of world literature ignore statistics about the translation, circulation and reception of literary works, since no way exists to find such information on a global scale. Because of this, Western scholars generally assume that certain figures are canonical everywhere in the world, such as Shakespeare and Dante. This paper proposes a new and different approach to the study of literary canonicity, by drawing on an almost completely untapped dataset (the 310 global Wikipedias) and comparing Wikipedia popularity and newly collected data on book translations. By examining diverse measures of global popularity of a corpus of 101 modern Italian poets, I aim both to integrate a new resource (Wikipedia) into the study of world literature as well as to newly problematize the very concept of world literature. I will show how shifting one's criterion of canonicity – whether the number of translations or the number of Wikipedia pageviews of an author – affects our understanding of what makes an author canonical or not. In the end, I argue, we have not yet developed a subtle enough way to determine the canonicity of authors. But this dual strategy of comparing translations and Wikipedia popularity does show us a potential way forward.

On the sources of cosmopolitanism as an idea: The Russian and the European views

The article is concerned with the difference in understanding of the term ‘cosmopolitan’ inRussiaandFrance. Often considered a predominantly negative phenomenon inRussia, cosmopolitanism fi st provoked a discussion at the time when the emphasis shifted from ideology to understanding of the historical-literary process. Since the late 18th c., the idea of the possible existence of a literary work within the global literary environment (the concept of world literature) was adjusted by the ‘golden chain’ metaphor, which enabled implementation of the ‘universality’ concept as a unity principally separate from the French idée universelle. During this evolutionary period emerged a distinctive subject of literary history: fi st, ‘humanity’ as a general term (initially identifi with universalism or cosmopolitanism), and then ‘a nation’. But it is the discovery of the national that the author believes is connected with particularism and provincialism, the latter summoning the memory of the noble intention of universalism and cosmopolitanism. An interim summary of the process was produced by Joseph Texte, a professor of comparative literature inLyon, at the end of the 19th c.

World literature, translation, untranslatability

ABSTRACT This paper explores the ontological status of world literature and its relationship with translation and untranslatability. It argues that world literature as national literature read, understood and appreciated beyond its linguistic borders requires, accommodates, and encourages intercultural interaction and translation as the catalyzer of new desires, new ideas, new styles, and new meanings in the world. The infinite respect for literary, cultural, and conceptual Otherness that can be derived from the Goethean concept of world literature offers or promises a genuine universalism which preserves the special characteristics of every culture. Untranslatability as a structural problem internal to translation itself as a mode of communication not only ceaselessly poses challenges to translation, but gives rise to interlingual influence and change, contributing to the birth and development of a world literature that enhances exchange, understanding, and respect among different nations, affording each national literature chances to enrich, renew, and rejuvenate itself. Untranslatability, the paper concludes, is not, as some scholars have maintained, an obstacle to world literature, and is in no way incompatible with it.

Decentred Geographies: Poetics and Politics of the Avant-garde

Thanks to the work of Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti, David Damrosch and many others, over the past two decades, the concept of world literature has once again become the subject of thorough examination within the field of literary studies, especially in relation to cosmopolitanism and globalization. When it comes to the study of individual national literatures and specific regional contexts, as well as to the definition of comparative literature as a discipline, debates regarding its background, its reach and limitations could not be ignored. World literature thus appears as a heterogenous entity – always manifesting in different contexts in different forms – consistently in dialogical exchange with specificities of a particular literature and culture. Instead of discussing the problematic relation between centre and periphery or criticizing the idea of global literary and cultural canon, the avant-garde as an international and global phenomenon that appears even more radically on the so-called periphery is what is of primary interest to me. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that avant-garde (in its various forms and radical expressions) simultaneously challenges art as an institution and introduces the idea of a decentred geography of world literature.

World Literature and the Italian Literary Canon: From Elena Ferrante to Natalia Ginzburg

Variously intended as a field of study, a paradigm, and/or a method of literary criticism, World Literature has in the last two decades become a central subject in literary studies. The current debate around World Literature is certainly central to the present and the future of the discipline of Comparative Literature. At the same time, as I show in this paper, a redefinition of World Literature, which would include a deeper understanding of both its risks and its potential benefits, can push us towards a revision of the canon(s) of our national literary traditions. Moving from Tim Park’s assertion that the popularity of Elena Ferrante’s “dull global novel” would contribute to obscuring more deserving authors – among whom he cites Natalia Ginzburg – this paper argues that Ferrante’s literary success could, on the contrary, pave the way for a rediscovery of past writers within the Italian literary tradition. Through a comparison of Ferrante’s L’Amica Geniale and Ginzburg’s La Strada che Va in Citta, the article shows how both works are, in Pheng Cheah’s terms, “literature that worlds and makes a world”, insofar as they foreground a world that is open and unstable, crucially caught between tradition and modernity, as well as the local and the global. Ultimately, both works call for a conception of World Literature that does not need to imply the loss of the local, but that can rather promote what Florian Mussgnug calls “responsible and responsive local sensitivity”.

Steampunk without steam: The Book of Devices as Neo-Ottoman experimentation

ABSTRACT Turkish author Ihsan Oktay Anar’s The Book of Devices (2017, Kitab-ı Hiyel) employs pseudo-steampunk characteristics in a pre-modern Ottoman context. The novel experiments with the possibility of steampunk’s expansion as a translated/adopted cultural element within the larger concept of world literature. I argue that The Book of Devices distorts the Anglo-American attitude of Neo-Victorianism as exemplified in steampunk. Anar’s (in)competence in depicting actual course of events in history, in portraying an imaginable technology that might work, and in forming a non-colonialist cultural background create a distorted example of an application of the steampunk genre in the Turkish setting. The book then comes to be an attempt to create a Neo-Ottoman mindset against Neo-Victorian expansion as reflected through steampunk. This way, though steampunk presents itself as “inhospitable” in that it resists outside intrusion from non-European experiments, Anar successfully merges it with modern Turkish literature to establish a local genre.

11 ½ TESES SOBRE O CONCEITO DE LITERATURA-MUNDIAL

A Literatura-Mundial é um conceito cujo tempo já deveria ter chegado como dizia Goethe, mas que continua sempre em devir. Este breve ensaio esboça uma intervenção o debate atual sobre o conceito de literatura-mundial com base na elaboração feita pela Warwick Research Collective (WReC) em 2015. Assim, baseia-se na teoria de sistema-mundo de Immanuel Wallerstein, que adopta para o campo literário com referência ao trabalho de Franco Moretti. A definição básica de Literatura-Mundial aqui proposta, portanto difere radicalmente de outras perspectivas, ao concentrar-se na literatura do sistema capitalista moderno. Num foco mais concentrado ainda, este ensaio propõe que o estudo da Literatura-Mundial seja visto como uma forma de resistência, num questionamento crítico da imaginação do centro.

Seeing through the Concept of World Literature

Abstract Less concerned with the concept of World Literature than with the promise and perils of conceptualization, this essay considers what experiencing some forms of writing as world literature might involve. Using J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country (1977) as an illustrative example, it addresses questions of circulation, translation, writing systems, book history, and literary geography in the context of recent academic debates about world literary studies. It concludes by revisiting Rabindranath Tagore’s landmark 1907 essay “World Literature,” arguing that it remains an indispensable guide to experiential reading and anti-conceptual thinking.