World Literature Studies Research Articles

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN THE CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY OF POSTMODERN

The article is based on the study and generalization of world and Russian criminological literature, as well as some statistical data. In the postmodern society in which humanity has lived since the mid-twentieth century, not only social processes and phenomena change significantly, but also knowledge about them. Postmodern criminology proceeds from the fact that “crime” and “criminality” are social constructs constructed by the authorities in the interests, first of all, of the authorities. There are no properties, characteristics or personality traits inherent only to the “criminal personality”. “Criminogenic factors” are also factors that determine other types of deviant behavior. Punishment is ineffective (not effective enough) in counteraction crime. New views of postmodern criminology are presented in the article.

Translation selection and the consecration of Dylan Thomas’s poetry in China

Abstract Dylan Thomas’s poetry can be seen both as minor Welsh literature and world literature. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of field and capital, this article explores the mechanism of translation selection and consecration of Thomas’s poetry in China by using his poetry published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press as an illustrative case study. In so doing, it is argued that the integrated forms of linguistic, economic, and symbolic capital associated with Thomas’s poetry, along with the expiration of its copyright, prompted the publisher to select his poetry for translation to maintain its own dominant position in the Chinese publishing field. The publisher, translator, and other agents have consecrated Thomas’s poetry as world literature in China. This article expands research on inter-peripheral translation flows and ‘sociologies of poetry translation’ and advances interdisciplinary studies of translation and world literature.

Historical-contextual Method of World Literature Studies: Foundation and Development of A.A. Gugnin’s Scientific School in Polotsk

Historical-contextual Method of World Literature Studies: Foundation and Development of A.A. Gugnin’s Scientific School in Polotsk

Comparative World Literature: Making a Case for Re/Translation

Translation has been a major bone of contention in comparative literature studies. For the longest time it was looked down upon by bona fide comparatists, who insisted on studying literary works in the original. World literature scholars, on the contrary, have from the beginning acknowledged that, given the multiplicity of the world’s languages and their literatures, it was inevitable that one resort to translation to access all but a handful of literatures. The final decades of the 20th century saw the rise of translation studies. Adopting insights and methods from descriptive translation studies might help bridge any putative gap between comparative and world literature studies, also when it comes to transcultural studies.

Thematic Analysis of Non-Violence in the Select Excerpts of Svetlana Alexievich and Thiruvalluvar

The universal prominence attained by English language has paved way for translation and thereby, offers access to world literature and comparative studies. India has witnessed a growth in the field of comparative studies since it received an impetus from Rabindranath Tagore's lecture delivered on the subject when he was invited by National Council of Education in 1907. Tamil Literature has endorsed stalwarts like Thiruvalluvar whose couplets focus on valuable topics that have not only stood the test of time but also has its influence across cultural, political, ethical and topographical diversity. His magnum opus titled Thirukkural is a masterpiece of human thought, equivalent to the Bible, Milton’s Paradise Lost and works of Plato. Svetlana Alexievich is a Belarusian writer who writes in Russian language. He works have been translated into 35 languages and more that 20 documentary films have been produced based on her testimonies collected from victims, survivors, and firsthand witnesses of war and disaster. Alexievich received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, for her polyphonic writing skill which fetched her veneration in the 21st century. This research article aims to compare and contrast how two literary stalwarts belonging to two different centuries and completely dissimilar ethnicities have unified thoughts on human existence. Thiruvalluvar’s views about ‘war’ and ‘killing’ and Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s perception of the futility of war are analyzed in a novel attempt to corroborate that peace and harmony are themes validated since the origin of species and will continue to be valued as long as human civilization exists.

Self-Translation in the Sinosphere: Challenging Orthodoxies from Shanghai to Taipei to Makassar

Abstract This article begins a debate in translation studies about the nature of self-translation in the Sinophone world. It demonstrates the continued influence of a history of cosmopolitan authorship and self-translation that emanated from Republican China and moved to Taiwan and beyond in the post-war period. This history and its contemporary effects, including diverse forms of self-translation in Taiwan and Indonesia, are shown to challenge the most prominent models of self-translation, notably those drawing on sociological frameworks such as Abram de Swaan’s “global language system,” which are proven to occlude local realities and multilingual writing. These new perspectives are shown to have consequences for both world literature studies and theoretical accounts of self-translation in the 21st century.

Introduction: the aesthetic agency of minor literature

This introductory essay traces a genealogy of the notion of the minor in critical theories of the past four decades to then articulate the notion’s aesthetic dimension. Foregrounding that dimension, we argue, offers a powerful analytical tool for fostering a dialogue between world literature and postcolonial studies. Through a critical survey of the important work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd, Pascale Casanova, Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, as well as David Damrosch and Bergur Rønne Moberg, we contend that these theoretical formulations of the minor have rarely lived up to their methodological promise to articulate creativity, change, and solidarity in ways that are in the final instance not determined by vertical opposition to the major or by an overly restrictive account of aesthetic agency. Going back to the work of Kafka that is so central to Casanova’s and to Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the minor, we retrieve the figure of Odradek and propose to read it as instantiating a self-reflexive aesthetic intervention that configures its own relation to political constraints. This insistence on aesthetic agency, we submit, challenges and complements both Deleuze and Guattari’s groundbreaking philosophical and political account of the minor and world literature’s focus on circulation and postcolonial studies’ emphasis on sociohistorical contexts. The introductory essay concludes by presenting the six essays that make up the special issue, and emphasizes the ways in which these essays’ attention to the formal and imaginative devices of the minor pluralize the notion by articulating not only minor literatures and languages, but also literary figures (children, women, sisters, queer men), genres (short story cycles, flash fiction, buried laments), and literary practices (indirect translation, diasporic publication, rewriting, adaptation) in ways that capitalize on the aesthetic agency of the minor.

IMC Strategy and Strengthening of Restaurant Brand based on Sultanate Cultural Heritage in The Recovery Period Covid-19

The development of the hospitality business, especially special restaurants that serve the Sultan's favorite dishes, requires an appropriate marketing communication strategy. Tourism and hospitality business recovered the fastest during the recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic. This research aims to create the right integrated marketing communication (IMC) strategy to reach the targeted market. Using qualitative research methods, inductive and constructivist paradigms, as well as data collection through the field and virtual world observations, in-depth interviews, and literature studies and then triangulated to produce valid research results. Currently, IMC is experiencing rapid development, not only in terms of content but also in terms of media and selection of messengers. If IMC 1.0 focuses on product content, then in IMC 4.0 the customer must be the main focus, so the communication content material created must be based on the principle of benefits and added value received by customers. such as getting new experiences, enjoying a unique and authentic taste, self-existence and others. Bale Raos restaurant has been able to create the right IMC but of course it needs improvement for more optimal results. The most important suggestion, Bale Raos Resto must review and reorganize its IMC program and improve marketing media in terms of content, format and appearance so that it is more appealing to the customer's sensory senses. meet the principle of customer benefits.

Intertextuality, World Literature and Migration: Dictionaries and the Female Body in Najat El Hachmi’s L’últim Patriarca and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese–English Dictionary for Lovers

This essay argues that globalization has textual implications and leads to increasing similarities between literary texts that emerge from the experience of migration but are located in disparate contexts. These textual entanglements are unintended but not necessarily arbitrary, since they are deeply rooted in today’s high interconnectivity between people, economic systems and cultural artefacts. The essay bridges the gap between the fields of world literature and literary theory by complementing Julia Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality with a contextual approach that adds understudied aspects of migration, multilingualism, gender and the market as key factors in discovering new resemblances between texts in a transnational context. By defining migration literature as a genre characterized by an open-ended web of intertextual relations and conceiving of intertextuality – the intersection of texts – as a concept that mirrors the crossing of different cultures that goes hand in hand with globalization, the essay also takes world literature studies into new directions. The essay shows how world literature’s focus on circulation and centre–periphery dynamics has implicitly favoured a narrow understanding of intertextuality as an intended world literary device that does not account for less linear crossings. Through a comparative analysis of A Concise Chinese–English Dictionary for Lovers by the Chinese-British author Xiaolu Guo and L’últim patriarca by the Catalan-Amazigh writer Najat El Hachmi the essay examines the processes of linguistic and sexual maturation that are at the core of both narratives of migration. The intertextual entanglements between these novels can be explained neither through conscious practices of rewriting nor through notions of intertextuality that focus exclusively on aesthetic matters and leave aside the cultural dimensions of globalization, but through a new approach that highlights the similarities between different subjectivities of migration and the social embeddedness of literature in a global context.

다중언어적 공간을 향하여

This paper endeavors to undertake a critical examination of Franco Moretti’s theory of world literature, elucidating its limitations, and subsequently proposing an alternative approach. Specifically, it proposes the establishment of a multilingual world literary framework as a counterpoint to the monolingualism emphasized within Moretti’s conception of a world literary ‘space.’
 While Moretti’s pioneering “distant reading” method once sparked controversy and marked a transformative juncture in the field of world literature studies in the United States, it has since evolved into one among several critical methodologies in the discipline. In Korea, conversely, Moretti’s theory has attained mainstream recognition within academic research. This prevalence, coinciding with the ascent of digital humanities, quantitative research, and interdisciplinary approaches, may inadvertently lead to an uncritical acceptance of the inherent limitations within Moretti’s theory of world literature. For Moretti, who draws inspiration from Immanuel Wallerstein’s world system theory to conceptualize the world literary space, the paramount objective is to ‘explain’ the complexities of ‘one and unequal’ global literary landscape. However, world literature theory should not only seek to ‘explain’ the unevenness within the world literature space but also engage in a critical analysis of the mechanisms perpetuating these inequalities, ultimately striving to effect change.
 In this regard, Gayatri Spivak’s notion of ‘planetarity’ and Emily Aptor’s concept of ‘untranslatability’ offer valuable insights, enabling us to envision a multilingual world distinct from the homogeneity often associated with globalization. While their focus centers on exploring the presence of the ‘world in literature,’ Francesca Orsini’s alternative perspective offers a critique of the inherent monolingualism within Moretti’s theory while advocating for the adoption of the concepts of ‘multilingual local’ and ‘significant geographies’ to unravel and elucidate the interrelationship between ‘literature in the world’ and the ‘world in literature.’ Orsini’s argument may provide a reference point for critically engaging with hierarchical center-periphery dynamics by empowering numerous independent local voices. This approach can enable us to reposition Moretti’s theory of world literature as one of the available methodologies, paving the way for a more nuanced and enriched understanding of world literature.

Racialized Modernity in Late-Nineteenth-Century Romanian Literature

My paper aims to discuss the imperative of combining ethno-racial and World Literature studies when analyzing the worlding of a semiperipheral literature. More precisely, it looks at the connection between modernity and racialization in Romanian literatur

Jewish Literature & World Literature. Unlearning (Trans)Nationalism

The present paper proposes an investigation of the concept of Jewish literature in its relation to world literature studies within an analysis of the first generation of Jewish writers who became part of the Romanian literary life following the 1923 emanc

Introduction to the special issue World literature and the strategies of nation-building

The introduction gives a survey of recent developments in cultural nationalism and world literature studies. I argue that these trends have come to tackle the issues of cross-cultural transfers in antithetical directions: While the former highlighted the transnational patterns of national self-fashioning, the latter wanted to reclaim the individual and the particular from all-absorbing globalist commodification. Then I summarize the findings of the articles collected in this issue as reminders that Goethe’s take on world literature as a tool for a dialogic national self-formation has not fully lost its validity even in our post-national present.

The Wikipedia Republic of Literary Characters

Literary characters do not receive the same attention from literary scholars as other components of literature (i.e. the narrative, theme, motif). In contrast to this lack of interest, various studies have shown that characters in particular play an important role for readers. We draw on this observation to explore a user-oriented notion of World Literature according to the collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia. Based on its language-independent taxonomy Wikidata, we collect data from 321 Wikipedia editions on more than 7000 characters presented on more than 19000 independent character pages across the various language editions. We use this data to build a network that represents affiliations of characters to Wikipedia languages, which leads us to question some of the established presumptions towards key-concepts in World Literature studies such as the notion of major and minor, the center-periphery opposition or the canon.

Preface: World Literature in an Expanding Digital Space

Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia, and Wikidata, the rapidly growing knowledge graph, are not yet widely used in literary studies, but their scale and multilingualism make them particularly suitable as new means for the study of world literature. This is the hypothesis at the heart of this special issue. Our preface provides a research overview of the topic, briefly summarizes the articles that constitute this issue, and focuses on overarching aspects and common challenges.

Voice against Social Taboos: Re-reading The Descendants of Cain (1954) and Sunlight, Moonlight (1964) from the Perspective of World Literature

This paper examines The Descendants of Cain (1954) and Sunlight, Moonlight (1964) by Hwang Sunwŏn (1915-2000) from the perspective of world literature. He intertextualized and rewrote his Japanese predecessor’s fiction works with the same title, “Descendants of Cain” by Arishima Takeo (1878-1923) and The Broken Commandment by Shimazaki Tōson (1872-1943), by addressing the issue of land reform in prewar North Korea and social discrimination in industrialized South Korea in 1960s, respectively. The theme of his novel, breaking taboos and obtaining freedom, distinguishes Hwang from his predecessors in the field of world literature studies. The term “influence” can be supplanted by the concept of “intertextuality” for transnational and transcultural comparative research. This study attempts to apply the term ‘intertextuality’ in order to prevent any misinterpretations of the concept of influence, particularly in relation to the potential hierarchy between influencing and influenced. By analyzing the texts of Hwang Sunwŏn, Arishima Takeo, and Shimazaki Tōson employing both close reading and distant reading techniques, we can gain insight into Hwang’s emphasis on taboo-breaking themes and his contribution to world literature studies. This article also emphasizes the importance of considering the format that Franco Moretti discusses in “Conjectures on World Literature.” Moretti suggests that modern novel is comprised of a triangle: “foreign plot; local characters; and then, local narrative voice” (65). “Local narrative voice” can be explained by Hwang Sunwŏn’s interest in the taboo motif. He continues to break the taboos and thematizes the issue of freedom versus ideology, and he further interrogates the problems of the legacy of Confucianism and newly adapted capitalism. His works are an example for the study of world literature of how the motif of violating taboos can function as a narrative tradition, demonstrating the boundless will of human freedom.

Framing, rewriting, and reception in world literature: the case of Wolf Totem

When world literature is seen as a product of translation and circulation and as a mode of reading, new world literature attributes, other than literariness, can be inferred, such as relevance to readers, a combination of cultural peculiarity and universality, and accessibility. A case study of Wolf Totem reveals that these attributes can explain how commercial publishers frame, translators rewrite, and readers interpret such works. Commercial publishers’ framing discourses usually highlight a novel’s cultural peculiarity and universality; translators emphasize accessibility while rewriting texts to accommodate target literary norms and readers’ pathos; and readers’ interests usually converge at themes relevant to their lives, thus promoting the evolution of interpretation toward shared experiences of humanity. Using content analysis tools, our study addresses the lack of empirical analysis in literary reception by examining the value of online reader reviews in explaining the effect of framing and rewriting and the readership’s criteria for rewriting. We contend that mass readers participate in the formation and circulation of world literature through word-of-mouth recommendations and sharing reading experiences. Therefore, the significance of online reader reviews deserves scholarly attention in reception and world literature studies.

The cultural dilemmas of uneven and combined development (UCD): ‘the biggest agony of the Turkish spirit’

Recent studies of international historical sociology have focused more on the interaction between the political and economic aspects of the world system compared to its cultural dimensions. In this article we want to address this lacuna with particular reference to the theory of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD here after). UCD is an attempt to develop a non-Eurocentric, non-linear, and historical understanding of international relations. It aims to provide a non-Eurocentric historiography and historical sociology that goes beyond binary oppositions of East and West, tradition and modernity, and emphasises non-Western agency in shaping historical developments. The cultural implications of UCD has recently been revived in world literature and cultural studies. We seek to contribute to this research by illustrating how UCD can help us understand the cultural implications of societal interaction through the use of Turkish literature, notably Peyami Safa’s work. We want to focus on the theme of the interaction between the West and the East in his work within the context of the theory of UCD as an example of how it manifests itself in the cultural field. Accordingly, the article is structured as follows. The first section discusses the key features of UCD as they relate to our topic, and the second section goes on to examine processes of Westernisation as they have occurred in Turkey and attempts to demonstrate how UCD is reflected in the literature of the period. The third section aims to show how the concept of UCD can help us better understand the implications of societal interaction in Peyami Safa’s work by addressing the various issues that are raised in Justin Rosenberg’s approach to analysing world literature. The final section concludes with general observations concerning the potential utility of UCD-based methodologies in constituting the foundation of non-Western IR theories.

The Arabic-Spanish-Jewish School of Poets: Heinrich Heine’s “Jehudah Ben Halevy” and World Literature

This article argues that Heine’s 1851 poem “Jehuda ben Halevy” modifies Goethe’s concept of world literature to make a place within it for the geographically dispersed, multilingual literature of the Jewish diaspora. Heine’s efforts to imagine Jewish literature as world literature resemble those of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, which made explicit the political implications of Goethean world literature by likening the arrival of Jewish literature in a world literary canon to the achievement of civil rights for German Jews. The article argues, however, that Heine goes further than Jewish scholars like Michael Sachs and Leopold Zunz by suggesting that Jewish literature not only deserves attention as world literature, but that its transculturality and multilingualism anticipate it and provide a model for future thought on world literature. Heine’s reflections in “Jehuda ben Halevy” indeed foreshadow contemporary interventions in the study of world literature regarding the status of medieval literature, untranslatability, and multilingualism.

Znaczenie dolara amerykańskiego jako waluty kluczowej w międzynarodowym systemie walutowym

Purpose – The aim is to assess the importance of the US dollar as the key world currency after 2008. Research method – The basic research methods used in the article are the study of world literature and the analysis of statistical data delivered by the European Central Bank, the Bank for International Settlements, the International Monetary Fund and SWIFT. Results – Although there has been discussion for several decades about the likelihood of the US dollar losing its position in the International Monetary System, it still maintains its status as the most important international currency. The dominant political and military position of the United States, the size of the economy and its still key share in world trade, and, above all, the market of instruments denominated in American currency and the dominant share of the dollar in the currency market, confirm the current position of the US dollar. This does not mean, however, that it will retain its current position. Analyzing historical changes in the leadership position among international currencies, one should not expect a revolution. Originality / value / implications / recommendations – The analysis of the importance of the US dollar as the key currency in the IMS, undertaken in the article, shows the importance of the problem and implies the need to carry out further research on this issue.