Theories Of World Literature Research Articles

Orientalism and World Literature: A Re-reading of Cosmopolitanism in Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s Literary World

Abstract Pierre Cachia’s masterful literary biography of Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (1956) identified cultural exchange and particularly translation as the catalyst for the Egyptian cultural and literary renaissance epitomized in the person of Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (1889-1973). This paper takes Cachia as a point of departure and pursues an understanding of Ṭāhā Ḥusayn within the framework of world literature and locates his vision of Egyptian modernity and national identity in the circulation of ideas, concepts, bodies of knowledge and worldviews in the Mediterranean world. It focuses on the role of Orientalism and European Classicism in the cosmopolitanism underpinning his program of cultural and educational reform, and interrogates the conceptual category of “nation,” narratives of Nahḍah, and theories of world literature.

Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature by Warwick Research Collective (WReC)

Reviewed by: Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literatureby Warwick Research Collective (WReC) Caitlin Vandertop (bio) Warwick Research Collective (WReC): Sharae Deckard, Nicholas Lawrence, Neil Lazarus, Graeme MacDonald, Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Benita Parry, and Stephen Shapiro. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool UP, 2015. Pp. 256. £19.99. The recent study from the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) intervenes in current debates in world literature by highlighting a general failure within the disciplines of postcolonial and world literary studies to interrogate the subject of capitalism. While approaches such as the "alternative modernities" paradigm have affirmed a cultural pluralism in recent years, the materialist framework presented in Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literatureunderscores the factors that continue to limit the texts and languages that are published, taught, and circulated within an uneven literary marketplace. By emphasizing "the context of capitalism as a world-system" (WReC 14), the Collective articulates an understanding of modernity as a singular and global phenomenon without precluding heterogeneity and difference. They are thereby able to address a series of timely questions: How, firstly, to reject Eurocentrism without recourse to a concept of postcolonial difference that loses sight of the global universality of capitalism's origins and effects? How to configure modernity as a phenomenon that is both irreducibly specific to individual locations and relational, insofar as it is formed in and through the colonial relationship? And how, finally, to make postcolonial critique sensitive to the uneven structures, institutions, and markets that continue to shape the possibilities of world literature? The Warwick study provides a way into these questions with its suggestive focus on combined and uneven development, a theory initially introduced by Leon Trotsky in his studies of early-twentieth-century semi-colonial Russia and China to explain the "amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms" (qtd. in WReC 11). Trotsky's work shows how the spaces transformed by capitalist or capitalizing social relations continued to sustain rural populations, subsistence agriculture, and traditional social dependencies. Such phenomena were not simply the legacy of archaic cultural practices or psychic characteristics but were actively kept in place and reproduced. The result, according to Trotsky, was a hybrid landscape of modernity and tradition that saw "industrial plants built alongside 'villages of wood and straw'; and peasants 'thrown into the factory cauldron snatched directly from the [End Page 189]plow'" (qtd. in WReC 11). One of the most striking examples of combined unevenness mentioned in the Warwick study is the rapidly expanding cities of semi-colonial China in the nineteenth century. The authors draw on Liu Kang's account of the development of colonial enclaves and port cities such as Shanghai and Peking, where the latest evolutions in production, commerce, and finance were introduced under the control of imperial powers who were "actively propping up an archaic landholding system, and supporting landlords, officials, militarists, and comprador elites in prolonging prior forms of social organisation" (WReC 11). Modernization in such spaces is revealed to be a process of uneven development that involves industrialization and urbanization in certain areas and the "development of underdevelopment" in others (13). By drawing on these landscapes of uneven development, the Warwick Research Collective complicates the developmentalist narratives inherent to globalization and stagist-Marxist discourses alike—whether these celebrate the spread of capitalism as a "tide lifting all boats" or affirm the belatedness of "primitive" accumulation in the face of capital's inevitable universalization (22). In contrast to both positions, the Collective suggests that capitalism "does not smooth away but rather producesunevenness, systematically," such that the idea of an "achieved" modernity—in which unevenness is "superseded, harmonised, vanquished, or ironed out"—is "radically unhistorical" (12–13; emphasis in original). As with the uneven landscapes of the capitalist world-system, so with the uneven "world" of world literature: here, too, the Warwick Research Collective rejects the idea of a "level playing field"—"a more or less free space in which texts from around the globe can circulate, intersect and converse with one another"—as an "idealist fantasy" that they identify in the work of a number of literary comparativists, including Jonathan Culler...

Distantly Reading Dante Translations

[full article, abstract in English; abstract in Lithuanian]
 This paper outlines a new research project that aims to catalogue and investigate all booklength translations of Dante’s Divine Comedy in 100 countries. This will be, in fact, the first project to map the circulation and translation of Dante’s Commedia across the globe using statistics and analysis. Despite 700 years of Dante Studies, there still exists no comprehensive bibliography of translations; and critical studies still focus primarily on major languages, neglecting less-translated languages. The theoretical background of this project draws on Franco Moretti’s ‘distant reading’, David Damrosch’s theories of world literature, and Johan Heilbron’s world system of translations. This project will include three strands, which it aims to carry out with a team of scholars. The first will examine the empirical data about the translations of the Commedia and their circulation abroad. The second strand will study the formal aspects of the translations, seeing where the Commedia was translated into terza rima, and discovering the predominant metrical forms of translations across the world. The third strand will investigate how the Commedia was translated under censorship, in fascist regimes, theocracies, military dictatorships, constitutional monarchies, the Eastern Bloc and Communist dictatorships. As the project is still in the early stages of research I will not be giving conclusions, but rather suggesting new pathways for future development.

On the particularities of postcolonial studies, or how postcolonialism has become obsolete

I draw first on Vivek Chibber's argument that postcolonial studies fails to provide an adequate basis for a theory of human rights and a practice of global solidarity. I then introduce the Warwick Research Collective's elaboration of a new theory of world literature constructed around the concept of “combined and uneven development.” I conclude by proposing a way out of the limitations of postcolonial studies.

THE CASE FOR PERIPHERAL AESTHETICS: FREDRIC JAMESON, THE WORLD-SYSTEM AND CULTURES OF EMANCIPATION

Since its 1986 publication, Fredric Jameson’s essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” (TWL) has been widely perceived as the master theorist’s colossal misstep; postcolonial scholars, following the Indian Marxist Aijaz Ahmad, have criticized TWL as a singular intervention that exemplifies metropolitan parochialism about third-world peripheries. Breaking with such consensus, this essay offers a postcolonial–materialist defence of the essay’s two central, conceptual categories: national allegory and third-world/peripheral aesthetics. I demonstrate that their theoretical basis lies in the differential calibration of modernism, and the public–private ratio, in the peripheries of the capitalist world-system. These abstractions are in fact engendered by the unevenly universalizing tendencies of capital itself. The first part of the essay illustrates how a reconsideration of TWL is vital to current theories of world literature, which borrow much and often without acknowledgement from older materialist frameworks of combined and uneven development, dependency and world-system analysis. In the second half, I argue that key mid-twentieth-century cultural landmarks, such as Mao Zedong’s Yenan lectures on literature, and Glauber Rocha’s “Aesthetics of Hunger” cinema manifesto, foreshadow TWL’s argument. Not only do these texts from Asia, Latin America etc. illuminate the anti-imperial, peripheral “roots” of Jameson’s formulations, they also trace a largely forgotten history, and corpus, of peripheral modernism, differing in key aspects from Euro-American modernism. The essay highlights the key concern of peripheral aesthetics, namely that culture is a site of emancipatory struggle.

Warwick Research Collective (Sharae Deckard, Nicolas Lawrence, Neil Lazarus, Graeme Mac Donald, Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Stephen Shapiro, and Benita Parry), Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature

“The periphery is where the future reveals itself” (J. G. Ballard). The epigraph to this impressive new work by the Warwick Research Collective encapsulates the project’s alternative and somewhat idealistic spirit. Such a statement gestures towards revelatory ends and justifies a method relying on Marxist class struggle theory. Yet, giving voice to what is excluded from the center is reminiscent of the projects of both subaltern and postcolonial studies, with which the present book shares sim...

Translation in the pre-modern world

ABSTRACTTranslation occupies a central place in current theories of world literature, but it is not the only way in which texts circulate beyond their original cultural and temporal contexts to become world literature. This article explores the shifting relationship between language and territory, contrasting modern languages as territorially bound by the nation-state with pre-modern cosmopolitan languages that transcended territorial location. Drawing upon the complex translation process of the works of Aristotle from the Abbasid translation movement of the eighth through 10th centuries to the multiple print editions of competing translations of Aristotle’s works published in Venice in the 16th century, the article argues that world literature often results from the confluence of the broad reach of a cosmopolitan language and the mobility of translation.

Haiti and Mozambique: Postcolonial Literature in the Context of Combined and Uneven Development

In this essay, I compare two narratives from different nations, Haiti and Mozambique, in order to analyze intersections between the postcolonial contexts in which each fiction is embedded. Two theoretical perspectives inform my reading of Nadine Pinede’s “Departure Lounge” (2011) and João Paulo Borges Coelho’s Campo de trânsito (2007). I draw first on Vivek Chibber’s argument that postcolonial studies fail to provide an adequate basis for a theory of human rights and a practice of global solidarity. I then introduce the Warwick Research Collective’s elaboration of a new theory of world literature constructed around the concept of “combined and uneven development”. My discussion of “Departure Lounge” and Campo de trânsito subsequently focuses on the fictional portrayal of emergent practices within traditional societies experiencing a process of modernization and the effects of the world capitalist system. I conclude by proposing a way out of the limitations of postcolonial studies.

Margin and freedom: The space of world literature seen from the Basque Country and Catalonia

This article proposes to look at how the current theories of world literature could be transformed if we looked at the space of world literature from the perspective of marginalized European literatures, such as Basque and Catalan. Departing from the analysis of Obabakoak (1988) by Bernardo Atxaga and Històries de la mà esquerra (‘Stories of the Left Hand’, 1981) by Jesús Moncada, the article elaborates a theory of world literature based on the idea of margin – that is, on recognizing the Otherness of what we want to see as our own – and contrasts it with theories of world literature by scholars such as Casanova, Damrosch and Glissant. This leads to the construction of a model of world literature in which the centre is empty, and which, among other consequences, is a way to break from Eurocentrism. This perception of world literature makes it possible to reflect on the idea of freedom of literature, discussed in relation to Hannah Arendt’s thought.

Combined and uneven styles in the modern world-system: stylistic ideology in José de Alencar, Machado de Assis and Thomas Hardy

The stylistic discontinuities that are a widely recognised feature of literature from the world-systemic periphery can also be located in literature at the intra-core periphery: that is, those cities, regions or macro-regions within a core state that have been peripheralised by capitalist centralisation processes. Engaging with Franco Moretti’s theory of world literature, Roberto Schwarz’s influential readings of José de Alencar and Machado de Assis, as well as Raymond Williams on Thomas Hardy, this essay tries to make visible the extent to which peripheral writers actively stylise their combined and uneven linguistic and cultural situations. Whilst aligning itself with theories of world-literature premised on the combined and uneven development of the modern capitalist world-system, the essay argues against an understanding of world-literature as a passive ‘reflection’ or ‘registration’ of this system. It suggests that an expanded definition of style – one which emphasises ‘stylistic ideologies’, the self-conscious stylistic projects writers develop – could help avoid such underestimations of the political and literary agency of writers at the periphery. It concludes with some remarks on the problem of historical temporality shared by peripheral styles and theories of style alike.

The Limits of World Literature

AbstractThis essay examines recent work on world literature theory, with a particular focus on those theorists who treat individual texts as in dialogue with the circulations of linguistic and cultural translation. I treat world literature as the theory without an object and make the counterintuitive claim that its objectlessness makes it well suited for leaving behind antiquated modes of categorizing and canonizing so‐called world texts, in order to make room for new kinds of structured thinking about the world. The essay begins with an introduction to the manifold interconnections of the new world literature, including its broad overlap with fields of globalization, translation studies, comparative literature, and postcolonialism. I position four key theorists of 21st century world literature – Emily Apter, Rebecca Walkowitz, Berthold Schoene, and David Palumbo‐Liu – in oppositional pairs in order to show the underlying commonality in their thinking about the value of a literature of and for the world. My entry point into the “thinking machine” of the world literature text is the concept of the limit. Far from the commonplace understanding of limit as a limitation or boundary, I argue that understanding world literature at the limit allows literary texts and theory to be read as an event of thinking that is in‐process, in‐common, and incomplete, an analogue to the necessary impossibility of knowing the world.

Introduction

Research Article| August 15 2016 Introduction Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. By the Warwick Research Collective. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015. 256 pp. $34.95. Comparative Literature Studies (2016) 53 (3): 503–504. https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.53.3.0503 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Introduction. Comparative Literature Studies 15 August 2016; 53 (3): 503–504. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.53.3.0503 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressComparative Literature Studies Search Advanced Search Alexander Fyfe: The last decade and a half has seen a considerable renewal of scholarly interest in “world literature.” Central in this resurgence have been theoretical inquiries into what constitutes world literature and how it should be read, most discussed among these perhaps being works by Emily Apter, Pascale Casanova, David Damrosch, and Franco Moretti. A recent and important contribution to the debate is Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature.1 The book is jointly authored by the Warwick Research Collective (WReC), a group of seven scholars who are, in their own words, “motivated by a common conviction that the existing paradigms of literary analysis, in whatever field, are not equal to the challenge of theorising ‘world literature’” (ix).2 Positing a resoundingly materialist definition of “world-literature” (note the hyphen) as the literature “of the modern capitalist world-system” (8), the book's major intervention is to... You do not currently have access to this content.

Internationalistische Weltliteratur: Die Buchgemeinschaft Universum-Bücherei für Alle und Kurt Kläbers Passagiere der III. Klasse

Focusing on the book club Universum-Bücherei für Alle and Kurt Kläber’s novel Passagiere der III. Klasse, this article reconstructs attempts by Communist writers and cultural activists to produce an internationalist world literature during the Weimar Republic. In contrast to theories of world literature that often ignore such non-canonical traditions, marginalize social class, and emphasize culture, this article argues that world literature theory needs to theorize the relations between world literature, politics, and social stratification.

Eurafrasiachronologies

Critical accounts of World Literature theory often speak of the dangers of “Eurochronology,” of the tendency to impose the narrative (and teleology) of the history of European cultures upon other regions of the world. This temporal dimension of Eurocentrism is of course to be avoided assiduously. At the same time, a synthetic reading of the literary histories of many of the larger cultures of premodern Eurasia suggests that there may in fact be room for a “Eurasiachronology,” or indeed a “Eurafrasiachronology,” which would identify parallels and connections across the entire so-called “Old World,” and offer a chronological basis for thinking about world literary history in a comparative way.

Born translated: the contemporary novel in an age of world literature

Acknowledgments Introduction: Theory of World Literature Now 1. Close Reading at a Distance 2. The Series, the List, and the Clone 3. Sampling, Collating, and Counting 4. This Is Not Your Language 5. Born Translated and Born Digital Epilogue: Multiples Notes Bibliography Index

Tayeb Salih, Sol Plaatje, and the Trajectories of World Literature

AbstractA crucial theoretical question in world literature studies concerns the dual trajectories of extroversion and introversion, and how they relate to or even are predicated on each other. By discussing the examples of Tayeb Salih and, in particular, Sol Plaatje, this article tries to demonstrate that although the current turn toward more “introverted” literary studies can be seen as justifiably critical of single-system modes of world literature theory, an attentiveness to the combined and contradictory trajectories of extroversion and introversion will enable a more situated and localized form of world literature studies that nonetheless evades the risk of reifying national or linguistic provenance. This also requires a stronger conception of reception history not as a transparent vessel for the literary object, but as an active agent in rendering specific texts or authorships readableasintroverted or extroverted.

Chinese Literature's Route to World Literature

In his article "Chinese Literature's Route to World Literature" Hongtao Liu argues that Goethe's theory of world literature based on the conflicting and unifying values of cosmopolitanism and localism has fueled Chinese literature's desire to join world literatures. Proposed by Zhenduo Zheng with the notion of the "unification of literature" at the beginning of the twentieth century and developed in the 1980s, the "global elements of twentieth-century Chinese literature" in the twenty-first century, this notion remains a feature of Chinese literature's global trajectory. Liu argues that although the experience of a number of transitions, China's pursuit remains relevant and translation remains a significant route for Chinese literature to join the spaces of world literatures. He also posits that other routes such as regional world literature and world literature in Chinese are gaining in importance.

World against Globe: Toward a Normative Conception of World Literature

Recent theories of world literature (Casanova, Damrosch and Moretti) have obscured its normative dimension because they have only understood the world in terms of spatial circulation, the paradigmatic case of which is global capitalist market exchange. This essay offers a critical analysis of the limitations of the recent revival of world literature. It outlines an alternative temporal understanding of the world as the normative basis for a radical rethinking of what “world literature” signifies and develops a normative account of world literature as an active power of world-making that contests the world made by capitalist globalization.

Anglocentrism within British literary studies: the reception of Edward Thomas

A decade after some measure of political devolution was achieved in Scotland and Wales, this article considers the late twentieth and early twenty-first century reception and critical positioning of the Anglophone Welsh writer, Edward Thomas, in order to expose a recalcitrant Anglocentrism which operates within a notionally devolved British literary establishment. It does so by way of Pascale Casanova's theory of world literature – in particular, her concept of ‘literary autonomy’ – the potential usefulness, and indeed the shortcomings, of which are here addressed within a British context for the first time. From the 1970s, Thomas becomes a contested figure among critics from an emergent Anglophone Welsh literature. At the same time, as the war in Ireland resumes, Thomas becomes a key writer for critics with associations to the unionist side of the Northern Irish divide. For them, Thomas becomes a means of re-telling the foundation myth of British Ulster identity: the Protestants’ ‘blood sacrifice’ for the union in the World War I. Finally, Thomas is appropriated as the key figure in a Philip Larkin and Andrew Motion-led attempt to re-centre twentieth-century poetry around an unbroken ‘English’ line of traditional poetic forms, created in opposition to the supposedly ‘foreign aberration’ of modernism.

Reception aesthetics in Vietnam

Reception aesthetics is a theory of literature which has exerted major impacts throughout the world from the late 1960s to the late 1980s in the West, espacially dymanically in China from the 1980s of the 20th century to the first decade of the 21st century. In Vietnam, although this theory was born quite early (1985), its mark is still not deeply engraved; thus a lot of potentials not having been discovered and utilized. Recreating the complete appearance of reception aesthetics in Vietnam and explaining the cause of that appearance is an important basis for discussion about the reception of foreign theory. How to make Vietnam literature theory integrated and successfully communicated with the world literature theory? How to make the most effective use of the Western theory in solving problems of the local literature? How to build a firm theory background imbued with national identities in the context of globalization? etc. are the author’s issues of great concerns.