World Literary Space Research Articles

Translingualism 2.0

This article examines recent technological and cultural developments that have transformed the publishing industry in the past two decades—the rise of social media platforms for writing and reading genre fiction as well as the translingual practices they enable. My focus on the digital aims to update earlier studies of translingualism in a world literary space (Stephen G. Kellman, Pascale Casanova). In particular, I examine a French-language platform (Fyctia) and a multilingual one (Wattpad) to argue that digital platforms’ affordances and constraints shape the translingual strategies of their writers and readers.

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.

:Literary Rebels: A History of Creative Writers in Anglo-American Universities

:<i>Literary Rebels: A History of Creative Writers in Anglo-American Universities</i>

Рецепция Пруста в России в 1920-е гг.

The article traces the history of the reception of Marcel Proust’s works in Russia, which began in the 1920s. The problem of studying the perception of Proust’s literary heritage, which has not yet been fully investigated, is of particular importance, since it allows us to touch upon a number of important issues of theoretical and historical-literary plans. Proust as an object of research is chosen here not by chance. In the world literary space there are special constant values, which, if to compare with various artistic phenomena, allows us to understand their artistic value, to follow the change of axiological parameters that determine the state of a particular stage of the literary process and to identify the main directions of development in it. Reception in the Russian culture works by Proust, which, of course, is one of such values, deserves special attention and study, since it reveals important moments not only in the creative activity of the French writer, but also in the development of Russian fiction and literary criticism. Based on the analysis of numerous documentary evidences contained in periodicals (“The Modern West,” “The Press and the Revolution,” “On a literary post,” etc.), theoretical and literary-critical works of authoritative literary critics (N.Y. Berkovsky, V.V. Weidle, B.A. Griftsov, A.K. Voronsky, etc.), in the statements of famous writers (O.E. Mandelstam, V.V. Mayakovsky, Y.K. Olesha, I. Ilf and E. Petrov), research reveals how the attitude to the works by Proust in the specified period of Soviet literature development, which is characterized by the coexistence and confrontation of various schools and trends (“Forge,” “Pass,” RAPP, LEF, etc.), helps to clarify their aesthetic orientation.

ნ. ბარათაშვილისა და ნოვალისის მხატვრულ-ონტოლოგიური სამყარო (ზობიერთი კომპარატივისტული შტრიხი)

Romanticism is a special phenomenon in the world literary space. A true reader will always feel "the metaphysical attraction of romanticism, in which, according to Shelley, "the tint of beauty mingles with the gloom of suffering."

Excavating Memory: Bilge Karasu's Istanbul and Walter Benjamin's Berlin

Excavating Memory: Bilge Karasu's Istanbul and Walter Benjamin's Berlin

Drifting in the World Literary Space

For Hong Kong poet Leung Ping-Kwan (penname: Ye Si, 1949-2013), travel allows him to visit literary capitals, in which his works are translated into local languages. Without regarding himself as merely a Hong Kong writer, Leung intentionally reminisces about his travel accounts in these literary centers, accentuating how his life is permeated by European traditions. This essay examines the trope of travel in Leung Ping-Kwan’s poems along with his prose essays, focusing on the dialectical thinking of centers and peripheries. I contend that the idea of travel points to the poet’s personal experiences as well as his literary endeavors while embarking on his poetic journeys. I adopt the notion of “self-exile” to describe the moment when Leung stays away from his native land and ponders on how Hong Kong Literature – the so-called “small literature” – can raise its visibility if it is presented in the international literary scene. Specifically, he draws several routes to the literary centers, Paris and Berlin in particular. And without simply being assimilated into the dominant literary culture, Leung usually writes in Chinese and tactically inserts the images of Hong Kong while illustrating the European urban imageries.

Roots of friendship: Uzbek literature and literary criticism in German literature during 1960-1970 years

Formation and development of literary and cultural contacts, contributed to the domestic and international situation, growing interest in national literatures; acquaintance of the German reader with the life and work of outstanding Uzbek writers and poets, evidence of the sincere sympathy of German scientists, strengthening of international literary relations, assessment of international recognition; Khamza is a talented and multifaceted personality, a well-reasoned assessment of the creativity of Uzbek writers; oppression of the poorest strata of the population, literary theoretical work, fundamental work of German scientists; significant stage, unbiased presentation, horizons of coexistence and development of literatures in the world literary space.

Re-thinking McOndo and its Canonization

ABSTRACT Through Pascale Casanova’s theory and methodology of world literary space the McOndo intervention and its process of canonization can be rethought beyond prevailing interpretations and misinterpretations. Through micro- and macro-analysis of the literary context which McOndo intervenes into, its various interventions (here explored exclusively in its prologue), its reception and analysis of its critical production, and informed by interviews with the editors and contributors, the literary value of this polemical Pan-Hispanic short-story anthology can be reconsidered. Here McOndo’s profoundly literary intentions come to the fore as a fundamental regional expression of isolated but comparable projects carried out by a whole generation of writers attempting to step out of the shadow of the Spanish American literary Boom, reject magical realism and the resulting international horizon of expectation, seeking to create a more autonomous literary space for Spanish American writers and assert their own position within the Latin American literary canon.

Unpacking Saʿdallāh Wannūs’ Private Library: On the (After)Lives of Books

Abstract The private library of the Syrian playwright and public intellectual Saʿdallāh Wannūs (1941-1997) arrived at the American University of Beirut in 2015. This article sets out to read Wannūs through his library. After presenting a brief overview of the books in Wannūs’ library, their subject matter, and their provenance, it examines personal book inscriptions, which unravel a rich intellectual network and provide insight into Wannūs’ trajectory and recognition as a playwright and public intellectual. It then explores the conditions under which Wannūs’ library came into existence and flourished in a Syria marked by the Baʿth party and the al-Asad regime’s authoritarian control of the political and cultural fields, under which it migrated from Damascus to Beirut in the wake of the 2011 Syrian revolution-turned-war. Wannūs’ library, the article argues, opened an Arabic and world literary space, both physical and metaphorical, from which Wannūs emerged as a modern Arabic and world-renowned playwright.

Exchanges in Nairobi and Lagos: Mapping Literary Networks and World Literary Space

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from JSTOR via the DOI in this record.

Crítica literaria y traducción cultural: una problematización del “boom” de la narrativa latinoamericana

Bearing in mind the important role of literary mediators –translators, critics, editors, etc,- in building up the world literary space, this study intends to do research on the image of the Spanish America that was discursively built by those mediators, departing from the so-called "boom" of the Spanish-speaking America, and from the viewpoint of the empowered literary systems.

New York, Capital of World Literature? On Holocaust Memory and World Literary Value

AbstractThe question of how world literary value is produced has been central to recent debates. While Pascale Casanova’s influential account of a relatively autonomous ‘world literary space’ follows the work of Pierre Bourdieu in applying economic metaphors to processes of world literary value production, this essay argues that Casanova’s 1999 account needs to be updated in light of recent economic and cultural developments: the economic and the literary sphere are no longer separate but fundamentally entwined, which means that processes of world literary value creation cannot be modeled as a pseudo-market. The essay traces ongoing debates on the transcultural circulation of Holocaust memory to put forward a more flexible and multifaceted model for the production of world literary value. To demonstrate the claim that world literary value is today articulated with other forms of value, the essay investigates the role of Holocaust memory in the recent world literary consecration of Roberto Bolaño, Karl-Ove Knausgaard, and Elena Ferrante. Concentrated around New York-based publishers and media, these three cases not only demonstrate the crucial role of Holocaust memory in articulating literary value, they also show the recent shift from Paris to New York as a primary center of world literary value production.

Archive of errors: Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, literature, and the world

ABSTRACTUsing Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq’s semi-autobiographical fictional travel narrative from 1855, this article critiques current world literature paradigms that see literary modernity as the entrance into world literary space’s zones of equivalence. Al-Shidyāq’s text, the article argues, encapsulates debates over the origins of Arabic literary modernity, but rejects both the notion that Arabic literary modernity is a European import and that it is product of a national literary past. Rather, in the author’s reading, al-Sāq represents a combative archive of influences and intertexts that is self-consciously multilinguistic and trans-imperial. Analyzing al-Sāq’s engagement with European texts, the article argues for the power of productive misreadings and corrections, as al-Shidyāq places errors at the centre of his comparative methodology. Reading al-Sāq as participating in and theorizing the nahḍah’s own transnational currents, the article argues that al-Shidyāq analyzes literary and linguistic relationships through an attention to error and unintelligibility, posing literary modernity itself as an error-prone aggregation of foreign and domestic forms, styles, and references. Through error, al-Shidyāq creates a mode of world literature in which Arabic literature is not merely the product of a vertical development, but rather is embedded in a larger network of transnational, horizontal associations.

Locating Algerian literature in world literature

ABSTRACTHow do current theories of world literature construct their object and how do they map world literary space? This article examines these questions in light of the reception of “Global South” or “postcolonial” writers in theories of world literary culture, including those of Pascale Casanova, Fredric Jameson and Franco Moretti. Focusing on the case of Algeria, the article considers how several widely-shared narratives about world literary history have shaped the dynamics of critical reception. It also contends that narratives of world literature have tended to overemphasize the center–periphery divide, neglecting other geographies of production and circulation.

The Quiet Editor: Ivan Vladislavić and South African cultural production

This article examines the literary and sociological significance of Ivan Vladislavić’s “double life” as both editor and writer. With reference to a number of his editorial roles as well as the joint projects he has worked on with writers and visual artists, the article considers how Vladislavić’s work with others spreads symbolic value. Described by one of his clients as the “quiet editor”, Vladislavić can be read as a new kind of author; what he terms “creative editing” as a new kind of writing, through which more traditional models of authorship and literary production are thrown into question — less Bourdieu’s “field of literary production” or Casanova’s “world literary space”, red in tooth and claw, and more Howard Becker’s “art world”: a convivial “network of cooperating people, all of whose work is essential to the final outcome”.

Closing the Gender Gap?: New Spaces of Cultural Memory Construction for Contemporary Female Authors in Portugal

This study is an exploration of feminist and non-essentialist, universal memory spaces for contemporary female authors in Portugal. It is based on the representations of four writers, Helia Correia, Teolinda Gersao, Lidia Jorge and Ines Pedrosa in academic, press and online criticism. This study shows how a national critical language that re-enforces gender normativity in categorizations that often only leave the outside position of ‘escrita feminina’ to the majority of contemporary authors is counter-acted in a world literary space, where women writers’ work is judged and valued through other ideological and socio-cultural lenses that make the emergence of different and differing ‘regimes of value’ possible. Press and online critical localities represent a more flexible, fluid and multi-faceted space, where critical contextualizations are constantly overwritten, preventing static categories that can then be ‘naturalized’. Authors themselves can influence press and online critical commentary in performative acts as well as through the creation of an authorial ‘online self’, which creates a counter-memory to the traditional contextualizations in a national field that follow normative constructions rooted in a patriarchal discourse. On the one hand, a traditional elitist critical approach can be observed in all media, academic, press and, digital, that often misreads and omits women’s literary projects. On the other hand, female and feminist spaces of alternative constructions of cultural memory are also present and traditional contextualizations co-exist with new classificatory mechanisms that give a more adequate representation to contemporary female authorship.

The Literary History of World‐Systems, I: Marxist Lineages

AbstractThis essay is the first of a two‐part series on the use of world‐systems theory in literary studies. It argues that the recent popularity of world‐systems theory among literary scholars has raised important questions about how we practice literary history. Appeals to a more “global” configuration of world literary space seem to promise a more inclusive literary history, but world‐systems theory's expansive focus also clashes with literary studies' traditional definitions of cultural activity. In order to investigate this tension, the essay begins by examining the birth of world‐systems theory. It shows how world‐systems theory grew out of a number of intersecting currents in academic scholarship, including Marxist economics, dependista theory, and Annales historiography. The essay then proceeds to trace literary studies' earliest engagements with world‐systems theory. As I show, these initial engagements took place within two distinct critical traditions: (1) in the Subaltern Studies project, which diagnosed intellectual production as an effect of the global division of labor; and (2) in Jamesonian Marxism, which attempted to map literature onto the world‐system under the aegis of a leftist Hegelianism. The essay concludes by analyzing how these projects have helped to redefine the nature of the relationship between literary production and economic systems.

Shifting Meridians: US Authorship in World Literary Space

Where does US literature situate itself in world literary space? How do writers in the US relate to literary institutions at home and in the world? In her study of transnational literary institutions, The World Republic of Letters (1999), Pascale Casanova conceives of world literary space as a hierarchical structure, or a landscape shaped by centers and peripheries, and she illustrates her thesis with an intriguing geographical metaphor: Just as the prime meridian that runs through Greenwich, England, functions as an internationally recognized standard for measuring global time, there is also a “Greenwich meridian of literature” that marks the site of greatest authority on a world literary map, a cultural topography that differs from economic or political landscapes (87). Casanova’s claim that until recently, this literary meridian ran through Paris has been regarded as Francophile “triumphalism” (Damrosch 27). But if we consider the relevant socio-institutional networks, her argument seems reasonable enough: between the 1700s and the 1960s, the writers and tastemakers connected with the Parisian literary establishment had the greatest weight, not within the world at large, but within specific transnational conversations about what might count as “modern” in literature and which “regions” within world literary space are most representative of literary modernity (“The Literary Greenwich Meridian” 7–8). Casanova’s account of the waning of Parisian authority since the 1960s, however, adds a redundant declension narrative that obscures some of her more valuable insights. She interprets the increasing irrelevance of Paris as a global breakdown of “autonomy,” which

The Hong Kong Dilemma and a Constellation Solution

Abstract For more than three decades there have been calls for a “locally produced” history of Hong Kong literature by scholars born in Hong Kong or long resident there. Following an overview of the “Hong Kong dilemma” and of scholarly endeavors to meet the three challenges of information selection, historical contextualization, and epistemological configuration, this essay discusses the merits and limitations of the three analytic perspectives and proposes the paradigmatic image of the constellation to situate Hong Kong literary history more suitably in the multiple dimensions of world literary space. It recommends the same paradigm for an effective history that forges connections beyond binarisms like East-West, mainland China–Hong Kong, and center-periphery.