Reading Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters in Eastern Europe

Abstract

The main focus of my article is to investigate the fate of Pascale Casanova’s translated work in the former communist literary spaces, where her theoretical argument about linguistic and historical dominance is a historical reality. I begin by examining the editorial decisions behind the translation of The World Republic of Letters into Romanian (2007, second ed. 2016) and the most representative echoes of this seminal book in several formerly communist countries (Romania, Serbia, Slovenia). I then test an essential concept in Pascale Casanova’s work: literary autonomy. Seen as a powerful tool to address the almost insurmountable break between textual singularity and its necessary historicity (Casanova 2005), literary autonomy can play an equally important role in investigating ideologically controlled literary spaces.