Of Littérature-monde as an Untranslatable

Abstract

In March of 2007 French newspaper Le Monde published the co-signed manifesto laying out the project of littérature-monde. Since then it has received much scholarly attention and has often been associated with its Anglophone counterpart, world literature. This article draws on Barbara Cassin’s concept of the untranslatable in the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies (2004) to complicate the project of littérature-monde: it needs to be articulated in relation to, rather than as a translation of, world literature. Following Cassin’s linguistic claim to a “maintien d’ une pluralité,” this article calls for contemporary literary scholarship to acknowledge littérature-monde and world literature as responses to different social, political, and cultural issues. Applying conceptual and philosophical untranslatability to the intrinsically different littérature-monde and to world literature destabilizes these fields’ global reach and consequently opens the possibility to consider them as co-existent, independent ways of reading literature on a global scale.