Pub Date : 2020-05-29DOI: 10.1163/24056480-00502001
P. Casanova
{"title":"Preface to the 2008 Edition of La République mondiale des lettres","authors":"P. Casanova","doi":"10.1163/24056480-00502001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-00502001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World Literature","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/24056480-00502001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46021220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-29DOI: 10.1163/24056480-00502003
Jing Tsu
Of the existing approaches to engaging with world literature, Pascale Casanova’s contribution remains the most prescient and relevant to the contemporary world. In this paper, I examine Casanova’s legacy in the context of contemporary Chinese literature – not only as the Sinophone, Chinese, or diasporic, but also in terms of the diverse genrification and creation of new types of media for literary inscription that border on obliterating the primacy of literary aesthetics. Is this a threat to the literary establishment, as it has been practiced, critiqued, and known in the European lineage? I argue that the literary space has never been in starker contrast with the world space, and that the emergence of a different “world normal” is challenging and fortifying Casanova’s legacy in deeply profound ways. To be examined, among others, are recent debates over world and Sinophone literature, science fiction, internet fiction, and diasporic writings.
{"title":"When Literary Relations End","authors":"Jing Tsu","doi":"10.1163/24056480-00502003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-00502003","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Of the existing approaches to engaging with world literature, Pascale Casanova’s contribution remains the most prescient and relevant to the contemporary world. In this paper, I examine Casanova’s legacy in the context of contemporary Chinese literature – not only as the Sinophone, Chinese, or diasporic, but also in terms of the diverse genrification and creation of new types of media for literary inscription that border on obliterating the primacy of literary aesthetics. Is this a threat to the literary establishment, as it has been practiced, critiqued, and known in the European lineage? I argue that the literary space has never been in starker contrast with the world space, and that the emergence of a different “world normal” is challenging and fortifying Casanova’s legacy in deeply profound ways. To be examined, among others, are recent debates over world and Sinophone literature, science fiction, internet fiction, and diasporic writings.","PeriodicalId":36587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World Literature","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/24056480-00502003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46600909","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-29DOI: 10.1163/24056480-00502002
Thirthankar Chakraborty
In Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution, Pascale Casanova explores the formal and the historical elements of Beckett’s works to establish how the bilingual writer masters the art of “abstractification” in his pioneering venture of testing the limits of language. Casanova closely investigates the cosmopolitan space of Paris in particular in order to explain the socio-political field from which Beckett’s bilingual works stemmed. As this article argues, it is this early search for a literary field with Beckett’s autonomous writing at its core that leads Casanova to her critically acclaimed and contentious notion of the world republic of letters.
{"title":"Samuel Beckett and the World Republic of Letters","authors":"Thirthankar Chakraborty","doi":"10.1163/24056480-00502002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-00502002","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution, Pascale Casanova explores the formal and the historical elements of Beckett’s works to establish how the bilingual writer masters the art of “abstractification” in his pioneering venture of testing the limits of language. Casanova closely investigates the cosmopolitan space of Paris in particular in order to explain the socio-political field from which Beckett’s bilingual works stemmed. As this article argues, it is this early search for a literary field with Beckett’s autonomous writing at its core that leads Casanova to her critically acclaimed and contentious notion of the world republic of letters.","PeriodicalId":36587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World Literature","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/24056480-00502002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47369105","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-29DOI: 10.1163/24056480-00502004
David Damrosch
Pascale Casanova’s seminal book has had an enormous and continuing impact around the world in a dozen languages, and as a result La République mondiale des lettres has itself become subject to the processes described within the book itself, as it enters world scholarly space. Casanova herself reflected directly on the somewhat unsettling results of this process, and her subsequent work was shaped in various ways by the international response to her pathbreaking book. This essay examines Casanova’s responses to the varied responses to her book, and suggests that her subsequent books should be understood as embodying a resulting mixture of resistance and rethinking of her earlier positions.
{"title":"La République mondiale des lettres in the World Republic of Scholarship","authors":"David Damrosch","doi":"10.1163/24056480-00502004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-00502004","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Pascale Casanova’s seminal book has had an enormous and continuing impact around the world in a dozen languages, and as a result La République mondiale des lettres has itself become subject to the processes described within the book itself, as it enters world scholarly space. Casanova herself reflected directly on the somewhat unsettling results of this process, and her subsequent work was shaped in various ways by the international response to her pathbreaking book. This essay examines Casanova’s responses to the varied responses to her book, and suggests that her subsequent books should be understood as embodying a resulting mixture of resistance and rethinking of her earlier positions.","PeriodicalId":36587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World Literature","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/24056480-00502004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44487803","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-02-14DOI: 10.1163/24056480-00403100
V. Laschinger
Elif Shafak’s The Flea Palace (2004) exposes secularized Istanbul as a grotesque world. By establishing the apartment building as a synecdoche for the city and negotiating the characters’ trajectories within the historical context of modernizing Istanbul, the novel presents their alienation as the sine qua non of the modern individual which is best confronted playfully or rather in the Sufi way. The argument is supported by the novel’s complex employment of circles and lines as thematic and formal patterns which refer to Islamic ritual practice of the Mevlevi Sufis in numerous ways.
{"title":"Whirls of Faith and Fancy","authors":"V. Laschinger","doi":"10.1163/24056480-00403100","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-00403100","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Elif Shafak’s The Flea Palace (2004) exposes secularized Istanbul as a grotesque world. By establishing the apartment building as a synecdoche for the city and negotiating the characters’ trajectories within the historical context of modernizing Istanbul, the novel presents their alienation as the sine qua non of the modern individual which is best confronted playfully or rather in the Sufi way. The argument is supported by the novel’s complex employment of circles and lines as thematic and formal patterns which refer to Islamic ritual practice of the Mevlevi Sufis in numerous ways.","PeriodicalId":36587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World Literature","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/24056480-00403100","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46306031","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-02-14DOI: 10.1163/24056480-00403400
Chen Bar-Itzhak
This essay concerns the unequal distribution of epistemic capital in the academic field of World Literature and calls for an epistemic shift: a broadening of our theoretical canon and the epistemologies through which we read and interpret world literature. First, this epistemic inequality is discussed through a sociological examination of the “world republic of literary theory,” addressing the limits of circulation of literary epistemologies. The current situation, it is argued, creates an “intellectual captivity,” the ethical and political implications of which are demonstrated through a close reading of the acts of reading world literature performed by scholars at the center of the field. A few possible solutions are then suggested, drawing on recent developments in anthropology, allowing for a redistribution of epistemic capital within the discipline of World Literature: awareness of positionality, reflexivity as method, promotion of marginal scholarship, and a focus on “points of interaction.”
{"title":"Intellectual Captivity","authors":"Chen Bar-Itzhak","doi":"10.1163/24056480-00403400","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-00403400","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay concerns the unequal distribution of epistemic capital in the academic field of World Literature and calls for an epistemic shift: a broadening of our theoretical canon and the epistemologies through which we read and interpret world literature. First, this epistemic inequality is discussed through a sociological examination of the “world republic of literary theory,” addressing the limits of circulation of literary epistemologies. The current situation, it is argued, creates an “intellectual captivity,” the ethical and political implications of which are demonstrated through a close reading of the acts of reading world literature performed by scholars at the center of the field. A few possible solutions are then suggested, drawing on recent developments in anthropology, allowing for a redistribution of epistemic capital within the discipline of World Literature: awareness of positionality, reflexivity as method, promotion of marginal scholarship, and a focus on “points of interaction.”","PeriodicalId":36587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World Literature","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/24056480-00403400","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47653706","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-08-08DOI: 10.1163/24056480-00403006
Vedran Ćatović
This study situates the works of Ivo Andrić at the intersection of world literature and postcolonial studies. It argues that, rather than being opposed as two mutually exclusive critical paradigms, the two need to be tactfully combined in order to account for the artist’s treatment of the prolonged subjugation undergone by the former Ottoman province of Bosnia. Two contradictory trends are observed. Andrić represents Bosnian small towns as places of symbolic resistance and perseverance. His local themes and language undermine the hegemonic presence of the empire, and invite a reading through a postcolonial lens. At the same time, a strong cosmopolitan current runs through the same narratives, and shows a paradoxical urge of the artist to extend his local setting into the global and intercultural spheres. Andrić stages the world as a multifarious and enigmatic whole – a viewpoint that embraces world literature as its aesthetic and political shrine.
{"title":"The Small-Town Globalism of Ivo Andrić","authors":"Vedran Ćatović","doi":"10.1163/24056480-00403006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-00403006","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This study situates the works of Ivo Andrić at the intersection of world literature and postcolonial studies. It argues that, rather than being opposed as two mutually exclusive critical paradigms, the two need to be tactfully combined in order to account for the artist’s treatment of the prolonged subjugation undergone by the former Ottoman province of Bosnia. Two contradictory trends are observed. Andrić represents Bosnian small towns as places of symbolic resistance and perseverance. His local themes and language undermine the hegemonic presence of the empire, and invite a reading through a postcolonial lens. At the same time, a strong cosmopolitan current runs through the same narratives, and shows a paradoxical urge of the artist to extend his local setting into the global and intercultural spheres. Andrić stages the world as a multifarious and enigmatic whole – a viewpoint that embraces world literature as its aesthetic and political shrine.","PeriodicalId":36587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World Literature","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/24056480-00403006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48869714","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-08-08DOI: 10.1163/24056480-00403007
Matylda Figlerowicz
This article proposes a model of world literature based on multilingualism, rather than translation or a series of monolingualisms. It analyzes three novels, positioned in uneven relationships to world literature: Ramon Saizarbitoria’s Hamaika pauso (Basque; Countless steps, 1995), Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (Spanish; 2004), and Sol Ceh Moo’s Sujuy k’iin (Mayan; Unspoiled day, 2011). They can all be read as multilingual, and despite the differences of their contexts and the particular ways in which different languages intertwine in them, anticlimactic forms are an aesthetic solution they share. The model of world literature informed by this anticlimactic multilingualism could be called the Real of world literature, since it points to the traumatic core of world literature that disrupts the possibility of systematizing its literatures in a holistic structure.
{"title":"Multilingual Novel","authors":"Matylda Figlerowicz","doi":"10.1163/24056480-00403007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-00403007","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article proposes a model of world literature based on multilingualism, rather than translation or a series of monolingualisms. It analyzes three novels, positioned in uneven relationships to world literature: Ramon Saizarbitoria’s Hamaika pauso (Basque; Countless steps, 1995), Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (Spanish; 2004), and Sol Ceh Moo’s Sujuy k’iin (Mayan; Unspoiled day, 2011). They can all be read as multilingual, and despite the differences of their contexts and the particular ways in which different languages intertwine in them, anticlimactic forms are an aesthetic solution they share. The model of world literature informed by this anticlimactic multilingualism could be called the Real of world literature, since it points to the traumatic core of world literature that disrupts the possibility of systematizing its literatures in a holistic structure.","PeriodicalId":36587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World Literature","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/24056480-00403007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44531450","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-08-08DOI: 10.1163/24056480-00403008
B. Holgate
Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013), which features the Thai-Burma “Death Railway” in World War Two, depicts a complex web of imperial regimes that converge and clash in the mid-twentieth century. The protagonist is an Australian soldier effectively fighting for his country’s former colonizer, Britain, which is losing its empire to Japan. I build on Laura Doyle’s concept of “inter-imperiality” to explore how the novel illuminates the historical process of imperial factors intersecting at multiple levels, from the geopolitical and economic to the personal and cultural. The novel demonstrates how inter-imperial identities challenge simple binary models of imperialism, and how so-called national literatures are produced in a world context. This is evident in Flanagan’s intertextual homage to classical Japanese author Matsuo Bashō. The novel also highlights how world literature discourse ought to take into account temporal and ethicopolitical factors (Pheng Cheah), suggesting an overlap with postcolonial studies.
理查德·弗拉纳根（Richard Flanagan）的《通往北方腹地的窄路》（The Narrow Road to The Deep North）（2013）以第二次世界大战中的泰缅“死亡铁路”为特色，描绘了20世纪中期融合和冲突的帝国政权的复杂网络。主人公是一名澳大利亚士兵，有效地为其国家的前殖民者英国而战，英国正将其帝国输给日本。我以Laura Doyle的“帝国间”概念为基础，探讨小说如何从地缘政治和经济到个人和文化等多个层面阐释帝国因素交叉的历史过程。这部小说展示了跨帝国身份如何挑战简单的帝国主义二元模型，以及所谓的民族文学是如何在世界背景下产生的。这一点在弗拉纳根对日本古典作家松尾巴什的互文致敬中可见一斑。这部小说还强调了世界文学话语应该如何考虑时间和伦理批判因素（Pheng Cheah），暗示了与后殖民研究的重叠。
{"title":"Intersecting Imperialisms","authors":"B. Holgate","doi":"10.1163/24056480-00403008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-00403008","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013), which features the Thai-Burma “Death Railway” in World War Two, depicts a complex web of imperial regimes that converge and clash in the mid-twentieth century. The protagonist is an Australian soldier effectively fighting for his country’s former colonizer, Britain, which is losing its empire to Japan. I build on Laura Doyle’s concept of “inter-imperiality” to explore how the novel illuminates the historical process of imperial factors intersecting at multiple levels, from the geopolitical and economic to the personal and cultural. The novel demonstrates how inter-imperial identities challenge simple binary models of imperialism, and how so-called national literatures are produced in a world context. This is evident in Flanagan’s intertextual homage to classical Japanese author Matsuo Bashō. The novel also highlights how world literature discourse ought to take into account temporal and ethicopolitical factors (Pheng Cheah), suggesting an overlap with postcolonial studies.","PeriodicalId":36587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World Literature","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/24056480-00403008","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42112023","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-08-08DOI: 10.1163/24056480-00403004
Shaden M. Tageldin
This essay traces the problem of world literature in key writings by the Egyptian scientist and littérateur Aḥmad Zakī Abū Shādī. Abū Shādī’s early nod to world literature (1908–1909) intimates the challenge of making literary particularity heard in the homogenizing harmonies of a world dominated by English. That problem persists in his account of a 1926 meeting with the Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore and in an essay of 1928 inspired by that meeting: one of the first manifestos of al-adab al-ʿālamī (world literature) in Arabic, predating the 1936 appearance of al-adab al-muqāran (comparative literature). While Abū Shādī lauds Tagore’s refusal to compare literatures East and West and insistence on the spiritual unity of all literatures, his struggles to articulate a world in which harmony is not an alibi for hierarchy suggest that neither comparative literature nor its would-be leveler – world literature – can shed the haunting specter of inequality.
{"title":"Abū Shādī, Tagore, and the Problem of World Literature at the Hinge of Afroeurasia","authors":"Shaden M. Tageldin","doi":"10.1163/24056480-00403004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-00403004","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay traces the problem of world literature in key writings by the Egyptian scientist and littérateur Aḥmad Zakī Abū Shādī. Abū Shādī’s early nod to world literature (1908–1909) intimates the challenge of making literary particularity heard in the homogenizing harmonies of a world dominated by English. That problem persists in his account of a 1926 meeting with the Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore and in an essay of 1928 inspired by that meeting: one of the first manifestos of al-adab al-ʿālamī (world literature) in Arabic, predating the 1936 appearance of al-adab al-muqāran (comparative literature). While Abū Shādī lauds Tagore’s refusal to compare literatures East and West and insistence on the spiritual unity of all literatures, his struggles to articulate a world in which harmony is not an alibi for hierarchy suggest that neither comparative literature nor its would-be leveler – world literature – can shed the haunting specter of inequality.","PeriodicalId":36587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World Literature","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/24056480-00403004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45774936","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：