Pub Date : 2022-09-09DOI: 10.1163/24056480-00703003
Levente T. Szabó
The invention of international fairs in the 19th century revolutionized both nationalism and modern thinking on global relationships since they showcased but also contested and negotiated national, imperial, and global identities. From the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace to the 1900 Paris Exposition, the international fairs / expositions universelles were landmarks of histoire croisée of nationalism, global thinking, and capitalism. Even though they seem to be showcasing industrial progress, they also created a completely new frame for the self-fashioning, vindication, and negotiation of national arts and literatures, interpreted in a global setting and in capitalist terms. I propose to explore the pattern and experience of the 19th-century international fair / exposition universelle as an important frame for the emerging modern transnational literary scene, fueling major debates on the nature of nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and capitalism.
{"title":"International Exhibitions, Literary Capitalism, and the Emergence of Comparative Literature","authors":"Levente T. Szabó","doi":"10.1163/24056480-00703003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-00703003","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The invention of international fairs in the 19th century revolutionized both nationalism and modern thinking on global relationships since they showcased but also contested and negotiated national, imperial, and global identities. From the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace to the 1900 Paris Exposition, the international fairs / expositions universelles were landmarks of histoire croisée of nationalism, global thinking, and capitalism. Even though they seem to be showcasing industrial progress, they also created a completely new frame for the self-fashioning, vindication, and negotiation of national arts and literatures, interpreted in a global setting and in capitalist terms. I propose to explore the pattern and experience of the 19th-century international fair / exposition universelle as an important frame for the emerging modern transnational literary scene, fueling major debates on the nature of nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and capitalism.","PeriodicalId":36587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World Literature","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42572795","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 : 2022-09-09DOI: 10.1163/24056480-00703009
Amélie Hurkens
The marketing of world literature today is marked by the larger migration of literary culture to Web 2.0. This has gone hand in hand with a reconsignment of influence of orthodox authorities, from established reviewing organs to awards, to the amateur readers congregating on social media platforms, first and foremost on Goodreads, the world’s largest online community for circulating literary recommendations and socialization. The present paper traces this reconsignment of influence by examining the engagement of the Goodreads community with the works that were awarded the Booker Prize or the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction between 2015 and 2019, looking at reader reviews as well as the discussions ensuing from those reviews. As such, the reconsignment of influence is concluded to be regulated by the algorithmic rules of Goodreads and its proprietary platform, Amazon.com.
{"title":"Worldlit as MMORPG?","authors":"Amélie Hurkens","doi":"10.1163/24056480-00703009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-00703009","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The marketing of world literature today is marked by the larger migration of literary culture to Web 2.0. This has gone hand in hand with a reconsignment of influence of orthodox authorities, from established reviewing organs to awards, to the amateur readers congregating on social media platforms, first and foremost on Goodreads, the world’s largest online community for circulating literary recommendations and socialization. The present paper traces this reconsignment of influence by examining the engagement of the Goodreads community with the works that were awarded the Booker Prize or the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction between 2015 and 2019, looking at reader reviews as well as the discussions ensuing from those reviews. As such, the reconsignment of influence is concluded to be regulated by the algorithmic rules of Goodreads and its proprietary platform, Amazon.com.","PeriodicalId":36587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World Literature","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45043665","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 : 2022-06-20DOI: 10.1163/24056480-tat00001
Jyhene Kebsi
This paper looks at the field of world literature through the lens of the narratives of paperless migrants. I propose a paradigm of world literary texts that criticize the barriers preventing or restricting Southern border crossers’ ability to circulate freely in this so-called global village. Hakim Abderrezak coined the neologism “illiterature” in order to refer to the literature of “illegal” migration. This paper situates illiterature within the ongoing debate over the redefinition of world literature. It sheds light on contemporary theorizations of world literature in order to show that illiterature represents a transnational genre that incarnates a cross-national interaction exemplary of a world literary model that criticizes the hierarchy of mobility and the unequal access to movement.
{"title":"Illiterature as World Literature","authors":"Jyhene Kebsi","doi":"10.1163/24056480-tat00001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-tat00001","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This paper looks at the field of world literature through the lens of the narratives of paperless migrants. I propose a paradigm of world literary texts that criticize the barriers preventing or restricting Southern border crossers’ ability to circulate freely in this so-called global village. Hakim Abderrezak coined the neologism “illiterature” in order to refer to the literature of “illegal” migration. This paper situates illiterature within the ongoing debate over the redefinition of world literature. It sheds light on contemporary theorizations of world literature in order to show that illiterature represents a transnational genre that incarnates a cross-national interaction exemplary of a world literary model that criticizes the hierarchy of mobility and the unequal access to movement.","PeriodicalId":36587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World Literature","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43597379","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 : 2022-05-18DOI: 10.1163/24056480-00702003
Deniz Gündoğan İbrişim
Both individual and public witnessing have always been integral to the process of living through catastrophe. Writing, and particularly literature, is a powerful form of witnessing. Reading José Saramago’s Blindness (1995) in tandem with Orhan Pamuk’s The While Caste (1985), this essay engages with the concept of witnessing, extending and deepening the way we might think about witnessing in a novel way in times of epidemics and pandemics. By reading these texts as narratives of plagues and epidemics at large, this essay aims to expand and challenge the association between witnessing and speech, between witnessing and sight through a critical attention to the role of affect, vitality, human and nonhuman materiality, and other communicative modes in these novels. While representing pandemics and epidemics, both Saramago and Pamuk, I argue, represent life, death, and the relation between self and other “beyond the human,” with powerful implications for our contemporary understanding of history, community, and politics. Thereby, these texts create dynamic, and unorthodox narrative strategy for relating to, connecting with, and narrating other and more-than-human worlds, affected by heteronomy amid contagion.
{"title":"The Ethics of Witnessing in Pandemic Times","authors":"Deniz Gündoğan İbrişim","doi":"10.1163/24056480-00702003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-00702003","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Both individual and public witnessing have always been integral to the process of living through catastrophe. Writing, and particularly literature, is a powerful form of witnessing. Reading José Saramago’s Blindness (1995) in tandem with Orhan Pamuk’s The While Caste (1985), this essay engages with the concept of witnessing, extending and deepening the way we might think about witnessing in a novel way in times of epidemics and pandemics. By reading these texts as narratives of plagues and epidemics at large, this essay aims to expand and challenge the association between witnessing and speech, between witnessing and sight through a critical attention to the role of affect, vitality, human and nonhuman materiality, and other communicative modes in these novels. While representing pandemics and epidemics, both Saramago and Pamuk, I argue, represent life, death, and the relation between self and other “beyond the human,” with powerful implications for our contemporary understanding of history, community, and politics. Thereby, these texts create dynamic, and unorthodox narrative strategy for relating to, connecting with, and narrating other and more-than-human worlds, affected by heteronomy amid contagion.","PeriodicalId":36587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World Literature","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45810272","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 : 2022-05-18DOI: 10.1163/24056480-00702002
Dustin Lovett
In Goethe’s Faust, Faust expresses his fear that the alchemical “medicine” he and his father once gave their patients to cure them from plague had done more killing than the plague itself. This fear situates Goethe’s work within a critical discourse stretching back to Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia, and carried on from the beginnings of the Faust tradition about magic, medicine and scientific error. From the charges of quackery against the historical Faust, through two centuries of popular literature depicting Faust’s “descent” from theology to medicine as precipitating his embrace of magic, the roots of the Faust legend run through the ambivalent relationship of the magical and medicinal. This article examines how the physician-astrologers of Renaissance Europe informed early Faustian literature, just as the alchemists, whose practices survived well into the Enlightenment, informed not only Goethe’s literary work but the author’s own life. The Faust tradition encodes the cultural salience that medicine has long held in the West as emblematic of the bumpy, dangerous path to knowledge.
{"title":"“Much Worse Than the Plague”","authors":"Dustin Lovett","doi":"10.1163/24056480-00702002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-00702002","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In Goethe’s Faust, Faust expresses his fear that the alchemical “medicine” he and his father once gave their patients to cure them from plague had done more killing than the plague itself. This fear situates Goethe’s work within a critical discourse stretching back to Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia, and carried on from the beginnings of the Faust tradition about magic, medicine and scientific error. From the charges of quackery against the historical Faust, through two centuries of popular literature depicting Faust’s “descent” from theology to medicine as precipitating his embrace of magic, the roots of the Faust legend run through the ambivalent relationship of the magical and medicinal. This article examines how the physician-astrologers of Renaissance Europe informed early Faustian literature, just as the alchemists, whose practices survived well into the Enlightenment, informed not only Goethe’s literary work but the author’s own life. The Faust tradition encodes the cultural salience that medicine has long held in the West as emblematic of the bumpy, dangerous path to knowledge.","PeriodicalId":36587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World Literature","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46809206","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 : 2022-05-18DOI: 10.1163/24056480-00702004
Nathanael Pree
This article takes two epidemics, one historical and the other allegorical, for comparison against the current Covid-19 crisis. Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year consists of a narrator whose objectivity and existence are ambiguous. José Saramago’s Blindness, published in the original Portuguese as an “essay,” traces the journey of a cluster of citizens through a polis afflicted by a sudden, infectious outbreak. The respective experiences of confinement: at home, in a disused mental hospital, and within the wider spaces of the city, are analysed in this article with reference to Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, alongside seminal works by Giorgio Agamben, Michel de Certeau and Susan Sontag. The article also aims to indicate how the current Covid-19 crisis may provide a scene of reading, alongside a contemporary response from Slavoj Žižek.
{"title":"Contagion and Confinement","authors":"Nathanael Pree","doi":"10.1163/24056480-00702004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-00702004","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article takes two epidemics, one historical and the other allegorical, for comparison against the current Covid-19 crisis. Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year consists of a narrator whose objectivity and existence are ambiguous. José Saramago’s Blindness, published in the original Portuguese as an “essay,” traces the journey of a cluster of citizens through a polis afflicted by a sudden, infectious outbreak. The respective experiences of confinement: at home, in a disused mental hospital, and within the wider spaces of the city, are analysed in this article with reference to Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, alongside seminal works by Giorgio Agamben, Michel de Certeau and Susan Sontag. The article also aims to indicate how the current Covid-19 crisis may provide a scene of reading, alongside a contemporary response from Slavoj Žižek.","PeriodicalId":36587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World Literature","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42252941","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 : 2022-05-18DOI: 10.1163/24056480-00702008
Nadège Lejeune
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.
{"title":"Of Littérature-monde as an Untranslatable","authors":"Nadège Lejeune","doi":"10.1163/24056480-00702008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-00702008","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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.","PeriodicalId":36587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World Literature","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46228129","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 : 2022-05-18DOI: 10.1163/24056480-00702006
Sándor Hites
The paper looks at a range of economic ideas that various early 19th century conceptualizations of world literature have drawn on or interacted with. What I attempt to demonstrate is that contrary to the tendency in recent debates to identify world literature as the cultural manifestation of modern capitalism per se, the multifariousness of the concept has corresponded to the heterogeneity of economic thought right from the beginning. I explore models of 1) free trade, 2) gifting, 3) economic planning, 4) national protectionism and 5) common/shared possessions in the writings of Goethe, Thomas Carlyle, Fichte, the Young Germany movement, and Karl Marx.
{"title":"Five Economies of Weltliteratur","authors":"Sándor Hites","doi":"10.1163/24056480-00702006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-00702006","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The paper looks at a range of economic ideas that various early 19th century conceptualizations of world literature have drawn on or interacted with. What I attempt to demonstrate is that contrary to the tendency in recent debates to identify world literature as the cultural manifestation of modern capitalism per se, the multifariousness of the concept has corresponded to the heterogeneity of economic thought right from the beginning. I explore models of 1) free trade, 2) gifting, 3) economic planning, 4) national protectionism and 5) common/shared possessions in the writings of Goethe, Thomas Carlyle, Fichte, the Young Germany movement, and Karl Marx.","PeriodicalId":36587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World Literature","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44753527","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 : 2022-05-18DOI: 10.1163/24056480-00702005
Anna Muenchrath
This essay intervenes in a debate about world literature that pits commodity circulation against normativity and literature’s causal force. By taking into account the history of book production and circulation as intimately linked with the history of global capitalism, this essay reads Severance (2018) by Ling Ma as a critique of the logic of global logistics and its labor relations. Reading the novel during a pandemic ironically draws attention to the reader’s own position in this global labor hierarchy, highlighting that the novel itself necessarily participates in the material injustices of global print capitalism. The essay argues that paying attention to book production and circulation – in the form of global supply chains, the world market’s global reach, and particularly the human relations this produces – is in fact not antithetical to, but instead a highly leveraged way of understanding literature’s potential for transformative agency.
{"title":"Making and Reading World Literature in a Pandemic","authors":"Anna Muenchrath","doi":"10.1163/24056480-00702005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-00702005","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay intervenes in a debate about world literature that pits commodity circulation against normativity and literature’s causal force. By taking into account the history of book production and circulation as intimately linked with the history of global capitalism, this essay reads Severance (2018) by Ling Ma as a critique of the logic of global logistics and its labor relations. Reading the novel during a pandemic ironically draws attention to the reader’s own position in this global labor hierarchy, highlighting that the novel itself necessarily participates in the material injustices of global print capitalism. The essay argues that paying attention to book production and circulation – in the form of global supply chains, the world market’s global reach, and particularly the human relations this produces – is in fact not antithetical to, but instead a highly leveraged way of understanding literature’s potential for transformative agency.","PeriodicalId":36587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World Literature","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45204663","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 : 2022-05-09DOI: 10.1163/24056480-20221001
Elisa Sotgiu
The global novel is one of the central stakes in the US-centered international literary field, a field that openly celebrates marginality, authenticity, and ethical bearing while still rewarding works targeted to an Anglophone, educated audience with an omnivorous aesthetic disposition. This essay reconstructs the genesis and the history of the contemporary literary field, tracing the geopolitical, social, and institutional changes that resulted in the current system of beliefs. The second part focuses on two celebrated global novelists, Elena Ferrante and Roberto Bolaño, studying the affinities in their work that reflect their similar position vis-à-vis the United States: they both disallow the centrality of the US and the legitimacy of academic institutions, make use of genre fiction, and craft their narratives around the figure of an authentic, marginal friend. These strategies prove to be particularly effective in responding to the contradictory constraints of the literary field.
{"title":"Woes of the True Global Novelist","authors":"Elisa Sotgiu","doi":"10.1163/24056480-20221001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-20221001","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The global novel is one of the central stakes in the US-centered international literary field, a field that openly celebrates marginality, authenticity, and ethical bearing while still rewarding works targeted to an Anglophone, educated audience with an omnivorous aesthetic disposition. This essay reconstructs the genesis and the history of the contemporary literary field, tracing the geopolitical, social, and institutional changes that resulted in the current system of beliefs. The second part focuses on two celebrated global novelists, Elena Ferrante and Roberto Bolaño, studying the affinities in their work that reflect their similar position vis-à-vis the United States: they both disallow the centrality of the US and the legitimacy of academic institutions, make use of genre fiction, and craft their narratives around the figure of an authentic, marginal friend. These strategies prove to be particularly effective in responding to the contradictory constraints of the literary field.","PeriodicalId":36587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World Literature","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43151199","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}
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