The processes of translation and critical reception of a literary work being adopted as a text of world literature and therefore translated into English, before all other factors, are governed by (social) narratives, as proposed by Somers and Gibson (1994) and Mona Baker (2006). Being a part of a larger system, the narratives in question are perceived as an instrument in “rewriting and manipulation” (Lefevere 1992) establishing an international or global setup of world literature studies. A case study examining the position/interpretation of The Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić within this framework serves as an illustration of the process.
Starting from the recent developments in the fields of transnational studies and world literature, this article analyses the presence of Romanian literature in the world and its specific manner of relating to the world. Thus, the author ś paper consists of three parts. The first part approaches, in short, the way in which Romanian culture envisaged national literature, world literature and the relationship between the two over the past two centuries. The second part is an attempt to systematize the manner in which Romanian literature asserted its presence in the world until now, by identifying four successive waves of its dissemination beyond national borders. Finally, the third part of the article poses a new approach toward the problem, meant to contribute to a better understanding and, at the same time, an improvement of the presence of Romanian literature in the world.
This article makes use of quantitative methods to chart the particular morphologies of translated novels in Romania after World War II. The three charts presented show the chronological shift in the preferences for translating novels in a comprehensive account of all the Russian (and Soviet), French, and American novels translated in Romania, demonstrating that the translations can be analysed through what Jordan A.Y. Smith convincingly argues to be a useful model in translation studies and world literature, namely translationscapes. Through use of an extensive database, the article illustrates which periods the novels translated in communist Romania originate from and describes three patterns of translation during communism according to David Damrosch’s approach to canon. It points towards a certain need for clarifying the circulation of the novel from a big data perspective, through what this study refers to as quantitative translationscapes.
The article defines the exemplum as an intertext in homiletic literature of various origins. The genre, modelled on the dichotomy of redemption (motives of virtue) and damnation (motives of sin), served the didactic function. Basic source texts for exempla were biblical and classical (or pseudo-classical) texts, patristic texts, religious and secular chronicles, various legends and other historiographic treatises, and books of emblems (the last of these have elicited least scholarly attention). However, other texts, less often associated with exempla, also served as their sources. These include such mediaeval and early modern period texts as the Golden Legend and the writings of Laurentius Surius (for exempla of the legend type) or (in postils) various partial legends (Vitae) – depending on which saint the sermon was devoted to. The study of exempla in early modern literature also encompasses such issues as geographical and temporal variation of the genre (period terminology), their literary value, secularisation (fairy tales, peddlers’ songs), and their permeation into other genres.
The expression “world literature” is currently being used in several ways: about various culturally and temporally inclusive bodies of the literature and about various ways of studying such literature. In the article, special attention is devoted to the editorial concept of the world literature in The Cambridge History of World Literature (2021), edited by Debjani Ganguly. Formulations about world literature sometimes cast it as a mind-independent entity, sometimes as a scholarly construction. It is argued that the choice between these alternatives is important, since it has significant consequences for the logic of thinking and reasoning about world literature.
The global turn in literary studies brings the necessity of looking for new ways to analyse literature and literary history, and to reframe the categories we use to describe it. Transculturality, though in use for the past 30 years, still seems one of the freshest and most promising terms to use in a newly profiled literary study. However, recent publications have proved that the meaning of the term is at best unstable – transculturality is being used in the different, sometimes contradictory ways. This article focuses on some of the issues that one may face when dealing with the notion of transculturality.
This article focuses on the (dis)continuities between the German-language work of Paul Celan (integrated into a “large” literature where he becomes “Europe’s foremost poet after World War II”, in George Steiner’s opinion) and the scanty corpus of Romanian literature written by Celan in his Bucharest period, read in the post-national perspective. In his book Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age (2020), David Damrosch states that a unified Romanian literature should integrate literature written in several languages, disregarding the obsolete criterion of the national language. While agreeing with this proposition, the article remarks that Damrosch’s other theoretical proposition that of the bifocal viewpoint, with the two foci represented by the literature of origin and that of insertion, proves ineffective in Celan’s case. The author proposes the use of “cultural triangulation”, Andrei Terian’s concept, for a better understanding of Celan as a post-national poet. In this model, Celan proves to be not a single poet but rather a network comprising all his possibilities of development in any language, intersecting possible (but abandoned) and accomplished versions of himself, writing in two languages (even not proportionately so), and absorbing and distributing biographical and cultural information from and to each of them.
This article aims to systemize the trends in world literature research, highlighting the differences between the concepts of this phenomenon as embraced by “small” and “large” literatures. It also takes account of the Czech and Slovak line of thinking which questions the concept of world literature as normative poetics or the standardized canon of masterpieces and their various discourses. The historical experience of Czech and Slovak comparative literary studies defending the independent values of Slavic literatures suggests that there cannot be any arbitrary research on world literature. With some exceptions and regardless of their terminologically and semantically different interpretations of this specialism, contemporary theoretical concepts (as embraced by Emily Apter, Pascale Casanova, David Damrosch, Marko Juvan, Franco Moretti, etc.) re-establish recognizing world literature as an international research issue or a subject employing English as a universal means of communication. Imposing such notion would allegedly condone inequality as a kind of epistemological framework to codify the binary opposition of “developed” and “underdeveloped” or “the centre” and “periphery”. It was mainly the Czech-Slovak structuralise tradition (represented by Frank Wollman, René Wellek, Dionýz Ďurišin, etc.) that rejected national literature as a natural starting point of world literature. Anchored in the Central European intellectual milieu at the crossing of various aesthetic movements, these “defensive” theories were linked with the structural concept of the Prague Linguistic Circle, letting alone the multilingual tradition of the former Habsburg Empire and the phenomenon of migration which implied the aspect of polyglossia and heterotopia as a breeding ground for comparative scholars.
The idea of world literature arose as a cultural counterpart to the process of globalization. However, since literature is organized within discrete traditions, the possibility of a world literature depends not just on increasing economic ties, but upon the formation of a global tradition. Since a tradition can only maintain its unity to the extent that it forms a single public sphere, the lack of a global public sphere undermines the possibility of a single world literature. The measure of this fragmentation is differences between public spheres defined by nation-state sovereignty.
The aim of this paper is double. First, it provides an overview on the situation of comparative literature in Spanish academia. Second, the paper discusses the reception of the Slovak theory of inter-literary process in Spain. In particular, after the performance of an analysis of the Spanish institutional singularities, namely the consequences for comparative literature's being merged into a single 'area of knowledge' with literary theory, the announcement of comparative literature's crisis and death is qualified according to spatial criteria along with interpretive communities. Finally, some conclusions are drawn for the International Comparative Literature Association's project of a comparative history of literatures in European languages as practised in Spain with a Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula.
Much discussion of the world literature, as seen in the theories of Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova, is still not entirely able to rid itself of Eurocentric and Western-centric biases. More recently, Zhang Longxi, as a leading Chinese cross-cultural scholar, despite his good intentions, displays Sinocentric limitations by claiming that imperial China “functioned as a centre in the East Asian region”. Based on the assumption that Zhang’s argument is emblematic of a larger current of Sinocentrism in China, this article argues that East Asian countries, most notably Korea and Japan, developed their own literatures and cultures, although they have been influenced by Chinese culture. This article calls for a more globally-oriented paradigm and asserts that any form of ethnocentrism, Eurocentric or Sinocentric, is injurious, or even fatal, to the salutary development of the world literature.
Any attempt to survey the state of research into Romantic Orientalism in comparative studies runs into considerable difficulties for two reasons. One is the lack of a commonly shared meaning of the term 'Orientalism', the other is the unresolved dispute about the scope of the very field of comparative studies. This article notes a strong connection between Romantic Orientalism and the type of research goals and ambitions declared by the practitioners of comparative studies. It seems that in so far as virtually all Romantics evinced some interest in the Orient Orientalism would make an ideal subject of comparative research. This chimes in with the opinion of many scholars in the field who have repeatedly called for opening up their discipline to the non-European literary terrain. What is more important, Orientalism would not only broaden the perspective of comparative studies, but also provide a common research field for otherwise irreconcilable approaches.
William Shakespeare is said to be uniquely omnipresent in the world’s literature, yet world literature concepts only devote marginal attention to him, so a conceptual change of direction is necessary for an understanding of his peculiar position. Whereas reception history has long highlighted the nation as the main critical framework, transcultural inquiries are now (re)discovering submerged imprints from regions such as Southwest Asia and West Africa on the initial formation of Shakespeare’s texts. These enable a reorientation in theorizing world literature, to grasp the nature of his achievements and to apply this new direction to other authors.
The paper explores the concept of world literature in the context of national literatures in Portuguese. It analyses the historical and cultural factors that influenced the formation of Portuguese nationhood, which has been historically linked with empire and colonization, and how this has affected the development of multiple “Lusophonias” (national literatures in Portuguese-speaking countries). It also rethinks Portugal’s semi-peripheral position in the European and world contexts and its relation to other Portuguese-speaking spaces and the wider world.
The paper deals with the work of Dionyz Durisin (1929-1997) and his response in world literature science. Durisin was one of the best Slovak literature theorists and world well known comparativist. Many of his works were translated into foreign languages, including Chinese and Japanese. They motivated the inter-literary research in whole Europe as well as in the USA, Canada, Latin America, China and Japan. In 1970 Durisin brought in his conception on the 6-th International congress AILC in Bordeaux. His works were known and cited also by Rene Wellek, Douwe W. Fokkema and Ulrich Weisstein. W. Fokkema pointed out inventiveness and originality of his conception. Earl Minner mentioned his significant contribution to the discussion on the notion of the influence. The others noticed the relation of his thought with translation research as well as with the Israeli school of poly-systems theory. In the 80s Durisin elaborated theory of inter-literary communities and in the last time he dealt with the notion of literary centrism and world literature.
The article is an analysis of René Wellek’s contribution to the theory of comparative literature. It draws on his characterization of the crisis of comparative literature presented at the 2nd Congress of ICLA in the USA, and continues with the interpretation of some of his other opinions concerning the situation in which literary studies in the USA found itself at the end of the 20th century. They are included especially in his articles “The Attack on Literature” and “Destroying Literary Studies.” René Wellek’s theoretical opinions are analysed especially in the context of emerging cultural studies and their ideologization of literature in general, formally expressed, for example, in the Bernheimer Report for the American Association of Comparative Literature. The author points out that the future of the comparative literature lies not in its use of ideological contexts but in its ability to draw attention to universal principles and values, perhaps thorough the conceptions of inter-literariness and world literature, and thus overcome the harmfulness of separatist tendencies fed by particularisms of various types.
From the late 1960s to the early 2000s, questions of canonization formed one of the central issues of “Deutschdidaktik”, which is the German phrase for the scholarly approach to teaching German language and literature. Within the didactic debate on canon, however, teaching world literature was widely neglected. Instead, the canon debate mainly focused on teaching contemporary literature, children and youth literature and functional literature. When addressing world literature, “Deutschdidaktik” omitted the discussion of fundamental issues of the canon. Things are very different within the US-American discourse. The discussions about teaching world literature and about how to redefine the canon are strongly intertwind. This essay compares the developments within the German and the US-American discourse. It will discuss the reasons for divergent settings of priorities in both canon debates. The essay concludes by suggesting a more intensive dialogue between American and German pedagogic discourse. It states also the need for a stronger inertwining of literary studies and studies of literary education within the German discourse, mainly through an application of postcolonial theorems on literary education.
This article aims to draw attention to the importance of the spatial point of view for the literary studies introduced by the Slovak comparatist Dionýz Ďurišin in the 1980s. The starting point of his systematics of world literature was the concept of the inter-literary process, derived from his study of various ways of connecting literatures in the world. The spatial concept of the changes in literatures enabled him to highlight the relevance of otherness and its function in the reception of foreign literatures. The study of inter-literary communities permitted him to discover various forms of connecting, interfering, permeating or merging different literatures and their works across the borders of languages and cultures, i.e. trans-literary studies. In addition, he identified some historical forms of inter-literary communities in world literature (such as Commonwealth, Iberian and Latin American, and Slavic/Russian). Spatial representations of literary phenomena, similar to those of Franco Moretti, also helped him to graphically represent the crossing movement of literatures in the world. A reliable source for learning about the changes in reflecting the spatial moment in world literature studies and about Ďurišin’s systematics are the works of César Domínguez. The terms and expressions Ďurišin created are now coming to be used in a larger sense. This has also been reflected in the discussions on the concept of world literature, which is currently undergoing various changes (Damrosch, Spivak, Moretti, Apter, Aseginolaza, Saussy, Tally, etc.).
Although the acceptance of a text into world literature is directly related to the importance of its country and language of origin, works from so-called small literatures can also become part of the global canon. They establish their “worldliness” not on the power of extra literary moments, but on the ability to constitute the world using the aestheticization of national images. This article analyses four literary-historical examples of authors (Ivan Horváth, Karel Čapek, Sandor Márai, and Witold Gombrowicz) attempting to become world authors through their “Central Europeanism”. Horváth seeks artistic inspiration for his dreamlike visions in French culture, Čapek attracts readers with the universality of his humanistic ideas, Márai embodies intellectual the nostalgia for the vanished Habsburg Empire, and Gombrowicz intuitively anticipates the postmodern grotesque. Despite their differences in genre and theme, these authors are connected by their inclination towards the West. At the same time, they all demonstrate that in this distinctive and indigenous (in terms of values) “interspace” between the West and the East, there is no “pure” national literature that does not synthesize a diverse foreign element. It is obvious that the way of this aestheticization of local “peripherality” implies their possible paths to “worldliness”.
In recent years, online fiction has emerged as a new form of Chinese literature, not only with a huge domestic readership, but also as a form increasingly favoured by readers from various countries, becoming a new literary landscape in the world. Whether the emergence of Chinese online literature has had an impact on the existing world literature and its complex relationship with national literature deserves in-depth study. Taking world literature as a theoretical perspective, this paper compares the origins of Chinese online literature and its development history, explores its translation and circulation mechanisms, and probes its relationship with the canon in order to discover potential new constructions of world literature. This article finds that Chinese online literature originated from the Chinese complex of overseas wanderers, and its early writing was characterized by a mishmash of Chinese and Western influences. In the process of its development, Chinese online literature has emphasized the highlighting of traditional Chinese cultural elements, while on the other hand, it has continuously absorbed and localized the essence of world popular literature and culture. Chinese online literature is not Chinese literature in the first place, but the literature of the network. The value of Chinese online literature does not stay at the level of aesthetic value but lies in its unique literary concept of shuang and a post-aesthetic paradigm. The above shows that Chinese online literature is a typical representation of the cultural exchange between China and the West in the Internet era, a post-aesthetic world literature with translation and circulation as its fundamental premise, and a new representative of popular literature into world literature.
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