Polysystems Redux: The Unfinished Business of World Literature

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 272-281
Author(s):  
Debjani Ganguly
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Unfinished Business ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Systems Model ◽  
Literary Space ◽  
The World

AbstractIn responding to Muhsin al-Musawi’s two-part essay on the Arabic Republic of Letters, this essay proposes a rethinking of the world systems model in global literary studies in terms of a polysystems framework. Rather than trying to fit literary worlds—ancient, premodern, modern—within a single Euro-chronological frame culminating in a world capitalist systems model—where the non-European worlds appear as invariably inferior—it is worthwhile to see them as several polysystems with variable valences within a heterotemporal planetary literary space. This approach offers a comparative reading of the emergence of three language worlds—Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic—and urges us to rethink the totality of the world literary space as a diachronic field that generates overlapping, multiscalar, comparative histories of literary polysystems.

scholarly journals Reconsidering The World Republic of Letters: A Qualunque Community of Literatures

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-115
Author(s):  
Hatice Karaman ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Philosophical Perspective ◽  
English Edition ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Literary Space ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common

In the preface to the English edition of The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova focuses on the existence of a literary world/universe, which maintains a relative autonomy from the world and its political disparities and restrictions. This suggested ideal of a literary space is an attempt to posit world literature as an alternative chronotope in which literary production can survive and multiply transnationally. My paper will offer a reconsideration of this global literary space, read via a philosophical perspective, shaped by the famous discussion of the common and community as conducted by Giorgio Agamben, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, among others. Within the above theoretical frame, my attempt will be to reread Casanova’s contribution to World Literature as a desired community of literature(s), formed by the coming together of qualunque singularities which co-exist and co-belong without “any representable condition of belonging” (Agamben). Furthermore, the idea of qualunque (whatever) will constitute the starting point for the ethico-political reconsideration and reconceptualisation of the global literary space offered by Casanova, not only without borders but also without hierarchies.

Against Global Literary Studies

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Edmond
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand ◽  
Institutional Frameworks ◽  
The World

Abstract Literary studies has taken a global turn through such institutional frameworks as global romanticism, global modernism, global anglophone, global postcolonial, global settler studies, world literature, and comparative literature. Though promising an escape from parochialism, nationalism, and Eurocentrism, this turn often looks suspiciously like another version of Anglo-European imperialism. This essay argues that, rather than continue the expansionary line of recent decades, global literary studies must allow other perspectives to draw into question its concepts, practices, and theories, including those associated with the terms literature, discipline, and comparison. As a settler colonial (Pākehā) scholar in Aotearoa New Zealand, I attend particularly to Māori literary scholars from Apirana Ngata, Te Kapunga Matemoana (Koro) Dewes, and Hirini Melbourne to Alice Te Punga Somerville, Tina Makereti, and Arini Loader. Their work highlights the limitedness of global literary studies in its current disciplinary guise. Disciplines remain important when they bring recognition to something previously marginalized, as in the battle to have Māori literature recognized within Pākehā institutions. What institutionalized modes of global literary studies need, however, is not discipline but indiscipline: a recognition of the limits of dominant disciplinary objects, frameworks, and practices, and an openness to other ways of seeing the world.

Futures of Spectrality

2020 ◽  
pp. 300-307
Author(s):  
Karim Mattar
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
The World ◽  
Per Se

In the Conclusion, I consider the wider implications of the book. Addressing the question of whether spectrality – and by extension (Derridean) theory per se – has a future in literary studies given the “postcritical” turn that scholars such as Rita Felski have recently called for, I suggest that it indeed does. This book, I affirm, is nothing if not a contribution to and expansion of the project of critique for the world literature debate. Through its reading of the Middle Eastern novel as metonym and metaphor of such, it will have sought to reorient world literature around the paradigmatic critical figure of the specter. Moving forwards, our task and indeed responsibility is one of expanding this analysis to the world in endless critique.

The Challenges of Writing a National Literary History in the Era of Transnationalism: Insights from a Peripheral Literary Space

Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 14-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Snejana Ung
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Asymmetry ◽  
Romanian Literature ◽  
Literary System

It goes without saying that during the nineteenth and twentieth century literary historiography tries to define national identities. However, a methodological and paradigm shift occur at the beginning of the twenty-first century when, under the auspices of globalization and the emergence of world literature and transnational literary studies, literary historiography is re-thought as a collective and transnational project. Yet, the asymmetry of the world literary system affects literary historiography too. When it comes to this scholarly genre, the asymmetry is most visible in the fact that in the era of transnationalism, national histories are still written at the periphery. Given the aforementioned observation, this paper a) looks into the challenges of writing literary history in Romania in the age of world literature and transnational studies, and b) tries to explain why a national literary history is still needed and how it can change the way we think about Romanian literature. The starting point of this inquiry is represented by the publication of Mihai Iovănel’s Istoria literaturii române contemporane: 1990-2020 [History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020]. In the context of the ‘transnational turn’ in literary studies, the attempt to write relevant national histories in a peripheral literary space such as Romania is faced, in my view, with two major challenges: 1) the fact that transnationalism manifests itself differently at the periphery and 2) the tradition of Romanian literary criticism and history. The former refers to the fact that unlike central literatures, where transnationalism is shaped to a large extent by migrant writers (those who enter these literatures), in Romanian literature it comprises exiled or migrant writers (those who left Romania and not vice versa) and, to a lesser extent, the literatures written by ethnic minorities. A comparative approach can cast light on this difference. For example, while the thirteenth volume of The Oxford English Literary History is dedicated entirely to migrant and bicultural writers, transnational histories concerning the peripheries, such as History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, focus on multiple literary spaces and therefore have a different approach to dealing with transnationalism. The latter challenge is represented, as shown by Iovănel, by the long-lasting tradition of the “principle of aesthetic autonomism”, which persists even in post-communist Romania. In this regard, this paper aims to show that Iovănel’s History… overcomes the above-mentioned hindrances of literary criticism and succeeds in offering an image of Romanian literature not as confined to its national boundaries but as part of the world literary system. Along with other significant scholarly works on Romanian literature as and in world literature, this project is a significant step towards re-thinking Romanian literature as a “literature of the world” (Terian 2015).

Jewish American Literature Against the World

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Schreier
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
American Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Jewish Studies ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Literary Study ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Jewish American Literature ◽  
The World

Abstract By way of a brief genealogy of the Jewish American literary field and through the lens of recent attempts to imagine how comparative literature-based thinking about a concept of “world literature” can be critically productive for Jewish literary study, this article analyzes Jewish American literary studies’ prestige problem. Because it has persistently failed to theorize the intellectual and methodological assumptions underlying its practice, Jewish American literary study remains burdened by the essentialist implications of an ethnological historicism. This article ultimately argues that Jewish American literary study needs to take more seriously the possibilities offered by a materialist epistemology rather than the Jewish studies-based historicist ontology it has mostly taken for granted. “My hope is that a Jewish American epistemology can operate outside the penumbra of a tired and played-out concept of ethnicity—a term that unavoidably, if spectrally, posits a biologistic object at the heart of its historicist project—even as it might still claim the mantle of Jewish-y-ness.”

Literatures of the World: An Inquiry

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (5) ◽  
pp. 1405-1413 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Shankar
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Affirmative Answer ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Rabindranath Tagore ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject

The Number of Conferences, Books, Essays, and Anthologies Dedicated to the Topic of World Literature Amply Testifies to a growing interest in the subject among literary scholars. In one sense, this interest within literary studies is perfectly comprehensible. It corresponds to a profound sense of a shrinking globe in which once-distant cultures are put in ever-closer proximity. The thinking goes something like this: if the world is becoming one, mustn't the literature of that world, too? In essence, the idea of world literature is the affirmative answer to some such commonsensical question, never mind that all the evidence points to a more complicated reality. Despite all the falling walls and speeding planes and globally communicating technologies (which doubtless do shrink distances), the world does not seem to be becoming one and indeed remains as complexly riven today as it ever was. There is no need to rehash the multiple genealogies—most often traced back to Goethe through René Wellek, Erich Auerbach, and Karl Marx, sometimes with a brief detour to Rabindranath Tagore—that underlie contemporary notions of world literature. The books, essays, and anthologies I allude to above sufficiently provide these genealogies. I have written elsewhere about my skepticism regarding the intellectual and political viability of the world literature project, suggesting that the notion of world literature always, and to little advantage, produces a fixed notion of the world (Flesh xvii, 124-36). In contemporary versions of the world literature project, the world becomes a reductive enumeration of cultures that have produced “masterpieces,” or “great works,” deemed good enough to enter a global canon. I am mainly skeptical of the idea of world literature because of this reductive impulse: I don't believe the idea can ever avoid a problematic diminution of the world or of the literary work.

scholarly journals Cosmopolitanism and Planetary Studies: Paradigms for Rewriting the Past

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-128
Author(s):  
Letitia Guran
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
World Order ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Cultural Dialogue ◽  
Romanian Literature

This paper discusses recent models of world literature rewriting in light of the 2018 Romanian Literature as World Literature, which remaps some of the most representative Romanian authors and movements according to the intersectional frameworks advanced by Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systemstheory, Pascale Casanova’s world republic of letters, and others. In their plea for what the book’s editors call planetary, cosmopolitan studies, the sixteen contributors reread canonical Romanian texts and advocate for a new literary world order, within which Romanian literature is regarded in a less hierarchical/dichotomic fashion, as a literature of the world. This initiative seeks to reposition Romanian literature as a diverse, active, and dynamic partner in the world’s cultural dialogue. My essay addresses a paradox which is very much at the centre of the book: how can one promote intercultural, non-hegemonic models of dialogue when translation and marketability still restrict the participation of “marginal” cultures in the planetary, cosmopolitan exchange of ideas?

scholarly journals O krok do Nobla i krok po nim – recepcja twórczości Olgi Tokarczuk na Ukrainie

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-162
Author(s):  
Olesia Nachlik
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
The World

The paper distinguishes and analyses the interpretative dominants in the Ukrainian reception of Olga Tokarczuk’s work over the last twenty years or so. This reception comprises numerous interviews, public conversations, translations and their presentations, literary criticism and literary studies dissertations, revealing the specificity of the point of view Poland’s neighbouring culture has on works which are now part of the world literature canon.

World

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Allan
Keyword(s):  
Systems Theory ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
World Systems ◽  
World Systems Theory ◽  
Normative Force ◽  
The World ◽  
Modern Egypt

This chapter focuses on the world of world literature—understood as either the site at which a literary work is produced (for world systems theory) or the site disclosed in the literary work itself (through practices of close reading). It examines the scholarship of Franco Moretti, Pascale Casanova, and Edward Said in order to elucidate dominant frames for understanding world literature and interweaves these different frames with selected scenes from modern Egypt: the first, the protests on the streets of Cairo of a Syrian novel deemed blasphemous, Haydar Haydar's Walīmah li-aʻshāb al-bahr (A Banquet for Seaweed); and the second, the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Naguib Mahfouz. Drawing from Said's notion of secular criticism, the chapter argues that reading—and not solely textuality—should be understood as worldly activity with a normative force across interpretative communities.

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