Greenwich Meridian in New York? The Basque Literary Field in World Literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 443-457
Author(s):  
Beñat Sarasola
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Greenwich Meridian

New York, Capital of World Literature? On Holocaust Memory and World Literary Value

2017 ◽  
Vol 135 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pieter Vermeulen
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Value Creation ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
Value Production ◽  
Roberto Bolano

AbstractThe question of how world literary value is produced has been central to recent debates. While Pascale Casanova’s influential account of a relatively autonomous ‘world literary space’ follows the work of Pierre Bourdieu in applying economic metaphors to processes of world literary value production, this essay argues that Casanova’s 1999 account needs to be updated in light of recent economic and cultural developments: the economic and the literary sphere are no longer separate but fundamentally entwined, which means that processes of world literary value creation cannot be modeled as a pseudo-market. The essay traces ongoing debates on the transcultural circulation of Holocaust memory to put forward a more flexible and multifaceted model for the production of world literary value. To demonstrate the claim that world literary value is today articulated with other forms of value, the essay investigates the role of Holocaust memory in the recent world literary consecration of Roberto Bolaño, Karl-Ove Knausgaard, and Elena Ferrante. Concentrated around New York-based publishers and media, these three cases not only demonstrate the crucial role of Holocaust memory in articulating literary value, they also show the recent shift from Paris to New York as a primary center of world literary value production.

Working-Class Writing and the Use Value of the Literary

PMLA ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 127 (4) ◽  
pp. 932-938 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonali Perera
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Use Value ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Greenwich Meridian ◽  
Country Culture ◽  
The Aesthetic

Formal preoccupations, which is to say specifically literary concerns, appear in small literatures only in a second phase, when an initial stock of literary resources has been accumulated and the first international artists find themselves in a position to challenge the aesthetic assumptions associated with realism and to exploit the revolutionary advances achieved at the Greenwich meridian.—Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters“In our country culture has become so complex, this complexity is reflected in our literature. It takes a certain level of education to understand our novelists. The ordinary man cannot understand them …” … And she reeled off a list of authors, smiling smugly. It never occurred to her that these authors had ceased to be of any value whatsoever to their society—or was it really true that an extreme height of culture and the incomprehensible went hand in hand?—Bessie Head, A Question of Power (first ellipsis in orig.)ON WHAT BASIS ARE SELECT TRADITIONS OF LITERARY INTERNATIONALISM RECOGNIZED AS WORLD LITERATURE AND OTHERS DEEMED MERELY historical, relics of nostalgic Marxism or of resolved debates on aesthetics and politics? According to recent influential formulations, world literature is writing that in original or translated form circulates outside the author's country of origin. But what of traditions of literary internationalism, like those of working-class writing, that reverse and displace practical, utilitarian propositions to ask, instead, in more abstract terms, what is the use value of the literary? Bessie Head's A Question of Power poses a challenge to practical definitions. What of literary texts that have global currency but aren't of “any value whatsoever to their society”?

On Islands and Deserts

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-236
Author(s):  
Tristan Leperlier
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Local Practices ◽  
Rachid Boudjedra ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Do So

Abstract This article argues for the necessity for world literature and postcolonial studies to examine both global hierarchies of literary legitimacy and those local practices which might challenge them, and give perspectives for other significant geographies. To do so, it focuses on the bilingual and transnational Algerian literary field; this requires different levels of interconnected analysis, namely of the two linguistic subfields, the intermediary level of national literary field and the two Francophone and Arabophone transnational literary fields. Trajectories and literary works of three very different yet linked writers, Rachid Boudjedra, Tahar Djaout and Tahar Ouettar, are examined in turn. The article traces both the global and linguistic inequalities to which they were subjected as well as their practices in order to argue that they reveal unexpected vectors of circulation between spaces and languages. Finally, this piece explores how and why each writer reinvents a world within their desert novels, that is, by narrating wanderings in the desert that are also explorations of national identity.

scholarly journals How Do Literary Works Cross Borders (or Not)?

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gisèle Sapiro
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Literary Works

This paper analyzes the factors that trigger or hinder the circulation of literary works beyond their geographic and cultural borders, i.e. participating in the mechanisms of the production of World Literature. For the sake of analysis, these factors can be classified into four categories: political (or more broadly ideological), economic, cultural and social. Being embodied by institutions and by individual agents, these factors can support or contradict one another, thus causing tensions and struggles. This paper ends with reflections on the two opposite tendencies that characterize the transnational literary field: isomorphism and the differentiation logics.

Translation and Translation as a Weapon

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gisèle Sapiro
Keyword(s):  
Text Analysis ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Social Activity ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Gendered Identities ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Cultural Mediators ◽  
Political Weapon

Translation is a social activity that fulfills other functions than mere communication: political, economic and cultural. Thus translation can be used as a political weapon to export or import texts conveying an ideological message, such as socialist realism. As evidenced by the promotion of world bestsellers, translation may in other cases serve economic interests. Literary translations also serve cultural purposes, such as the building of collective (national, social, gendered) identities, the representations of other cultures, or the subversion of the dominant norms in a literary field (as defined by Pierre Bourdieu), which can be illustrated by the reception and uses of William Faulkner’s novels in France in the 1930s (namely by Jean-Paul Sartre). The study of translation has become a research field called “Translation Studies,” which underwent a “sociological turn” at the beginning of the 21st century, and was also renewed at the same time by the rise of “world literature” studies in comparative literature. While translation studies are interested in norms of translation (as defined by Gideon Toury), which may vary across cultures, especially between domesticating and foreignizing strategies, the sociology of translation and of (world) literature asks how literary texts circulate across cultures: who are the mediators? Why do they select certain texts and not others? What obstacles stand in the way of the transfer process? How are translations used as weapons in cultural struggles? The circulation of texts in translation can be studied through a quantitative analysis of flows of translation (across languages, countries, publishing houses) and through qualitative methods: interviews with specialized intermediaries and cultural mediators (publishers, translators, state representatives, literary critics), ethnographic observation (of book fairs, literature festivals), documentary sources (critical reception), archives (of publishers), and text analysis. However, internal (text analysis) and external (sociological) approaches still wait to be fully connected.

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