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.

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 Kategoriernes kamp - Debatten om en verdenslitteratur på fransk

2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (67) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisbeth Verstraete Hansen
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
Aesthetic Ideal ◽  
Academic Debate

Lisbeth Verstraete Hansen: “The Battle of Categories. The Debate about a World Literature in French”This article questions the literary vision expressed in the manifesto Pour une littérature-monde en français. The article examines the binary oppositions constructed by the signatories in order to position themselves in the literary field (francophone literatures vs literature-monde en français, literary formalism vs real world /mobility), then shows that the attempt to define an aesthetic ideal common to all writers is vain. Finally, an analysis of Alain Mabanckou’s novel Verre Cassé (2005) demonstrates how this writer could be said to have textually realized his personal vision of a literature-monde en français considered as a plurality of experiences. The article concludes that the manifesto’s influence is more visible in academic debate about categorizations in literary history than in literary works.

scholarly journals Faulkner in France

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gisèle Sapiro
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
Central Position ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Literary Journals ◽  
Foreign Author ◽  
Editorial Strategies

In the early 1930s, when he started being translated into French, Faulkner was an unknown author in the transnational literary field. Questioning the role of intermediaries—publishers, translators, critics, authors—in the circulation of literary works and in the making of world literature, this article focuses on the role of the French publisher Gallimard in the symbolic recognition of Faulkner. Based on the publisher’s archives, the study examines the editorial strategies implemented in order to introduce a foreign author in a country that occupied a central position in the transnational literary field, at a time American literature just began arising interest: selection and order of publication of the works, prefaces by famous French authors (Malraux), publication in literary journals. These prefaces as well as the first reviews of Faulkner’s novels also reveal different strategies of importation, from transfer of symbolic capital to subverting the local literary field (Sartre).

scholarly journals Caribbean Spaces and Anglophone World Literatures

2017 ◽  
Vol 135 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-158
Author(s):  
Jan Rupp
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
New World ◽  
Western World ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Old World ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
The World ◽  
Small Set ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Anglophone World

AbstractCaribbean writing in English highlights the call for a pluralization of world literature(s) in a double sense. It is produced in multiple Caribbean spaces, both domestic and diasporic, and it clearly stands for the extension of what used to be a rather small set of (Western) world literature. Moreover, not least as a legacy of the colonial New World/Old World distinction, visions of the world are at the heart of the Caribbean spatial imaginary as probed in many literary works. This article explores the trajectory of Caribbean spaces and Anglophone world literatures as a matter of migration and circulation, but also in terms of the symbolic translation by which experiences of movement and space are aesthetically mediated. Because of its global span across different locations Caribbean writing in English is constituted as world literature almost by definition. However, some works pursue a more circumscribed concern with domestic spaces and local artistic idioms, which affects their translatability and redefines a conventional ‘from national to world literature’ narrative.

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.

Autoexoticism with Promotional Purposes? Samuel-Henri Berthoud and Provincial Literary Ruse in Nineteenth-Century France

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (2) ◽  
pp. 397-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Gosetti
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Dominant Culture ◽  
Cultural Center ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The North ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Foreign Land ◽  
Incomplete Picture ◽  
Shed Light

“There speaks the provincial!”—Goncharov, The Same Old StoryIn nineteenth-century france, the so-called province, denoting everything outside Paris, was considered a foreign land by Parisian writers, who often constructed it as an exotic space. When we deal with this kind of provincial exoticism, however, considering this perspective alone risks painting an incomplete picture of the French literary field. Through the example of Samuel-Henri Berthoud, an author from the north of France, my intention here is to shed light on autoexoticist practices by indigenous provincial writers and to explore how they actively reclaimed, fostered, and enhanced exotic constructions about their provinces. Indeed, a wealth of evidence supports my argument that their acceptance of hegemonic constructions from the dominant culture was not passive but rather an active and creative reappropriation. This essay also challenges the idea of a stable hegemonic cultural center around which the marginal authors and literary works gravitate. Before tackling these issues, let us take a step back and briefly survey the particular value of provincial France at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

scholarly journals Zur Rolle des Aufbau Verlags bei der Veröffentlichung des Werks des portugiesischen Romanciers Eça de Queirós in deutscher Sprache

2014 ◽  
pp. 221-236
Author(s):  
Anette Kind
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
East Berlin ◽  
Limited Access ◽  
Eca De Queiros ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Research Tools

This article discusses the impact of political ci.rcumstances on the translator' s work. Especially under dictatorial regí.mes, the translator has to work with limited access to indispensable research tools. This will be demonstrated through the example of the translations into German of the literary works of the Portuguese writer Ec;a de Queirós, published by the Aufbau Verlag in East Berlín. The aim is to show how the publisher managed to reconcile an ambitious literary programme for the publication of world literature with the política! and ideological requirements of the GDR cultural programme, and to describe the very difficult circumstances in which many translators had to work.

scholarly journals World Literature According to Wikipedia Popularity and Book Translations: The Case of Modern Italian Poets

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 433-458
Author(s):  
Jacob Blakesley
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Dual Strategy ◽  
The World

Most studies of world literature ignore statistics about the translation, circulation and reception of literary works, since no way exists to find such information on a global scale. Because of this, Western scholars generally assume that certain figures are canonical everywhere in the world, such as Shakespeare and Dante. This paper proposes a new and different approach to the study of literary canonicity, by drawing on an almost completely untapped dataset (the 310 global Wikipedias) and comparing Wikipedia popularity and newly collected data on book translations. By examining diverse measures of global popularity of a corpus of 101 modern Italian poets, I aim both to integrate a new resource (Wikipedia) into the study of world literature as well as to newly problematize the very concept of world literature. I will show how shifting one's criterion of canonicity – whether the number of translations or the number of Wikipedia pageviews of an author – affects our understanding of what makes an author canonical or not. In the end, I argue, we have not yet developed a subtle enough way to determine the canonicity of authors. But this dual strategy of comparing translations and Wikipedia popularity does show us a potential way forward.

scholarly journals The Literary World of the North African Taghrība

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-214
Author(s):  
Karima Laachir
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
World Literature ◽  
World System ◽  
Interesting Case ◽  
North African ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
The North ◽  
Shared Set ◽  
Literary Systems

Abstract The novels by North African novelists Waciny Laredj, Majid Toubia and Abdelrahim Lahbibi that refashioned the traditional Arabic genre of the taghrība inspired by the medieval epic of Taghrība of Banū Hilāl, still a living oral tradition in the region, offer an interesting case study of location in world literature. They circulate both within national (Algerian, Egyptian and Moroccan) literary systems and the pan-Arab literary field while maintaining a distinct aesthetic and political locality. In these novels, the literary life of the North African taghrība takes forms and meanings that are geographically and historically located, and that are shaped by the positionality of the authors. This paper intervenes in the discussion on location in world literature from the perspective of Arabic novelistic traditions by showing that the pan-Arabic literary field itself is far from homogenous but is marked by a diversity of narrative styles and techniques that can be both local/localised and transregional at the same time. Therefore, we need to shift our understanding of world literature beyond macro-models of “world-system” that assume a universally-shared set of literary values and tastes.

Autonomy Revisited: The Question of Mediations and its Methodological Implications

Paragraph ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gisèle Sapiro
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Research ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
External Analysis ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Different Levels

Bourdieu's concept of the literary field aimed to overcome the opposition between internal and external analysis of literary works. This paper examines its theoretical and methodological implications by exploring the notion of mediations between text and context at three different levels: the material conditions of production and circulation of literary works; the modalities of their production by their authors; their critical reception. It is through these mediations that the key concept of autonomy becomes operational for empirical research and that it displays its heuristic power, as illustrated by works using Bourdieu's theory of the literary field produced over the last two decades.

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