Debating World Literature

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 239-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hendrik Birus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Turn Of The Millennium ◽  
Literary Systems ◽  
National Literatures

Abstract Since the turn of the millennium the idea of “World Literature” has experienced a boom. This development is closely connected with the increasingly rapid globalization process, which began during the first few decades of the nineteenth century and led to the co-emergence of Weltliteratur and Littérature comparée in 1827. Goethe’s proclamation of the “Epoch of World Literature” created the impression that existing national literatures were to be supplanted; instead, however, the same period simultaneously witnessed the latter’s triumphant proliferation. Beecroft’s typology of the evolution of literary systems may assist in overcoming the rather pointless antithesis between world literature and national literatures. Since literary translation now plays an increasingly important role, it has become an indispensable factor contributing to the flourishing of world literature.

Epilogue Arab Literature, World Literature

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tahia Abdel Nasser
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Study ◽  
Arab Literature ◽  
Literary Systems ◽  
National Literatures

This chapter looks at the effects of autobiographical production in other languages and translation on the globality of national literatures and world literary study. It examines current theorisations of world literature and considers Arab autobiography within new literary systems.

Boatmen, Wastrels, and Demons: Figures of Literature

CounterText ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simona Sawhney
Keyword(s):  
Social Studies ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Sanskrit Text ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The World ◽  
National Literatures

Engaging some of the questions opened by Ranjan Ghosh's and J. Hillis Miller's book Thinking Literature Across Continents (2016), this essay begins by returning to Aijaz Ahmad's earlier invocation of World Literature as a project that, like the proletariat itself, must stand in an antithetical relation to the capitalism that produced it. It asks: is there an essential link between a certain idea of literature and a figure of the world? If we try to broach this link through Derrida's enigmatic and repeated reflections on the secret – a secret ‘shared’ by both literature and democracy – how would we grasp Derrida's insistence on the ‘Latinity’ of literature? The groundlessness of reading that we confront most vividly in our encounter with fictional texts is both intensified, and in a way, clarified, by new readings and questions posed by the emergence of new reading publics. The essay contends that rather than being taught as representatives of national literatures, literary texts in ‘World Literature’ courses should be read as sites where serious historical and political debates are staged – debates which, while being local, are the bearers of universal significance. Such readings can only take place if World Literature strengthens its connections with the disciplines Miller calls, in the book, Social Studies. Paying particular attention to the Hindi writer Premchand's last story ‘Kafan’, and a brief section from the Sanskrit text the Natyashastra, it argues that struggles over representation, over the staging of minoritised figures, are integral to fiction and precede the thinking of modern democracy.

Farming for the Few

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marko Marinčič
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
Metrical Pattern ◽  
Point Of Departure

The point of departure for this chapter is a little known work by Jožef Šubic, whose translation of Virgil’s Georgics, published in 1863, although largely unknown outside scholarly circles, nonetheless offers an important background to the Slovenian school of translation of Greek and Latin texts and of classics in general. Marinčič argues that this text, written in a hybrid metrical pattern, is by no means a literary masterpiece, but it is a groundbreaking work reflecting the contemporary debates concerning the use of classical metrical forms and implicitly opposing the Romantic ideology of agricultural self-sufficiency, which, in the course of the nineteenth century, resulted in a widespread prejudice against translation of world literature.

Local Color, World-System; or, American Realism at the Periphery

2019 ◽  
pp. 99-118
Author(s):  
Mark Storey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
World Literature ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sarah Orne Jewett ◽  
Local Color ◽  
The Core ◽  
Hamlin Garland ◽  
Peripheral Position

This chapter employs recent approaches to the study of world literature to offer a new reading of nineteenth-century American regionalism. The huge body of texts usually included in the regional or “local-color” genre often take rural communities as both subject matter and foregrounded setting, communities that are held in a structurally “peripheral” position within the combined and uneven world economy of the late nineteenth century. This chapter argues that such a position is registered in the genre’s distinctive oscillation between realist and “irrealist” literary modes—between the professionalized and ascendant cultural standard of the core and the persistence of nonrealist generic devices and registers. Calling on two of the genre’s quintessential representatives, Hamlin Garland and Sarah Orne Jewett, the chapter ultimately makes a case for reading local-color writing as a form of (semi)peripheral realism within world literature’s expanded geographical and temporal horizons.

The world in Auerbach’s mouth: Weltliteratur after philhellenism

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-452
Author(s):  
Mathura Umachandran
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Human Activity ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Complex Structures ◽  
Intercultural Understanding ◽  
The World

Abstract We live in an age of globalized and globalizing phenomena: the contemporary agenda of academic inquiry takes in ‘networks’, ‘connectivity’, and other modes of articulating complex structures of human activity. In Comparative Literature and beyond, the idea of world literature has borne the weight of idealist intercultural understanding, the hopes of translation studies, and the anxieties around the failure of communication. Erich Auerbach offers a touchstone in the conceptual genealogy of world literature (Weltliteratur). This article illuminates how Auerbach’s Weltliteratur is predicated on a polemic with German philhellenism, tracked through Auerbach’s declaration that his idea is ‘ungoethisch’. Auerbach’s revisions to Weltliteratur constituted a strategy to render it a historicist concept. Since Auerbach’s notion of historicism was itself derived from nineteenth-century German humanism, this essay argues that Auerbach was attempting to go with Goethe beyond Goethe. Finally, this essay assesses how successful Auerbach’s decoupling of Weltliteratur from universalism, under the sign of Goethe and the Greeks. I suggest that Weltliteratur is still a pertinent concept today because of Auerbach’s intervention to install historicist and dialectical resources therein.

scholarly journals From Baranowski to Baranauskas, from James to Ngũgĩ: Post-Colonial Aspects of Linguistic Switch

2020 ◽  
pp. 219-245
Author(s):  
Paweł Bukowiec
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
World Literature ◽  
The Other ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Post Colonial

The article attempts to perform a comparative study of the phenomenon of the so-called linguistic switch, i.e., a change of languages in which the writer creates his/her works. One side of the analysis focuses on nineteenth-century Lithuanian poets, represented mainly by Antanas Baranauskas, and the other on the contemporary Kenyan prose writer Ngu˜g˜ wa Thiong’o. The juxtaposition of ı such extremely distant authors: 1. allows a better understanding of the specificity of multilingualism in both eighteenth-century Lithuanian literature and contemporary fiction; 2. proves once again the universality of postcolonial sensitivity; 3. constitutes an attempt at comparative thinking in the context of world literature.

scholarly journals Reading World Literature: Elliptical or Hyperbolic? The Case of Second-World National Literatures

2012 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Andrei Terian
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Second World ◽  
National Literatures

Geopolitics of Comparison: World Literature Avant la Lettre

2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-269
Author(s):  
Waïl S. Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Comparative Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of

Abstract According to a well-known narrative, the concept of Weltliteratur and its academic correlative, the discipline of comparative literature, originated in Germany and France in the early nineteenth century, influenced by the spread of scientism and nationalism. But there is another genesis story that begins in the late eighteenth century in Spain and Italy, countries with histories entangled with the Arab presence in Europe during the medieval period. Emphasizing the role of Arabic in the formation of European literatures, Juan Andrés wrote the first comparative history of “all literature,” before the concepts of Weltliteratur and comparative literature gained currency. The divergence of the two genesis stories is the result of competing geopolitical interests, which determine which literatures enter into the sphere of comparison, on what terms, within which paradigms, and under what ideological and discursive conditions.

Women’s Private Cosmopolitanism in Literary Translation and Song

2021 ◽  
pp. 77-92
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ronyak
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
German Language ◽  
Musical Settings ◽  
Textual Practices

This chapter considers the ways in which Fanny Hensel’s Drei Lieder nach Heine von Mary Alexander (unpublished, 1830) can be understood as part of cosmopolitan practices among elite women in the nineteenth century. In 1833, Mary Alexander, who wrote letters to Hensel in Berlin using her imperfect German from London, translated poems 1, 4, and 27 from Heinrich Heine’s Die Heimkehr into English. Hensel responded with her own settings of the English-language poems which she composed in Berlin and sent back to Alexander, working in a language she had only recently acquired. Aspects of both Alexander’s engagement with the German language and Hensel’s engagement with English show the ways in which both women intermingled cultures and language in their own textual practices. Hensel’s musical settings of Alexander’s translations show further evidence of an essentially cosmopolitan play between English, Scottish, and German musical and poetic traces.

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