Translingual Affairs of World Literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-122
Author(s):  
Fabrizio De Donno
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Italian Literature ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Family Romance ◽  
Linguistic Family ◽  
Jhumpa Lahiri

Abstract This essay explores a number of texts of the exophonic, or non-native literary production, respectively in Italian and German, of translingual authors Jhumpa Lahiri and Yoko Tawada. While the paper looks at how their dominant languages, respectively English and Japanese, continue to play a role in these writers’ non-native production, it focuses on the different approaches the two authors adopt to translingualism and the “linguistic family romance” metaphor, which they equally employ in highly imaginative ways in order to address both their condition of rootlessness and their attitudes to the notion of “mother tongue.” The essay argues that while Lahiri seems to remain a writer that does not contaminate languages (she is a writer in English, a writer in Italian, and a translator of Italian literature into English), Tawada brings German and Japanese together and dwells on the space of contamination between them in her production in German (and Japanese).

A Critique of ‘Literary Worlds’ in World Literature Theory

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 354-372
Author(s):  
Ryan Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Literary Systems ◽  
Literature Theory ◽  
East West

Abstract Recently, critics of world literature such as Alexander Beecroft, Eric Hayot, and Haun Saussy have argued that a multitude of possible literary worlds make up the world of world literature. Literary worlds theory provides a richer and more relativistic account of how literary production and analysis work than do similar models such as Franco Moretti’s and Pascale Casanova’s world literary systems. However, the theory runs into two difficulties: it downplays the socio-historical situation of the critic and the text; and it has difficulty accounting for the cross-world identity of characters and how logically inconsistent worlds access one another. To refine the theory, I modify G.E.R. Lloyd’s concept of the “multidimensionality” of reality and literature. Strengthening Lloyd’s concept through reference to recent work in comparative East-West philosophy, I contend that the addition of Lloyd’s theory resolves the problems presented above while still allowing for a relativistic critical approach to world literature.

What, Us Global?

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-46
Author(s):  
Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Identity Group ◽  
Fields Of Study ◽  
The World ◽  
Selection Of

This article addresses what can roughly be considered the “Hispanic sphere” in the field of World Literature Studies. First, the concepts of the local and the regional are examined from the perspective of world literature. The present article also lays out the limitations of a number of theoretical approaches that define world literature negatively: as a concept that necessarily excludes or denies any elements regarded as “local” or “regional.” In this respect, it offers an account of the discomfort or alienation experienced by those who see themselves as belonging to a particular identity group and are urged to justify their position in global terms. To illustrate this, this article explores a selection of specific approaches attending to how they define and place the academic and literary production of the Hispanic sphere within broader fields of study, such as those related to the world novel and the phenomenon of glocality. Finally, it discusses the emergence of global regionalism, from both outside and within what can be referred to as “regional entities.”

Being Well

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Crystal Parikh
Keyword(s):  
Right To Health ◽  
Ana Castillo ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Persons With Disabilities ◽  
Family Romance ◽  
The Core ◽  
Family Saga ◽  
The Family ◽  
Jhumpa Lahiri ◽  
The Right

Considering the family romance and family saga as adapted in narrative fiction by Jhumpa Lahiri and Ana Castillo, in tandem with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Chapter Five argues for a conception of the right to health that recognizes embodied vulnerability as the core feature of human being.

The Greenwich Meridian of Literature and the „Peripheries” of World Literature: Lu Xun’s Alternative Cartography

Tekstualia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (65) ◽  
pp. 41-48
Author(s):  
Thomas Starky
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Literary Space ◽  
Related Idea ◽  
Greenwich Meridian

The article discusses Pascale Casanova’s mapping of world literature according to a division into center and peripheries, focusing on her idea of the Greenwich Meridian of literature as a spatial and temporal measure of the world’s literary production. The related idea of literary consecration of peripheral writers is explained. The possibility of an alternative cartography that emphasizes literary transfers via translations between peripheries is analyzed on the basis of the famous modern Chinese writer Lu Xun’s theoretical and translation output. His practice of translating peripheral writers, often carried out second-hand via German editions, potentially challenges popular contemporary mappings of literary space such as those developed by P. Casanova and F. Moretti.

Minority Cosmopolitanism

PMLA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 126 (3) ◽  
pp. 592-609 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Koshy
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Ethnic Literature ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Transnational Movements ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Production And Consumption

The topography of literary production and consumption has been transformed as writers and texts travel, ethnic literature is taught and translated in multiple national venues, and writers’ locations, audiences, and subject matter resist ready alignment. he growing internationalization of ethnic literary production has produced a heterogeneous range of texts, which challenge the established boundaries of ethnic and world literature. Because they focus on minorities, these texts have been slow to win recognition as world literature even though they depict transnational movements and identifications that diverge from those in canonical ethnic narratives. I develop the analytic of minority cosmopolitanism to examine the ways in which these literary narratives of worlding contest contemporary economic and political processes of globalization and Eurocentric accounts of globality. This essay considers how the gendered figure of the diasporic citizen serves as a vehicle for minority cosmopolitanism in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies (1999).

Irish Poets: Keepers of National Lore

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-54
Author(s):  
Asst. Prof. Dr. Amal Nasser Frag
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
Irish People ◽  
Literary Renaissance ◽  
Language Literature

This paper discusses three noteable Irish poets: Augustine Joseph Clarke (1896-1974), Richard Murphy  (1927- ), and Patrick  Kavanagh  (1904–1967), who are considered as keepers of national lore of Irland. It explains these poets’ contribution to world literature through the renewal of Irish myths, history, and culture. Irish poets tackle the problems of Irish people in the present in a realistic way by criticising the restrictions imposed on the Irish people in their society.Augustine Joseph Clarke’s poems present a deep invocation of Irish past and landscape. While Richard Murphy offers recurring images of islands and the sea. He explores the personal and communal legacies of history, as many of his poems reveal his attempts to reconcile his Anglo-Irish background and education with his boyhood desire to be, in his words, “truly Irish”. Patrick  Kavanagh was not interested in the Irish Literary Renaissance Movement that appeared and continued to influence many Irish writers during the twentieth century which called for the revival of ancient Irish culture, language, literature, and art. He, unlike the Irish revivalists who tried to revive the Gaelic language as the mother tongue of the Irish people like Dillon Johnston and Guinn Batten, uses a poetic language based on the day-to-day speech of the poet and his community rather than on an ideal of compensation for the fractures in his country’s linguistic heritage. The paper conculdes with the importance of the role of the Irish poet as a keeper and a gurdian of his national lore and tradition

“Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all – but an orphan”: The Mother Tongue and Translation in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

2020 ◽  
Vol 138 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-298
Author(s):  
Birgit Neumann
Keyword(s):  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Intercultural Relationships ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Family Romance ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Vietnamese American ◽  
The Family

AbstractThe essay offers a close reading of On Earth We’re Briefly Georgeous, the remarkable novel by Vietnamese American writer Ocean Vuong, showing how the text’s critical engagement with the notion of the mother tongue is used to negotiate subjectivity and community in diasporic contexts. It assesses the importance of the tongue within the broader context of contemporary migrant and transcultural fiction and reveals how the tongue functions as a trope to explore possibilities of self-articulation after the loss of the mother tongue. Further, the essay draws on the concept of translation, exposing both its violent dimensions and its liberating potential within uneven intercultural relationships. Struggling with the unavailability of his mother tongue, Vuong’s central writer-protagonist performs multiple acts of translation between the unequal languages of Vietnamese and English and reconfigures both in terms of their foreignness. These acts of translation materialize in a multilingual poetics that thoroughly unsettles the priority of closed entities and that confronts the organic genealogy inscribed in the “family romance” (Yildiz 2012: 20) of the mother tongue with open, non-identitarian modes of sociality.I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for Anglia as well as Christina Slopek, Martin A. Kayman and Susan Winnett for generously sharing their thoughts on earlier versions of my article with me.

scholarly journals World literature, a decentred sphere

2019 ◽  
pp. 115-123
Author(s):  
Jorge Acero Portilla
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Ideological Bias ◽  
Current Trends ◽  
Franco Moretti ◽  
National Literatures

Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova’s accounts of world literature are coded in metaphors. The former employs a core-periphery system to examine the unequal relationships between national literatures; the latter sees world literature as a ‘world literature of letters’, wherein the exchanges between literary traditions take place following economic patterns. This essay discusses to what extent these metaphors are inadequate to analyse the current trends of world literature as they portray the so-called central literatures as unidirectional forces that inform the canon, thereby shaping the literary production. This perspective privileges an economical jargon which constitutes an ideological bias resulting in the homogenisation of the literary value. This article takes a different approach by offering an alternative metaphor to explain world literature and its dynamics. This metaphor is a decentred sphere without a circumference. In order to illustrate this point, William Ospina’s El año del verano que nunca llegó (2015) is analysed, focusing on its worldly elements.

scholarly journals Cultural Pluralism through Translation? Imagining the Italian Other in the Habsburg Monarchy

2003 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michaela Wolf
Keyword(s):  
Italian Literature ◽  
Cultural Pluralism ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Habsburg Monarchy ◽  
Italian Peninsula ◽  
Short Survey ◽  
Italian Culture ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Cultural Market

AbstractThe historical relationships between the Italian peninsula and Austria are also reflected in the reception of Italian literary production in the Habsburg monarchy. This can be seen in the formation of a literary canon which always goes together with selective mechanisms. These selections decisively contribute to the formation of cultural hegemonies.This paper presents the creation of theOtherthrough the activity of translation in the context of the reception of national Italian literature in the Habsburg Monarchy. It will analyze what was accepted on the cultural market of the Habsburg Monarchy and what the criteria for the reception of translated Italian literature were. Against the background of a short survey of the various aspects of the Italian image created through intercultural contacts, this paper investigates the ways in which these images were discussed, created and represented through translation. The analysis of some paratexts will show that the margin left for the Italian culturalOtherwas quite narrow and largely reduced to stereotypical views of Italian culture.

scholarly journals Ko vsak uporablja svoj lastni jezik in razume svojega sogovorca

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 99
Author(s):  
Nataša Pirih Svetina ◽  
Mojca Schlamberger Brezar ◽  
Gregor Perko ◽  
Patrice Pognan
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Teaching Method ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Lingua Franca ◽  
Usual Practice ◽  
Communication Practice ◽  
Slavic Languages ◽  
Linguistic Family ◽  
Germanic Languages

Intercomprehension is a communication practice where two persons speak their mother tongue and are able to understand each other without being taught the language of their adressee. It is a usual practice between languages that belong to the same linguistic family, for example Slavic, Romance or Germanic languages. In the article, the authors present the notion of intercomprehension as an alternative to communication in English as a lingua franca. That kind of communication was known among Scandinavians, whereas the first teaching method was developped for Romance languages (EuRomCom) at the beginning of the 21st century. Today, more methods exist including German and Slavic languages. In the article, the authors are enumerating some of them and also give a short outline of existing practices.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document