World Literature in Stereo: Magnetic Tape and the Media Futures of Global Literary History

SubStance ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-53
Author(s):  
Jacob Edmond
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Magnetic Tape ◽  
World Literature ◽  
The Media

On the sources of cosmopolitanism as an idea: The Russian and the European views

2020 ◽  
pp. 44-69
Author(s):  
E. E. Dmitrieva
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
General Term ◽  
Literary Process ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Literary Environment

The article is concerned with the difference in understanding of the term ‘cosmopolitan’ inRussiaandFrance. Often considered a predominantly negative phenomenon inRussia, cosmopolitanism fi st provoked a discussion at the time when the emphasis shifted from ideology to understanding of the historical-literary process. Since the late 18th c., the idea of the possible existence of a literary work within the global literary environment (the concept of world literature)   was adjusted by the ‘golden chain’ metaphor, which enabled implementation of the ‘universality’ concept as a unity principally separate from the French idée universelle. During this evolutionary period emerged a distinctive subject of literary history: fi st, ‘humanity’ as a general term (initially identifi    with universalism or cosmopolitanism), and then ‘a nation’. But it is the discovery of the national that the author believes is connected with particularism and provincialism,   the latter summoning the memory of the noble intention of universalism and cosmopolitanism. An interim summary of the process was produced by Joseph Texte, a professor of comparative literature inLyon, at the end of the 19th c.

The Center of the World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
June Howard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Local Color ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
The World ◽  
Literary Regionalism ◽  
Multiple Media ◽  
The One

The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is a study of literary regionalism. It focuses on but is not limited to fiction in the United States, also considering the place of the genre in world literature. It argues that regional writing shapes ways of imagining not only the neighborhood, the province, and nation, but also the world. It argues that thinking about place always entails imagining time. It demonstrates the importance of the figure of the schoolteacher and the one-room schoolhouse in local color writing and subsequent place-focused writing. These representations embody the contested relation between localities and the knowledge they produce, and books that carry metropolitan and cosmopolitan learning, in modernity. The book undertakes analysis of how concepts work across disciplines and in everyday discourse, coordinating that work with proposals for revising American literary history and close readings of particular authors’ work. Works from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries are discussed, and the book’s analysis of the form is extended into multiple media.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 217-222
Author(s):  
Karin Kukkonen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
Media Ecology ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
4E Cognition ◽  
The Media

The conclusion shows that several of the embodied aspects of writing fiction discussed for the eighteenth-century novel can be traced into the nineteenth century through an example from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. It is shown that, like the earlier authors in the case studies in this book, Dickens features shifting embodied stances and involves elements of the media ecology of his day rather than deploying the concrete particulars that “formal realism” considers central to the novel. Links to larger arguments about the role of the novel in literary history are then drawn in contrast with accounts, based on Adorno/Habermas and Benjamin, that argue that eighteenth-century fiction becomes rationalised and disembodied with the novel and its culture industry. Rather than impoverishing experience, it is argued that the novel as a lifeworld technology depends profoundly on readers’ embodied engagements and that 4E cognition is a critical perspective that affords such an alternative take.

“We Should Have Had a Historian”: Live Television and the Accident of the Moon Landing Tapes

2020 ◽  
pp. 152747642093476
Author(s):  
Ella Klik
Keyword(s):  
Small Group ◽  
Magnetic Tape ◽  
Tape Recording ◽  
The Moon ◽  
The World ◽  
Magnetic Tape Recording ◽  
Live Television ◽  
The Media ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Moon Landing

Forty years after the first moon landing in 1969, National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced that it had likely recycled the tapes containing the original footage of the landing. Although the mission was a monumental event viewed by millions of people around the world, the production and handling of the recorded materials was a matter of little concern to more than a small group of employees, historians, and space enthusiasts. This article argues that despite the fact that the erasure of these archival materials was accidental, it was not an accident per se but rather a fulfillment of a logic designed into the apparatus of magnetic tape recording from its very inception, and therefore a generative event for the media archeologist. By evoking histories and theories of broadcast and magnetic recording, I argue that erasure is a process that discloses networks of economic, cultural, material, and aesthetic discourses and interests.

The Soviet Project of the 1930s to Found a “World Literature” and British Literary Internationalism

2019 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 403-425
Author(s):  
Katerina Clark
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Network ◽  
Missing Link ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Georg Lukacs ◽  
Georg Lukács

Abstract A major lacuna in Pascale Casanova’s account of world literature in her World Republic of Letters is the Soviet venture into establishing a “world literature” (mirovaia literatura) to be centered not in Paris but in Moscow. This aim was most actively pursued between the wars, when many writers were implicated in its international network. This moment in literary history provides a missing link in the progression from the more elitist world literature as conceived by Goethe and others in the early nineteenth century to world literature in our postcolonialist present and era of globalization. This article outlines the networks that sought to foster such a world literature and the main aesthetic controversies within the movement. In particular, the article looks at the efforts of such official spokesmen as Andrei Zhdanov, Karl Radek, and Georg Lukács to proscribe “bourgeois” modernism. It takes members of the British Writers’ International and their associated journals the Left Review and New Writing as case studies in the interplay between Moscow as putative “metropole” and the “periphery.”

Gender, Genre, and Literary Firsts

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 286-306
Author(s):  
Erin Twohig
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
Conventional Wisdom ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Gender And Genre ◽  
Related Process

Abstract This article questions the conventional wisdom that Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Dhakirat al-jasad was the first Arabic-language novel written by an Algerian woman. Published more than a decade earlier, Zhor Wanisi’s novel Min yawmiyat mudarrisa hurra received less critical attention, despite representing an important contribution to Algerian literature and women’s life writing. Rather than accepting the “first” novel as an objective category, this article shows how the accolade has obscured works like Wanisi’s from Algerian literary history, reinforced gender and genre binaries, and subjected both authors to biased evaluation. The article draws on a corpus of book reviews, scholarly articles, and monographs to describe how Wanisi’s work was discounted as not a “true” novel, and the related process that brought Mosteghanemi to world fame. The trajectories of Wanisi and Mosteghanemi, placed side by side, suggest new avenues for our understanding of gender, literary genre, and the postcolonial dynamics of world literature.

The Doxa of Reading

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (3) ◽  
pp. 636-642 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Goldstone
Keyword(s):  
Text Analysis ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Digital Tools ◽  
Machine Learning Techniques ◽  
Sociology Of Literature ◽  
Distant Reading ◽  
Learning Techniques ◽  
Previous Decade ◽  
Semantic Transformation

Reading Franco Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees as a late-stage graduate student in 2008 was invigorating. Here was an approach to literary history free from the pieties of close reading, committed to empiricism, seeking to fulfill, with its “materialist conception of form,” the promise of the sociology of literature (92). And, at the time, it seemed natural that the way to follow the path laid out by Moretti in Graphs and in the essays he had published over the previous decade was to go to my computer, polish my rusty programming skills, and start making graphs. Yet reconsidering Moretti's Distant Reading now, one is struck by how nondigital the book is. In fact, the meaning of distant reading has undergone a rapid semantic transformation. In “Conjectures on World Literature,” originally published in 2000, Moretti introduces the phrase to describe “a patchwork of other people's research, without a single direct textual reading” (Distant Reading 48). Today, however, distant reading typically refers to computational studies of text. Introducing a 2016 cluster of essays called “Text Analysis at Scale,” Matthew K. Gold and Lauren Klein employ the term to speak of “using digital tools to ‘read’ large swaths of text” (Introduction); in his contribution to the cluster, Ted Underwood embraces “distant reading” as a name for applying machine-learning techniques to unstructured text. Discussions of distant reading have become discussions of computation with text, even if no section of Distant Reading features the elaborate computations found in the Stanford Literary Lab pamphlets to which Moretti has contributed.

Corpse Narratives and the Teleology of World Literary History

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-79
Author(s):  
Héctor Hoyos
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Critical Practice ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Latin American Fiction

The present essay proposes an orientation towards the corpse as a viable telos for the present-day revival of World Literature as critical paradigm. The argument has three parts. First, it characterizes two central tenets of the existing paradigm: a profession of dynamism for its own sake and an implicit lack of finality. Drawing on Kristeva and on examples from contemporary Latin American fiction, especially Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, the article then introduces corpse narratives that embrace the abject and reorient critical practice towards materiality. Finally, the conclusions propose a modest agenda for a different “worldliteraturism” that valorizes abject materiality over high-minded idealism.

scholarly journals Komparatystyka i (inna) Historia Literatury / Comparative Literature Studies and (an Alternative ) History of Literature

2012 ◽  
Vol 53 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 401-422
Author(s):  
Andrzej Hejmej
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Comparative Studies ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Model ◽  
David Damrosch ◽  
History Of Literature

Summary This article examines the relationship between comparative studies and history of literature. While paying special attention to the present-day condition of these two disciplines, the author surveys various approaches, formulated since the early 19th century, which sought to break with the traditional, national model of the history of literature and the ethnocentric model of traditional comparative studies, driven by an impatience with both nationalism and crypto-nationalism. In this context he focuses on the most recent projects of literary history like ‘comparative history of literature’, ‘international history of literature’, ‘transcultural history of literature’, or ‘world literature’ - all of which are oriented towards the international dimension of literary history. The article explores the possible reasons for the late 20th and early 21st- century revival of Goethe’s idea of Weltliteratur (in the critical thought of Pascal Casanova, David Damrosch, and Franco Moretti) and the recent vogue for ‘alternative’ histories of literature produced under the auspices of comparative cultural studies. At the same time it voices some skepticism about the radical reinvention of comparative studies (along the lines of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Death of a Discipline).

scholarly journals Editorial

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 5-7
Author(s):  
Jakob Lien ◽  
Solveig Daugaard ◽  
Ragnild Lome
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Doctoral Student ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan ◽  
Media Archaeology ◽  
Double Blind ◽  
Honorary Doctor ◽  
History Of ◽  
Media Philosophy ◽  
The Media ◽  
And Gender

”Since Sputnik, the planet has become a global theatre under the proscenium arch of man-made satellites. Our psyches acquire thereby a totally new rim-spin.” (Marshall McLuhan, Culture is our business, 1970) With these words by Marshall McLuhan, you are hereby welcomed to the second issue of Sensorium Journal. This issue includes papers from the Geomedia conference in Karlstad 2017, about skywriting, singing birds, satellites and airplanes. In a media archeological vein, works on (artifical) flatness are featured, the sympoiesis of comic books is discussed and a section is reserveed for reviews of challenging new theoretical titles by Tung-Hui Hu, Anna Tsing and Mark Seltzer. The essay “Notational Iconicity” by professor of language and media philosophy at Freie Universität, Sybille Krämer, is translated into Danish by our editor Solveig Daugaard. Krämer, who is an honorary doctor at Linköping University, visited Östergötland in 2017 to discuss a series of texts related to her concept of “artifical flatness”, one of which we are proud to present in this issue. Krämer’s strikingly cogent take on some of the foundational questions of media philosophy regarding the intricate relations between thinking, speech and systems of written notation provide an interesting antipole to the somewhat wordier approach of many leading media theorists today. As an artistic spin to the theoretical ideas of Krämer, we confront it with an excerpt from the 1884-novel Flatland by British author and theologian Edwin A. Abbott, originally published under the witty alias “A Square” along with the visual reinterpretation of the novel by Canadian poet Derek Beaulieu from 2007, introduced by Jakob Lien. The featured image in this editorial (above) is from Beaulieus book. One of the theoretical interests of the editors of this journal is media archaeology.  We therefore approached a number of scholars in Scandinavia for this issue, who have worked with the concept, and asked them three questions we ourselves have struggled with. What is media archaeology in their view? How, more concretely have they used the media archaeological framework in their research? And how do they understand the relation between artefact and structure within media archaeology? In addition, we also asked our colleagues in the network to contribute and openly reflect on the same questions. The resultant survey gives the impression of a theoretical framework that – at least in the past decade – has played an intriguing role for media oriented aesthetic thinking in Scandinavia, and still has wide potential for exploration and further development for research in the field. * Since the last issue, Sensorium Network has organized two workshops. One on non-human languages in Umeå in 2016, and one on autopoiesis in Linköping in 2017. In addition, preparations have started, for transforming part of Sensorium Journal into a peer reviewed publication in 2018. The journal will still be a place for collective writing and artistic contributions but will in addition feature a section of articles that have gone through a double blind referee process. Make no mistake! The idea behind the journal is still the same; the mixture of peer reviewed articles and the more open main section of the journal is meant to mirror the collaborative idea behind Sensorium. The change in the structure of the journal also bear with it some very intriguing news: From the next issue on, Sensorium Journal will be equipped with a scientific board, whose members will be announced later this fall, as well as three new editors: Jenny Jarlsdotter Wikström is a doctoral student in comparative literature and gender studies at Umeå University, Johan Fredrikzon is a doctoral student in history of ideas at Stockholm University, and Per Isreaelson recently defended his thesis on the media ecologies of fantastic in literary history. We expect lots of fun, sharp and lively discussion as well as new initiatives to spring from their involvement as editors of the journal. Enjoy Sensorium Journal 2!

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