scholarly journals Writing World Literature: Approaches from the Maghreb

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (5) ◽  
pp. 1386-1395 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Hiddleston
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Relative Status ◽  
Franco Moretti ◽  
National Borders

World Literature is a Notoriously Ambiguous Term. Since Goethe Began Referring to a Universal Weltliteratur IN 1827, the meaning of world literature has passed through many mutations, and, with the resurgence of interest in the term that followed David Damrosch's publication in 2003 of his provocative What Is World Literature?, it has generated a good deal of controversy. Although it appears to describe a type of literature or group of texts, world literature is more often used to designate a critical perspective. World literature is not so much a canon of works conceived to be globally or universally significant as an approach to literary criticism. What this critical approach entails, however, is often unclear and frequently freighted with cultural and sociopolitical assumptions that challenge the supposed openness of world literature. Most theorists agree that the notion of world literature invites exploration of the ways in which texts exceed national borders, but the relative status of national and international sociocultural frameworks remains highly contentious, as do critics' understandings of a text's “worldliness” and mode of circulation. As Franco Moretti famously asserts, world literature is “not an object, it's a problem”; it requires ongoing debate.

Milton in China ‘Yet Once More’

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bing Yan
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Subsequent Discussion ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Collaborative Context ◽  
Chinese Literary Criticism ◽  
Near Future

This chapter overviews Chinese reception of Milton, with an emphasis on some of the most well-known Chinese translations of Paradise Lost. Close readings of these translations against Milton’s original demonstrate the difficulties of and resolutions for rendering Milton’s verse specific to Chinese. The subsequent discussion of the paratexts accompanying Chinese translations and of ‘introduction to world literature’ series gives a sense of the collaborative context that has shaped and continues to shape today’s general reception of Milton in China. That politically charged reception, eager to view Milton’s Satan as the embodiment of the poet’s revolutionary spirit, also dominates some recent works of Chinese literary criticism. The chapter ends by conceding that, while Milton scholarship in China has been relatively univocal and is still young, recent developments in world literature promise that innovative and intriguing work on Milton can be expected from China in the near future.

The Tent of Meeting and the Women’s Mirrors in 1 Sam 2:22 and Exod 38:8

Textus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-192
Author(s):  
Domenico Lo Sardo
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Textual Criticism ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Critical Problem ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This article evaluates the relationship between the texts of 1 Sam 2:22 and Exod 38:8 using a methodology that proceeds from textual criticism to literary criticism. According to a traditional text-critical approach of the available textual witnesses (MT, LXX, 4QSama), the short reading of 1 Sam 2:22 found in LXXB 4QSama is preferable to that of MT. By contrast, using a literary critical approach, this article proposes that MT-Exod 38:8 depends on MT-1 Sam 2:22 and not vice versa. MT-1 Sam 2:22 has greater affinity with Num 4:23 and 8:24 regarding the terminology used for the women’s ‘cultic service’ at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting. 1 Sam 2:22b ought to be regarded as a post-P addition made after the text of the LXX had been translated from the Hebrew. For Exod 38:8 and related texts, we examine the role of the Vetus Latina in resolving this text-critical problem.

Postcolonial world literature: Narration, translation, imagination

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 072551362199470
Author(s):  
Dirk Wiemann ◽  
Shaswati Mazumdar ◽  
Ira Raja
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Single Units ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Neoliberal Globalization ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Postcolonial Criticism ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
The World

Postcolonial criticism has repeatedly debunked the ostensible neutrality of the ‘world’ of world literature by pointing out that and how the contemporary world – whether conceived in terms of cosmopolitan conviviality or neoliberal globalization – cannot be understood without recourse to the worldly event of Europe’s colonial expansion. While we deem this critical perspective indispensable, we simultaneously maintain that to reduce ‘the world’ to the world-making impact of capital, colonialism, and patriarchy paints an overly deterministic picture that runs the risk of unwittingly reproducing precisely that dominant ‘oneworldness’ that it aims to critique. Moreover, the mere potentiality of alternative modes of world-making tends to disappear in such a perspective so that the only remaining option to think beyond oneworldness resides in the singularity claim. This insistence on singularity, however, leaves the relatedness of the single units massively underdetermined or denies it altogether. By contrast, we locate world literature in the conflicted space between the imperial imposition of a hierarchically stratified world (to which, as hegemonic forces tell us, ‘there is no alternative’) and the unrealized ‘undivided world’ that multiple minor cosmopolitan projects yet have to win. It is precisely the tension between these ‘two worlds’ that brings into view the crucial centrality not of the nodes in their alleged singularity but their specific relatedness to each other, that both impedes and energizes world literature today and renders it ineluctably postcolonial.

Franco Moretti as Satirist

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (3) ◽  
pp. 681-685
Author(s):  
Bethany Wiggin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
New Left ◽  
Distant Reading ◽  
Shelf Space ◽  
Franco Moretti ◽  
The Revolution

My first encounter with Franco Moretti's work was “conjectures on world literature,” from which his book distant reading takes its title. The essay was first published in 2000 in the New Left Review, the original home of seven of the ten essays reprinted in Distant Reading. I happened across it in 2004 amid a fit of procrastination fueled by anxious uncertainty. I was unsure about how, or even whether, to revise a dissertation on popular novels in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany, many of which had been translated from the French. No one really knew much about them. They were miserably cataloged; generations of Prussian librarians had been ordered not to collect them—and to throw away any that had managed to take up shelf space in the first place. In 1795 the reactionary, antirepublican Johann Georg Heinzmann opined, “So lange die Welt stehet, sind keine Erscheinungen so merkwürdig gewesen als in Deutschland die Romanleserey und in Frankreich die Revolution” (“Since the beginning of time nothing was more noteworthy than the revolution in France and the reading of novels in Germany”; 139; my trans.). But an awful lot of these novels are now gone. Critics sometimes say they were read to shreds. And whereas Heinzmann—and generations of state and church censors before him—cared a great deal about the republican potential of German Romanleserey (“reading of novels”), I wasn't confident anyone did today.

scholarly journals Dancing with Myriam: Creating and Staging a New Metaphor for the Process of Translation

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Paula Pratt
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
World Literature ◽  
African Women ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
North African ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
Oral Interpretation ◽  
Doctoral Work ◽  
As Relationship ◽  
The Relationship

This article tells the story, and analyzes the development, of a “staged metaphor” for the translation process, from its chance inception over ten years ago, to the more recent revision and staging of the script. In 2005, I was teaching world literature at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco, while also researching the writing of Irish and North African women. I chose to focus on those women writing in Irish, Tachelhit, Arabic, or French, whose work had been translated into English. I was initially inspired by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’s poem, “The Language Issue,” which compares the "sending forth" of her writing to a potential reader, to the story of Moses being discovered by Pharoah’s daughter. My ultimate goal was to produce a chamber theatre play, based on the Irish and North African texts, which would dramatize a metaphor for the translation process. This was an outgrowth of my doctoral work, in which I had drawn on oral interpretation theorists, who see the performance of literary texts as an accepted means of doing literary criticism. Accordingly, I also expanded the project to include the observations of translation theorists, and I incorporated these into the creation of the script for a chamber theatre performance. After directing a staging of the script in Morocco in 2007, I realized that I needed to add more choreographed movement, and to incorporate the character of Moses’s and Myriam’s mother into the metaphor. The addition of dance, and the foregrounding of the relationship between Myriam and her mother, draws unapologetically on female relationships. It is my conclusion that the revised metaphor, with the addition of these elements, is validated by Yves Bonnefoy’s and Henri Meschonnic's depictions of “translation as relationship with an author,” and that, the metaphor does indeed “provide . . . fresh insights.”

scholarly journals Introduction: Ethical Literary Criticism, Brain Text, and New Readings of World Literature

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (37) ◽  
pp. 392-401
Author(s):  
Biwu NA ◽  
Maria Luisa Torres Reyes
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
World Literature

scholarly journals QUEER CRITICISM AS A POST-MODERNIST APPROACH

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 132
Author(s):  
Hamdi Hameed Yousif
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
First Century ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Common ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
The One ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

One of the post-modernist approaches to literary criticism is the queer criticism which has not been evaluated properly. Queer criticism can refer to any piece of literary criticism that interprets a text from a non-straight perspective. Therefore, it includes both lesbian and gay criticism. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to trace the social and political reasons behind the emergence of Queer criticism in the late twentieth century till it acquired momentum in the twenty-first century. After trying to define the terms related to the Queer criticism, the paper tries to examine the poetics of queer (gay and lesbian) literary works and to point out the main characteristic features of this critical approach by identifying the criteria and the textual evidence by which a literary work is labeled queer. It, also tries to shed light on the common features between queer criticism and feminism, on the one hand, and queer criticism and the deconstructuralist approach on the other hand. The final section of the study is a critique which points out the negative aspects of this approach.

A Critical Inquiry into Web-Mediated Collaborative Learning

2000 ◽  
pp. 307-326 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dubravka Cecez-Kecmanovic ◽  
Carolyn Webb
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Collaborative Learning ◽  
Field Study ◽  
Empirical Data ◽  
Communicative Action ◽  
Interaction Process ◽  
Learning Processes ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Communicative Practices

This chapter presents a critical approach to collaborative learning viewed as a social interaction process. Based on Habermas’ theory of communicative action, the chapter proposes a communicative model of collaborative learning with the aim to enhance understanding of communicative practices in Web-mediated collaborative learning situations and to provide a methodological instrument for the analysis of concrete learning processes. Drawing on the empirical data from a field study the chapter illustrates how the communicative model of collaborative learning can be applied to analyse not only what linguistic interactions among students mean but also what they produce in a particular learning situation. The chapter concludes by summarising possible implications of this critical perspective and the communicative model of collaborative learning on both practical pedagogy and empirical research in Web-mediated environments.

Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett, World Literature, and the Colonial Comparisons

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 330-349
Author(s):  
Blaž Zabel
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
British Empire ◽  
World Literature ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
Imperial Politics

Abstract This article discusses the work of the early Irish comparatists Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett, who in 1886 published the first monograph in English in comparative literature. By bringing into discussion Posnett’s lesser-known journalistic publications on politics, the essay argues that his comparative project was importantly determined by the contemporary challenges of British imperial politics and by his own position in the British Empire. The article investigates several aspects of Posnett’s work in the context of British colonialism: his understanding of literature and literary criticism, his perception of the English and French systems of national literature, and his understanding of world literature and classical literature. Recognising the imperial and colonial context of Comparative Literature additionally highlights the development of literary comparisons, which have marked subsequent discussions in the discipline.

HOMER AND THE SUBLIME

Ramus ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 184-199
Author(s):  
James I. Porter
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
Ancient Astronomy

Was Homer sublime? The question is rarely asked today. Sublimity was once a staple of the ancient intellectual traditions, as Homer is perfectly suited to show. The present essay will take up the question of Homeric sublimity by examining four case studies drawn from ancient astronomy to literary criticism to Homer himself, who not only licensed but also inaugurated these later traditions. Longinus will lurk everywhere in the background, but part of the point of this essay is that Longinus, while broadly representative, is in fact a minority voice in the wider landscape of ancient thought, as is the purely literary critical perspective that he is usually assumed to represent. Just as sublimity transcends customary frameworks of experience by putting these radically into question, so does it challenge the ways in which we tend to carve up antiquity into domains and disciplines that are artificially removed from one another. Sublimity by its nature crosses over genres and discourses and brings out the underlying patterns of thought that they share. But now to our case studies, which will give us a clear entrée to the problem, and will supply us with criteria of what should or should not count as ‘sublime’, as we follow each case in turn.

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