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.

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.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thibaut d'Hubert
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Bay Of Bengal ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Fragmented Landscape ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Bengali Literature

The introduction opens with a reflection on the relative marginality of the kingdom of Arakan and what it entailed in terms of historiography. I observe a reconfiguration of cosmographical imaginaries around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that conditioned the formation of vernacular literary traditions in eastern South Asia and around the Bay of Bengal. Then I provide a brief overview of the Bengali poet Ālāol’s life and works and discuss what the study of his poetics brings to our knowledge of Middle Bengali literature. I highlight the fragmented landscape of Middle Bengali literary production and the need to study Middle Bengali poems as literary texts and not only as sources for social or religious history. The last section of the introduction provides an overview of the contents of the book.

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.

New York, Capital of World Literature? On Holocaust Memory and World Literary Value

2017 ◽  
Vol 135 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pieter Vermeulen
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Value Creation ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
Value Production ◽  
Roberto Bolano

AbstractThe question of how world literary value is produced has been central to recent debates. While Pascale Casanova’s influential account of a relatively autonomous ‘world literary space’ follows the work of Pierre Bourdieu in applying economic metaphors to processes of world literary value production, this essay argues that Casanova’s 1999 account needs to be updated in light of recent economic and cultural developments: the economic and the literary sphere are no longer separate but fundamentally entwined, which means that processes of world literary value creation cannot be modeled as a pseudo-market. The essay traces ongoing debates on the transcultural circulation of Holocaust memory to put forward a more flexible and multifaceted model for the production of world literary value. To demonstrate the claim that world literary value is today articulated with other forms of value, the essay investigates the role of Holocaust memory in the recent world literary consecration of Roberto Bolaño, Karl-Ove Knausgaard, and Elena Ferrante. Concentrated around New York-based publishers and media, these three cases not only demonstrate the crucial role of Holocaust memory in articulating literary value, they also show the recent shift from Paris to New York as a primary center of world literary value production.

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.

Pahlavi

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlo Cereti
Keyword(s):  
Tenth Century ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Islamic Culture ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Literary Traditions

This chapter offers an overview of Pahlavi literature. It surveys a wide variety of genres and texts, which were composed in the form that has reached us mainly in the ninth and tenth century, though some of the works and many of the themes date back to the Sasanian period and even earlier. Much of this literature was composed by Zoroastrians in Iran, and the chapter looks at the Zoroastrian contexts of literary production. Important texts such as the Dēnkard and the Bundahišn are discussed at length. The chapter also examines non-religious literature and other literary traditions with which Pahlavi authors came into contact. No doubt a large part of Sasanian non-religious literature was translated into Arabic and later also into Persian, contributing to the blossoming of Islamic culture.

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.

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.

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.”

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