On Global English and the Transmutation of Postcolonial Studies into “Literature in English”

1999 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-80
Author(s):  
Rita Raley
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Imperialism ◽  
Diaspora Studies ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Global English ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Language Question

What does it signify to speak of a World Literature in English? In what ways might diaspora studies and transnationalism be linked to the contemporary phenomenon of global English, with a mode of comprehending the world that holds English at its center? What can diaspora studies and transnationalism learn from the “language question” frequently raised in discussions of both cultural imperialism and postcolonial writing? What can they learn from the question of globalism now so ubiquitous in contemporary criticism? How does the Literature in English concept relate, on the one hand, to Edouard Glissant's outline of the “liberation” that results from compromising major languages with Creoles (250), and, on the other, to Fredric Jameson's implicit yearning for a philosophical universal linguistic standard not circumvented by linguistic heteroglossia (16-7)? These questions outline the conceptual terrain of this article, in which I read the discursive transmutation of the discipline of Postcolonial Studies into “Literature in English” as both symptom and cause of the emerging visibility of global English as a recognizable disciplinary configuration situated on the line between contemporary culture and the academy. Over the course of this article, I chart this discursive transmutation and its necessary preconditions—the critical investiture in the “global,” the renewed attention to dialects, the abstraction of the “postcolonial”—as a way of articulating profound reservations about the “new universalisms,” of which Literature in English is a primary instance.

Indonesian Literature’s Position in World Literature

TEKNOSASTIK ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Dina Amelia
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
The Other ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Western World ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
The Voice

There are two most inevitable issues on national literature, in this case Indonesian literature. First is the translation and the second is the standard of world literature. Can one speak for the other as a representative? Why is this representation matter? Does translation embody the voice of the represented? Without translation Indonesian literature cannot gain its recognition in world literature, yet, translation conveys the voice of other. In the case of production, publication, or distribution of Indonesian Literature to the world, translation works can be very beneficial. The position of Indonesian literature is as a part of world literature. The concept that the Western world should be the one who represent the subaltern can be overcome as long as the subaltern performs as the active speaker. If the subaltern remains silent then it means it allows the “representation” by the Western.

scholarly journals ТЕМА «ЗОЛОТОЇ ЛИХОМАНКИ» У ЗБІРЦІ ДЖЕКА ЛОНДОНА «ПІВНІЧНІ ОПОВІДАННЯ»

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (93) ◽  
pp. 43-53
Author(s):  
М.А. Дерій
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Practical Experience ◽  
Gold Rush ◽  
The Other ◽  
Jack London ◽  
Central Theme ◽  
The North ◽  
Physical Deterioration ◽  
The World ◽  
The One

Jack London's «Northern Stories» is the conventional name of the early writer's works, with which he entered the world literature. The collection is composed of a system of motifs related to the theme of «gold rush». The theme of «gold rush» raises serious problems for barbaric looting of nature to satisfy greed. Jack London reproduced beautiful pictures of nature and at the same time the terrible consequences of human activity in Alaska. The testing theme was the central theme in Jack London’s «Northern Stories». The writer consistently reproduced situations in which a person, remaining alone with danger, was given the opportunity to test their own forces in a difficult struggle against circumstances threatening its existence. Reproducing the realities of everyday life of goldsmiths, Jack London, of course, could not escape the naturalistic detail. But the writer’s proposed interpretation of man strongly opposed the leading concepts of naturalists. In particular, he freed characters from biological dependence: even under the worst circumstances, the heroes of the «Northern Stories» are not helpless – they overcome physical deterioration due to solid positions and moral stability. Characters that Jack London frankly sympathizes with embody the romantic ideal of the author: they are strong personalities who adhere to the laws of brotherhood and justice. One of the main features that permeates all Jack London’s writings about the North is the adventure motif, it unites people of different professions and nationalities, includes the danger, uncertainty and romanticism. Jack London wrote his «Northern Stories» based on his practical experience, in which the cruelty of «white silence», on the one hand, and the romance of the struggle for life, on the other hand, and, moreover, the preservation of the moral person’s face and kindness in situations where could stand only a person who has a strong spirit.

World Literature

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sowon Park ◽  
Jernej Habjan
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Cultural Imperialism ◽  
Western World ◽  
Current Form ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
General Terms ◽  
The World

As a global academic branch of studies, world literature emerged around the turn of the millennium, though thinking about literature with reference to “world,” however defined, can be traced back to at least two hundred years earlier. The underlying factors for the emergence of world literature studies are many. The end of the Cold War and the rise of non-Western economies, the advent of a global literary marketplace, and the proliferation of digital platforms are seen as some of its preconditions. In general terms, the expansion of world literature can be seen to reflect the rapid integration of the world into a single market. As a field of inquiry, world literature continues to grow in response to the problems encountered by teachers, students, and readers in their daily contact with literature from around the world. Historically, a prevalent way of thinking about world literature in the Western literary tradition was as the selection of masterpieces from around the world. This serviceable notion was, however, shown to fall below its own theoretical requirement and to be clearly in need of revision, since the “world,” in practice, referred to the “First World,” and world literature had simply been another name for the classics from the five major European states—Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy—and from Russia and the United States. The urgent need to acknowledge and validate occluded regions of the non-Western world as unique literary and historical spaces that contribute to the whole has necessitated an altogether different framework for theorizing concepts such as language, nation, and masterpieces. In its current form, world literature studies aspires to overcome some of the problems that have arisen from the methods and procedures of traditional nation-based literary studies, as well as to address unresolved tensions within comparative literary studies, which have sometimes implicitly equated world literature with European literature. In this it overlaps with critiques of cultural imperialism and Eurocentrism raised by postcolonial studies. Where it differs markedly is in its thinking about the global system of literary production, dissemination, and evaluation beyond Europe and its former colonies, and in its focus on the methodological issues that emerge from the barely manageable inundation of literary texts now made available by digital multimedia platforms. In this effort, world literature studies is often joined by other recently established disciplines, especially globalization studies, translation studies, cosmopolitanism studies, and transnationalism studies.

Popularity

2020 ◽  
pp. 274-287
Author(s):  
Susan Bassnett
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Research Programme ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
The Other ◽  
Jack London ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The World ◽  
The One

Susan Bassnett shows in this chapter how the study of world literature has traditionally been dominated by a focus on ‘great’ authors, on the one hand, and avant-garde writers, on the other. Missing from this research programme is a corresponding emphasis on popular literature, and thus on those authors, such as Jack London or J. K. Rowling, who are actually read by massive amounts of people. The trouble with such an approach is that it blatantly disregards many of the most exciting dynamics by which authors reinvent the world. The chapter makes the case that, in thinking about those writers whose work becomes global, we need to broaden our horizon beyond the texts studied in schools and universities so as to take more seriously books once dismissed as what the Germans term Trivialliteratur.

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.

scholarly journals Hiketeia

1973 ◽  
Vol 93 ◽  
pp. 74-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Gould
Keyword(s):  
Dominant Role ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Dead Body ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Working Out

To Professor E. R. Dodds, through his edition of Euripides'Bacchaeand again inThe Greeks and the Irrational, we owe an awareness of new possibilities in our understanding of Greek literature and of the world that produced it. No small part of that awareness was due to Professor Dodds' masterly and tactful use of comparative ethnographic material to throw light on the relation between literature and social institutions in ancient Greece. It is in the hope that something of my own debt to him may be conveyed that this paper is offered here, equally in gratitude, admiration and affection.The working out of the anger of Achilles in theIliadbegins with a great scene of divine supplication in which Thetis prevails upon Zeus to change the course of things before Troy in order to restore honour to Achilles; it ends with another, human act in which Priam supplicates Achilles to abandon his vengeful treatment of the dead body of Hector and restore it for a ransom. The first half of theOdysseyhinges about another supplication scene of crucial significance, Odysseus' supplication of Arete and Alkinoos on Scherie. Aeschylus and Euripides both wrote plays called simplySuppliants, and two cases of a breach of the rights of suppliants, the cases of the coup of Kylon and that of Pausanias, the one dating from the mid-sixth century, the other from around 470 B.C. or soon after, played a dominant role in the diplomatic propaganda of the Spartans and Athenians on the eve of the Peloponnesian War.

scholarly journals Two Conceptions of Second Nature

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georg W. Bertram
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Open Future ◽  
Second Nature ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World ◽  
Cognitive Activities ◽  
The Open Future ◽  
The One ◽  
First Nature

AbstractThe concept of second nature promises to provide an explanation of how nature and reason can be reconciled. But the concept is laden with ambiguity. On the one hand, second nature is understood as that which binds together all cognitive activities. On the other hand, second nature is conceived of as a kind of nature that can be changed by cognitive activities. The paper tries to investigate this ambiguity by distinguishing a Kantian conception of second nature from a Hegelian conception. It argues that the idea of a transformation from a being of first nature into a being of second nature that stands at the heart of the Kantian conception is mistaken. The Hegelian conception demonstrates that the transformation in question takes place within second nature itself. Thus, the Hegelian conception allows us to understand the way in which second nature is not structurally isomorphic with first nature: It is a process of ongoing selftransformation that is not primarily determined by how the world is, but rather by commitments out of which human beings are bound to the open future.

scholarly journals Possibilities of the Development of Edible Insect-Based Foods in Europe

Foods ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 766
Author(s):  
Magdalena Skotnicka ◽  
Kaja Karwowska ◽  
Filip Kłobukowski ◽  
Aleksandra Borkowska ◽  
Magdalena Pieszko
Keyword(s):  
Material Processing ◽  
Functional Food ◽  
The Other ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
Edible Insects ◽  
Mineral Salts ◽  
Edible Insect ◽  
Alternative Protein ◽  
The World ◽  
The One

All over the world, a large proportion of the population consume insects as part of their diet. In Western countries, however, the consumption of insects is perceived as a negative phenomenon. The consumption of insects worldwide can be considered in two ways: on the one hand, as a source of protein in countries affected by hunger, while, on the other, as an alternative protein in highly-developed regions, in response to the need for implementing policies of sustainable development. This review focused on both the regulations concerning the production and marketing of insects in Europe and the characteristics of edible insects that are most likely to establish a presence on the European market. The paper indicates numerous advantages of the consumption of insects, not only as a valuable source of protein but also as a raw material rich in valuable fatty acids, vitamins, and mineral salts. Attention was paid to the functional properties of proteins derived from insects, and to the possibility for using them in the production of functional food. The study also addresses the hazards which undoubtedly contribute to the mistrust and lowered acceptance of European consumers and points to the potential gaps in the knowledge concerning the breeding conditions, raw material processing and health safety. This set of analyzed data allows us to look optimistically at the possibilities for the development of edible insect-based foods, particularly in Europe.

Domesticated mammoths: Mythic and material in Nenets verbal tradition on ya’ xora

Multilingua ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Karina Lukin
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Verbal Art ◽  
The World ◽  
The One

AbstractThis article discusses language materialities and the Otherworld through the findings of mammoth remains and text-artifacts representing Nenets verbal art. The remains and verbal art are read together as a network of mythic knowledge that forms a semiotic whole, where different signs interact and create potentials for new significations. The article aims to open up a web of relations in which materialities of differing ages and durabilities meet and affect each other through their semiotic potentialities. The materialities operate on several levels of signification, ranging from basic metaphors for mammoths to larger regimes that organize the signification. Consequently, mythic knowledge concerns worlds that are, on the one hand, imperceptible but, on the other, sensible through narration and imagination in terms of materialities. The key material elements of the mythic knowledge are tainted by the narration, such that they cannot be considered without the mythic qualities. In addition, the knowledge concerning the world affects Nenets rituals and ways of dwelling.

Benson and Miller in Perspective

1979 ◽  
Vol 3 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 242-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Kuklick
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Applied Science ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Knowledge ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Stock Of Knowledge

Despite differences in coloration Miller and Benson are birds of a feather. Although he is no Pollyanna, Miller believes that there has been a modest and decent series of advances in the social sciences and that the most conscientious, diligent, and intelligent researchers will continue to add to this stock of knowledge. Benson is much more pessimistic about the achievements of yesterday and today but, in turn, offers us the hope of a far brighter tomorrow. Miller explains Benson’s hyperbolic views about the past and future by distinguishing between pure and applied science and by pointing out Benson’s naivete about politics: the itch to understand the world is different from the one to make it better; and, Miller says, because Benson sees that we have not made things better, he should not assume we do not know more about them; Benson ought to realize, Miller adds, that the way politicians translate basic social knowledge into social policy need not bring about rational or desirable results. On the other side, Benson sees more clearly than Miller that the development of science has always been intimately intertwined with the control of the environment and the amelioration of the human estate.

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