scholarly journals Goethe’s “Welt” poet in Bengal: The Influence of World Literature on Jibanananda Das and other Bengali Poets of the 1930s-40s

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Firoze Basu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Translation ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe ◽  
Thomas Mann ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Original Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Bengali Literature ◽  
International Circulation

This study aims to establish a link between the concept of “Weltliteratur” or World Literature, in terms of the free movement of literary themes and ideas between nations in original form or translation, and the Bengali poets of the thirties and forties who actively translated French and German poets. It identifies Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's (1749-1832) concept of World Literature as a vehicle for the Kallol Jug poets. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe introduced the concept of “Weltliteratur” in a few of his essays in the first half of the nineteenth century to describe the international circulation and reception of literary works in Europe, including works of non-Western origin. My emphasis will be on Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) arguably the most celebrated poet in Bengali literature who was well versed in the contemporary Western Canons of Poetry. Jibanananda’s defamiliarization of the rural Bengal Landscape, his use of exotic foreign images owe a debt to contemporary European poets. Interestingly, Jibanananda had reviewed an English translation of German author Thomas Mann’s novel “Dr Faustus’ for a Bengali magazine “Chaturanga”. In the Bengali review he states that despite prevalent misconceptions (some critics considering the novel to be superior to the original Faust epic by Goethe) Goethe’s Faust was the first text to capture the hope, despair and crisis in the modern world and articulate it in such a manner that “true” literature of the age was created in its new light. In Jibanananda’s estimation, Thomas Mann deserves credit for treating the Faust legend in a unique and creative way.

Epic and Novel

2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 396-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha Moore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Aurora Leigh ◽  
Big Picture

This essay explores a peculiarly Victorian solution to what was perceived, in the middle of the nineteenth century, as a peculiarly Victorian problem: the fragmentation and miscellaneousness of the modern world. Seeking to apprehend the multiplicity and chaos of contemporary social, intellectual, political, and economic life, and to furnish it with a coherence that was threatened by encroaching religious uncertainty, Victorian poets turned to the resources of genre as a means of accommodating the heterogeneity of the age. In particular, by devising ways of fusing the conventions of the traditional epic with those of the newly ascendant novel, poets hoped to appropriate for the novelistic complexity of modern, everyday life the dignifying and totalizing tendencies of the epic. The essay reevaluates the generic hybridity of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) as an attempt to unite two distinct kinds of length—the microscopic, cumulative detail of the novel and the big-picture sweep of the epic—in order to capture the miscellaneousness of the age and, at the same time, to restore order and meaning to the disjointed experience of modernity.

Orhan Pamuk and the Limits of Translation: Foreignizing The Black Book for World Literature

2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karim Mattar
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
English Translation ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Local History ◽  
Translation Theory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Black Book ◽  
Sociology Of Translation ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Linguistic Categories

This article questions the often all-too-readily adduced arguments and methodologies of translation theory with reference to the English translations of Orhan Pamuk's novel The Black Book as exemplary case studies. It argues that domestication and foreignization are problematic as linguistic categories. It then seeks to rework such intuitively forceful terms for a sociology of translation, suggesting that they regain their coherence when directed towards questions of reception. The reception of The Black Book in English translation has been dominated by domesticating readings that minimize or neglect Pamuk's engagement with local history in favour of stock categorizations of the novel in terms of postmodernism. Against such readings, a ‘foreignizing reading strategy’ is proposed, one that seeks to restore to interpretation something of Pamuk's engagement with the local, especially his treatment of Sufism and Hurufism. Translation theory, it is urged, can be more effectively and universally applied in literary studies when directed towards literary sociology rather than linguistic comparison.

scholarly journals THE HOLOCAUST AS AN ETERNAL LESSON FOR MANKIND (Education of resistance to racism and xenophobia on the basis of contemporary foreign fiction and cinema)

2018 ◽  
pp. 84-94
Author(s):  
Olha Nikolenko
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Main Role ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Second World

The theme of the Second World War and the Holocaust is one of the topical themes of contemporary fiction and cinema. Outstanding writers and directors of our time are turning to the embodiment of this tragic topic. They set themselves the task of comprehending the past and giving the third millennium generation spiritual experience that will help young people combat the manifestations of racism and xenophobia in the modern world. The article deals with the novel “Schindler’s Ark” by Th. Keneally, “The Children of Noah” by E.-E. Schmitt, “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” by J. Boyne, “The Book Tief” by M. Zuzak and movies that are based on these books. In the genres of a historic novel and psychological story based on the documents, the writers revealed the complicated social processes in Europe during 1930-1940. The writers described the historic events within the life of ordinary people who lived in the terrible circumstances of the totalitarian system. The symbols playedthe main role in revealing the subject of the Holocaust in the novels and films about the Second World War and the Holocaust. Thomas Keneally continued the traditions of romantic irony and added to it some social, psychological and philosophical meanings. The irony in the novel by Thomas Keneally “Schindler’s Ark” plays an important role in the investigation of European society in the tragic period of the 20thcentury. In the novels by Thomas Keneally irony takes place on the different levels such as plot, composition, imagology, time and space, style and language. T. Keneally broadens the meaning of irony and its function in the documentary and historic novel. The irony in the novel “Schindler’s Ark” maintains some main functions: social for explaining the anti-humanistic essence of fascism, war, racial hatred, research in investigating the tragedy of the Holocaust and its consequences, psychological in revealing the psychology of people of different social class, philosophical in discussing the important issues of human life in the word, axiological dealing with the values of mercy, morality, the ability to resist violence. T. Kenealy represents different forms of irony such as the irony of the narrator, the irony of the author, the combination of controversial documentary facts, the contradiction of phenomenon and notions, the comparison of the different points of view, self-irony, irony as inner enlightenment, catharsis. In the novel “Schindler’s Ark” by T. Kenealy the author of the article analyzed the traditions of world literature such as B. Brecht within the motive of personal financial profit from the war, N. Gogol within the motive of buying and selling the dead souls. The writer represented these motives in his own way as the events took place during the real historic time, and he found the inner power in people of past century to keep their life, humanity and culture on the Earth. The irony is a unique feature of T. Keneally’s individual style and it enriched the genre of novel.

Decolonizing the Novel

Worlds Enough ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 134-146
Author(s):  
Elaine Freedgood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry James ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Anthony Trollope ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Franco Moretti ◽  
Multiple Domains

This chapter reviews the critics cited by Franco Moretti in his landmark essay “Conjectures on World Literature,” and analyzes them against the grain of his argument. Moretti argues that critics from Meenakshi Mukherjee and Kōjīn Karatani to Roberto Schwarz and Doris Somer similarly contend that the novels of the nations they study were pale or defective imitations of “Western” originals. Henry Zhao, whom Moretti hales with particular enthusiasm, has unfortunately internalized an idea about omniscient narration that cannot be found in “Western” realism. The chapter provides a description of the narrators of William Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, or George Eliot by the earlier critics, including Henry James. Criticism of the novel and the novel itself have given readers worlds enough; the nineteenth-century novel, like those that preceded and followed it, gave readers one hugely ruptured but continuous world in which they are, as imperial liberal subjects, always in more than one place at the same time, always inhabiting multiple domains in person or by proxy.

The Allure of Synthesis: Science and the Literary in Comparative and World Literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-372
Author(s):  
Alessio Mattana
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Scientific Texts ◽  
Hard Science ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

This article offers a reconstruction of the scientific lineage of comparative and world literature. It will be argued that the approaches by Philarète Chasles and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe were influenced by the meaning of ‘comparative’ developed in scientific texts in the long eighteenth century. Building on the assumption that literature may be made into a hard science, a number of nineteenth-century comparatists then sought to elaborate syntheses of literature in the form of universal laws that would hold to all literary texts. I argue that this ‘scientifying’ approach to literature is still at work to this day, and I conclude my intervention by pointing to the epistemological issues that must be considered when the literary is treated scientifically.

Symbolic Space in The Magic Mountain of Thomas Mann

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (8) ◽  
pp. 55-60
Author(s):  
Linh On Thi My
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
World Literature ◽  
German Literature ◽  
Thomas Mann ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Meaningful Life ◽  
Tuberculosis Patients ◽  
Symbolic Space

The Magic Mountain (Der Zauerberg) of Thomas Mann is one of the masterpieces of German literature in particular, of the 20th century world literature in general. In the novel, Thomas Mann created a symbolic space with the mountain in Davos and the nursing center of Davos for tuberculosis patients. The Davos Mountain influenced by sacred mountains in Grimm's fairy tales, is an experience and challenge space for the characters of the novel, especially for Hans Castorp. The nursing center of Davos for tuberculosis patients is a space to test people' patience before the hardships of life with the obsession of disease and death, pushing people to choose: stop walking, accept defeat or continue fighting for a meaningful life.

Worlds Enough

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Freedgood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Aesthetic

Now praised for its realism and formal coherence, the Victorian novel was not always great, or even good, in the eyes of its critics. As this book reveals, it was only in the late 1970s that literary critics constructed a prestigious version of British realism, erasing more than a century of controversy about the value of Victorian fiction. Examining criticism of Victorian novels since the 1850s, this book demonstrates that while they were praised for their ability to bring certain social truths to fictional life, these novels were also criticized for their formal failures and compared unfavorably to their French and German counterparts. The book analyzes the characteristics of realism—denotation, omniscience, paratext, reference, and ontology—and the politics inherent in them, arguing that if critics displaced the nineteenth-century realist novel as the standard by which others are judged, literary history might be richer. It would allow peripheral literatures and the neglected wisdom of their critics to come fully into view. It concludes by questioning the aesthetic racism built into prevailing ideas about the centrality of realism in the novel, and how those ideas have affected debates about world literature. By re-examining the critical reception of the Victorian novel, the book suggests how we can rethink our practices and perceptions about books we think we know.

scholarly journals Elementary Ratiocination: Anticipating Sherlock Holmes in a Slovene Setting

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-82
Author(s):  
Michelle Gadpaille
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
English Translation ◽  
German Language ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Ethnic Tensions ◽  
Crime Novel

The paper reevaluates an obscure, German-language crime novel from the nineteenth century and its better-known English translation: Carl Adolf Streckfuss’s Das einsame Haus: nach den Tagebüchern des Herrn Professor Döllnitz: Roman (1888), translated as The Lonely House (1907). Although written in German by an author from Berlin, the novel is set on the territory of Slovenia. The paper situates the novel geographically and historically, while considering its place in the developing genres of crime and later detective fiction. Moreover, the novel’s depiction of intraethnic tension in the Slovenian village where the crime occurs will be shown to reflect the ethnic tensions on the frontiers of Austro-Hungarian territory, and to align with later trends in English detective fiction towards the use of ethnic taxonomies in constructing and solving crime.

Adam Zalužanský’s “De sexu plantarum” (1592): an early pioneering chapter on plant sexuality

2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Funk
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Translation ◽  
History Of Botany ◽  
Main Work ◽  
Botanical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
First Time

In the history of botany, Adam Zalužanský (d. 1613), a Bohemian physician, apothecary, botanist and professor at the University of Prague, is a little-known personality. Linnaeus's first biographers, for example, only knew Zalužanský from hearsay and suspected he was a native of Poland. This ignorance still pervades botanical history. Zalužanský is mentioned only peripherally or not at all. As late as the nineteenth century, a researcher would be unaware that Zalužanský’s main work Methodi herbariae libri tres actually existed in two editions from two different publishers (1592, Prague; 1604, Frankfurt). This paper introduces the life and work of Zalužanský. Special attention is paid to the chapter “De sexu plantarum” of Zalužanský’s Methodus, in which, more than one hundred years before the well-known De sexu plantarum epistola of R. J. Camerarius, the sexuality of plants is suggested. Additionally, for the first time, an English translation of Zalužanský’s chapter on plant sexuality is provided.

Hurry Up and Wait: The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and the Maritime in Modernism

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxwell Uphaus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Cultural Role

The burgeoning subfield of literary oceanic studies has largely neglected modernist literature, maintaining that the end of the age of sail in the late nineteenth century also marks an end to maritime literature's substantive cultural role. This essay outlines a way of reading the maritime in modernism through an analysis of the engagement with history and temporality in Joseph Conrad's sea novel The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897). The novel depicts the sea as variously an anachronistic sphere left behind by history, an integral foundation to history, an element that eclipses history, and an archive of history's repressed violence. This article traces the interactions of these various views of the sea's relationship to history, highlighting how they are shaped and inflected by the novel's treatment of race. Based on this analysis, it proposes an approach to the sea in modernist literature that focuses on its historiographical rather than social import.

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