The Greenwich Meridian of Literature and the „Peripheries” of World Literature: Lu Xun’s Alternative Cartography

Tekstualia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (65) ◽  
pp. 41-48
Author(s):  
Thomas Starky
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Literary Space ◽  
Related Idea ◽  
Greenwich Meridian

The article discusses Pascale Casanova’s mapping of world literature according to a division into center and peripheries, focusing on her idea of the Greenwich Meridian of literature as a spatial and temporal measure of the world’s literary production. The related idea of literary consecration of peripheral writers is explained. The possibility of an alternative cartography that emphasizes literary transfers via translations between peripheries is analyzed on the basis of the famous modern Chinese writer Lu Xun’s theoretical and translation output. His practice of translating peripheral writers, often carried out second-hand via German editions, potentially challenges popular contemporary mappings of literary space such as those developed by P. Casanova and F. Moretti.

Working-Class Writing and the Use Value of the Literary

PMLA ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 127 (4) ◽  
pp. 932-938 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonali Perera
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Use Value ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Greenwich Meridian ◽  
Country Culture ◽  
The Aesthetic

Formal preoccupations, which is to say specifically literary concerns, appear in small literatures only in a second phase, when an initial stock of literary resources has been accumulated and the first international artists find themselves in a position to challenge the aesthetic assumptions associated with realism and to exploit the revolutionary advances achieved at the Greenwich meridian.—Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters“In our country culture has become so complex, this complexity is reflected in our literature. It takes a certain level of education to understand our novelists. The ordinary man cannot understand them …” … And she reeled off a list of authors, smiling smugly. It never occurred to her that these authors had ceased to be of any value whatsoever to their society—or was it really true that an extreme height of culture and the incomprehensible went hand in hand?—Bessie Head, A Question of Power (first ellipsis in orig.)ON WHAT BASIS ARE SELECT TRADITIONS OF LITERARY INTERNATIONALISM RECOGNIZED AS WORLD LITERATURE AND OTHERS DEEMED MERELY historical, relics of nostalgic Marxism or of resolved debates on aesthetics and politics? According to recent influential formulations, world literature is writing that in original or translated form circulates outside the author's country of origin. But what of traditions of literary internationalism, like those of working-class writing, that reverse and displace practical, utilitarian propositions to ask, instead, in more abstract terms, what is the use value of the literary? Bessie Head's A Question of Power poses a challenge to practical definitions. What of literary texts that have global currency but aren't of “any value whatsoever to their society”?

Polysystems Redux: The Unfinished Business of World Literature

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 272-281
Author(s):  
Debjani Ganguly
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Unfinished Business ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Systems Model ◽  
Literary Space ◽  
The World

AbstractIn responding to Muhsin al-Musawi’s two-part essay on the Arabic Republic of Letters, this essay proposes a rethinking of the world systems model in global literary studies in terms of a polysystems framework. Rather than trying to fit literary worlds—ancient, premodern, modern—within a single Euro-chronological frame culminating in a world capitalist systems model—where the non-European worlds appear as invariably inferior—it is worthwhile to see them as several polysystems with variable valences within a heterotemporal planetary literary space. This approach offers a comparative reading of the emergence of three language worlds—Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic—and urges us to rethink the totality of the world literary space as a diachronic field that generates overlapping, multiscalar, comparative histories of literary polysystems.

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.

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.”

scholarly journals Reconsidering The World Republic of Letters: A Qualunque Community of Literatures

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-115
Author(s):  
Hatice Karaman ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Philosophical Perspective ◽  
English Edition ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Literary Space ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common

In the preface to the English edition of The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova focuses on the existence of a literary world/universe, which maintains a relative autonomy from the world and its political disparities and restrictions. This suggested ideal of a literary space is an attempt to posit world literature as an alternative chronotope in which literary production can survive and multiply transnationally. My paper will offer a reconsideration of this global literary space, read via a philosophical perspective, shaped by the famous discussion of the common and community as conducted by Giorgio Agamben, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, among others. Within the above theoretical frame, my attempt will be to reread Casanova’s contribution to World Literature as a desired community of literature(s), formed by the coming together of qualunque singularities which co-exist and co-belong without “any representable condition of belonging” (Agamben). Furthermore, the idea of qualunque (whatever) will constitute the starting point for the ethico-political reconsideration and reconceptualisation of the global literary space offered by Casanova, not only without borders but also without hierarchies.

Literary Translation and Modern Chinese Literature

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
JI Jin
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Symbiotic Relationship ◽  
Literary Creation ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Cultural Alterity

Since the late Qing, literature in translation and modern Chinese literature have maintained a symbiotic relationship. Translation, understood as an entirely new means of creation and expression rather than a mere change in language, profoundly influenced modern Chinese literature with regard to narrative structures and techniques as well as generic and formal innovations. Literature in translation can be considered from the dual perspectives of cultural alterity and sameness; even as the process of translation was influenced by modern literature, translation played an important role in the development of modern Chinese literature. To regard literature in translation as an integral part of modern Chinese literature challenges how we define the “Chineseness” of Chinese literature. It allows for a new understanding of the dialectic relationship between literature in translation and modern Chinese literature in the broader context of world literature and thus opens up new possibilities for literary creation.

Minority Cosmopolitanism

PMLA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 126 (3) ◽  
pp. 592-609 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Koshy
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Ethnic Literature ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Transnational Movements ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Production And Consumption

The topography of literary production and consumption has been transformed as writers and texts travel, ethnic literature is taught and translated in multiple national venues, and writers’ locations, audiences, and subject matter resist ready alignment. he growing internationalization of ethnic literary production has produced a heterogeneous range of texts, which challenge the established boundaries of ethnic and world literature. Because they focus on minorities, these texts have been slow to win recognition as world literature even though they depict transnational movements and identifications that diverge from those in canonical ethnic narratives. I develop the analytic of minority cosmopolitanism to examine the ways in which these literary narratives of worlding contest contemporary economic and political processes of globalization and Eurocentric accounts of globality. This essay considers how the gendered figure of the diasporic citizen serves as a vehicle for minority cosmopolitanism in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies (1999).

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