Dissemination of Lithuanian Literature: Becoming Part of World Literature

The article discusses the policy of dissemination of national literature abroad as one of the soft power practices used for the formation of the image of the country and the country’s literature, created through the translated and published works of Lithuanian authors in foreign languages. It also reviews the current situation, the selection of the works to be translated, institutions and bodies in charge of this dissemination, and problems of the research on the reception of the works (authors) translated into foreign languages.

Against the Authoritarian Orator and His Pater familias: Deviant Literarity and Orphaned Speech in El padre mío by Diamela Eltit and Lotty Rosenfeld

Published in the last year of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte’s military dictatorship saw its end, My Father (El padre mío) constitutes an interprofessional, collaborative work between Chile National Literature Prize winner Diamela Eltit and visual artist Lotty Rosenfeld, composed of unaltered transcriptions of three monologues (dis)articulated by a schizophrenic vagrant who referred to himself as My Father. By re-enacting the vagrant’s irrational utterances in a truthful but parodic manner, Eltit and Rosenfeld “orphaned” these spoken words into a work of written literature that mocked the authoritarian voice of the dictator who had imposed himself as the Grand Orator of the Nation and the Father of Chile. The main objective of the present work, which is principally based on the conceptualization of Mute Speech by Jacques Rancière, is to examine the political dimension of Eltit and Rosenfeld’s aesthetic endeavor: through an exploration of the possibilities of political emancipation that the vagrant’s fatherless monologues fostered in My Father, our study demonstrates that what neoliberal civil society presupposes as objectionable animalistic noises may be capable of intervening in what Rancière refers to as the “distribution of sensible” and its consolidated aesthetics of hierarchy, thus subverting the fable of pater familias and pater patriae concocted by Pinochet’s right-wing military regime.

Misrepresentation of the Other: A Postcolonial Study in Selected Arab and American Novels

The paper sheds light on one of the important concepts in contemporary literature which tackles the representation of the Other in selected Arabic and American literary products. The representation of the other holds many misrepresentations and stereotypes, both varying and fixed; as such, the study of the literary representations of the other which comes as a remedy many fixed and prevalent frameworks between the self and the other which deals with the construction of an individual on cultural, political and social levels. The study tackles a topic of great importance for contemporary literary studies and critiques, especially at the level of national literature. The research aims to discuss how Arab writers envision the concept of the Other, on one hand; and it argues how American writers projects the concept in their novels, on the other hand. It also gives an insight about Arabs and Americans viewing the term the self and other or utilize the term Imagology which is very significant because it differentiates between the Oriental and Western points of view. The paper is restricted to argue the representation of the other in these four novels. Finally, the research ends up with conclusion and recommendations for further researches.

A Study of Bagobo Tagabawa Folk Speech Using Murdock’s and Eugenio’s Classification

Around 60, 000 in number, the Bagobo people constitute one of the indigenous peoples in Davao, Philippines. This study analyzes the Bagobo Tagabawa folk speech, specifically their proverbs and riddles. Also, this study aims to help in preserving the Bagobo Tagabawa folk speech and fostering a better understanding and appreciation of their life, literature, and people. The researcher analyzed the 90 proverbs and the 97 riddles in form and style using the classification of the riddles of George P. Murdock and the category of proverbs used by Damiana Eugenio. The concept of cultural anthropology by Franz Boas was employed in the study to determine the cultural contents of each literary piece of the said indigenous group. Findings reveal that the Bagobo people have rich and varied folk literature, constituting an important part of Philippine national literature that could vanish amid modernization. This study has contributed to the preservation of the cultural materials of the Bagobo Tagabawa. Thus, it is hoped that it will make it easier for non-Bagobo Filipinos and the rest of the world to know and appreciate Bagobo folk speech. Furthermore, the researcher recommends that this study be disseminated among folklore enthusiasts to enrich the Bagobo Tagabawa folk speech analysis. This research can help the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) promote, protect, and recognize the culture of the indigenous peoples, particularly in the territory of Mindanao.

Decolonising the Mind of the Antipodean Author: Gothic Tropes and Postcolonial Discourse in Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake

This article analyses Peter Carey’s novel My Life as a Fake (2003) through the lens of genre fiction, focusing on how the Gothic mode combines with key concepts in postcolonial studies. Intertextual references to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) and analogies with Stephen King’s The Dark Half (1990) and “The Importance of Being Bachman” (1996) are investigated to contextualise Carey’s postcolonial Gothic. Furthermore, taking a cue from Frantz Fanon and Oswaldo de Andrade’s theoretical studies, I argue that the main characters of this novel display attitudes that allegorically reflect the stages through which the national literature of a former settler colony is shaped.

One Text, Many Literary Traditions: The Multidimensionality of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman

Death and the King’s Horseman, published in 1975, is undoubtedly Wole Soyinka’s most acclaimed play. When awarding the playwright the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 1986, the Committee specifically cited it as a “drama of existence”. Many literary critics have written about the play from multifarious perspectives. However, the dramatic text is still open to multidimensional interpretations that can further illuminate the rich texture of this canonical work. My study contextualises this dramatic masterpiece as yielding to a form of critical inquiry that makes it cohere with definitions of various literary traditions. It can be interrogated as Yoruba/Nigerian national literature, African literature, postcolonial literature, and world literature. It is, therefore, in this effort to use many approaches to see the play as a holistic text that I have chosen to interrogate it as “one text, many literary traditions”.

From Distant to Public Reading The (Hebrew) Novel in the Eyes of Many

From its very beginning, the term “distant reading” (Moretti 2000) was controversial, displacing ‘close reading’ by relying on literary histories and thereby reflecting on the entire global literary system. One of the weaknesses of this approach lies in its exclusive reliance on canonical and authoritative historiographies, one or two for each national literature, something which is bound to over-simplify the complexities of national literatures. As is known, Moretti’s proposal became a ‘slogan’ for Digital Humanities while algorithmic manipulation of texts has taken the place of reading literary (human) histories. Yet the problem of over-simplification remains, albeit differently. As an alternative, we offer a fusion approach, radicalising Moretti’s idea. In this article, we demonstrate how computer-based analysis of different readings carried out by many readers – not necessarily professionals – produces a relatively minute picture. Our case study will be the Hebrew novel, from its emergence in 1853 to the present day; a manageable corpus on which we gather information using questionnaires we have carefully created in our lab. Alongside the presentation of our approach, the actual research, and its initial findings, we will reflect theoretically on the conceptual benefits, as well as the limits, of public distance reading.