Viagens da literatura cabo-verdiana entre raízes e rizomas, entre árvores e ondas: literatura mundo para uma Pátria Mundo

Chaves de leitura para a Poesia Cabo-verdiana contemporânea na sua relação com os conceitos de Literatura Mundial e Literatura-Mundo, com base em propostas teóricas de Zhang Longxi, David Damrosch, Armando Gnisci, Franco Moretti, Édouard Glissant, Helena Buescu e Zilá Bernd, entre outros pesquisadores. Constructos como transárea, arquipélago e vetorização, definidos por Ottmar Ette, bem como de Postpoesia, segundo Augustín Fernández Mallo, mostrar-se-ão também produtivos para o estudo da Poesia Cabo-verdiana.

Bringing the Monkey King to the World

By the end of 1930s, Waley had already established his reputation as a sinologist and an outstanding translator of Chinese poetry. Under what circumstances did Waley decide to translate the novel Xiyou ji into English? How does Monkey connect to social and literary realities during his time? If we follow Pascale Casanova’s application of Abram de Swaan’s “floral figuration” to her discussion on the literary world, how is this Chinese novel of the periphery linked to the center through Waley’s translation and other “cosmopolitan intermediaries”? Furthermore, if world literature, as David Damrosch proposes, is “an elliptical refraction of national literatures,” in what ways does Monkey respond to the tension between the receiving culture and its national context? By addressing those questions, this paper seeks to demonstrate Waley’s multiple relationship with Xiyou ji and highlight various factors that contribute to the canonization of the novel in a larger space of world literature.

Svetovna primerjalna književnost

David Damrosch: Comparing the Literatures. Literary Studies in a Global Age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. 386 str.

Orlando’s Unseen Face

In this essay, I propose to complicate the paradigm of circulation through a close look at a case in which a unique life story, of the sexually ambiguous Chevalier d’ Éon (1728–1810), crosses back and forth across generic as well as national boundaries, reaching a nodal point when he receives an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography edited by Virginia Woolf’s father, and then becomes the model for her hero/ine Orlando. The Chevalier has never before been discussed by Woolf scholars, who have paid little attention to Woolf’s foreign intertexts, but a broader understanding of the concept of circulation as developed by David Damrosch, Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova will help me reveal the route of this hidden source from France to Russia and then to England, and can enable us to see Woolf’s gender- and genre-bending novel as a prime example of globality and worldliness.

Decentred Geographies: Poetics and Politics of the Avant-garde

Thanks to the work of Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti, David Damrosch and many others, over the past two decades, the concept of world literature has once again become the subject of thorough examination within the field of literary studies, especially in relation to cosmopolitanism and globalization. When it comes to the study of individual national literatures and specific regional contexts, as well as to the definition of comparative literature as a discipline, debates regarding its background, its reach and limitations could not be ignored. World literature thus appears as a heterogenous entity – always manifesting in different contexts in different forms – consistently in dialogical exchange with specificities of a particular literature and culture. Instead of discussing the problematic relation between centre and periphery or criticizing the idea of global literary and cultural canon, the avant-garde as an international and global phenomenon that appears even more radically on the so-called periphery is what is of primary interest to me. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that avant-garde (in its various forms and radical expressions) simultaneously challenges art as an institution and introduces the idea of a decentred geography of world literature.

The Global Presentation of Small National Literatures: South Slavs in Literary History and Theory

This chapter uses the particularly prominent and sensitive South Slav context to compare how representatives of dominant and subordinate literary cultures attempt to characterize and narrate the history of smaller national literatures. It begins from a notion of exchange whereby dominant literary nations are traditionally perceived to export stylistic features for emulation by writers in subordinate literatures and systems of periodization and classification for adoption by those literatures’ historians. In return, these subordinate literatures gain a channel of communication through which some degree of recognition or cultural legitimacy may be bestowed. The chapter addresses recent efforts by the academic community of dominant cultural systems to move beyond national models of literary history, focusing on accounts by pre-eminent scholars Linda Hutcheon, Stephen Greenblatt, Pascale Casanova and David Damrosch that use South Slav examples to make their case. These accounts are set against the earlier endeavours of Serbian literary historians – Jovan Skerlić, Pavle Popović and Svetozar Petrović – who engage with similar questions in their complex local context. The chapter argues that this attempt to eradicate a political agenda identified in the national approach to literary history in fact reinforces the hegemony of the dominant over the subordinate.