World Literature in the World?

Criticized for being too Euro- and Americentric, world literature scholarship tends to center on the American implications of this shortcoming, with little discussion of world literature beyond these centers. This paper thus addresses the function of world literature beyond these centers, particularly in the lingua franca of global business: English. Drawing from my experience in the United Arab Emirates, I argue that because students in the region come from places with fraught colonial histories, migrant, Anglophone literature is critical in the world literature classroom because it allows them to see their own experiences articulated in the global literary vernacular. Using Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf as an example, I show how its transnational scope addresses both the hegemonic, Euro-American gaze, but also the students’. Thus, Anglophone literature is not necessarily the extension of an imperialist project or a flattening of differences; rather, it becomes an articulation of them.

A Filmmaker in His Library

In his 1952 essay “For an Impure Cinema: In Defense of Adaptation,” André Bazin defended cinema’s “impurity” as a necessary element in the medium’s formal evolution and technical development. The Italian writer, filmmaker, and essayist Pier Paolo Pasolini based his own artistic method on the tension among the distinct artistic languages that characterizes Bazin’s “impure cinema,” thereby situating his work in his “library-laboratory,” a space where ideas circulate beyond their disciplinary fields. In keeping with Bazin’s essay, this article illuminates how Pasolini turned his library into a toolbox and blurred the boundaries between mediums of creation and categories of theoretical thought.

Page, Stage, Location

The growth of globalization has greatly expanded the exposure of writers and now filmmakers to the wider world beyond their home country or region, offering new opportunities to bring elements of the outside world into their works, and in turn to take their works out to distant audiences. This essay discusses the increasing presence of foreign cultures in the progression from the literary detail to the stage prop and then the movie location, and then focuses on three films based on literary works, films that display the growing presence of the world in contemporary cinema and of the films in the world.

Welcome to the Field

Videogames offer vast potential for critical reflection by humanities scholars, but the tendency of existing game studies scholarship to treat the rules of a game separately from the game’s social meaning suggests that videogames have no place in humanistic disciplines. This article challenges that notion by contrasting a cultural view of videogames with the dominant mere-technology view. Ecocriticism functions as a prestige language for videogames that permits entrance into what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls the field of cultural production. Ecology simultaneously provides metaphors for explaining videogame technology while allowing games to enter ongoing critical and cultural conversations. Humanists interested in but unfamiliar with videogames should therefore start with those with environmentalist themes. This article presents Horizon Zero Dawn (2017) as a case study. Horizon Zero Dawn presents a stylized pastoral pseudo-utopia that embraces ecofeminist calls to reconstruct rationality while challenging existing sexism in computing fields.

Between Life and Legend

This article sets out to explore the multiple “senses” in Raoul Peck’s 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro from several perspectives. First, it focuses on Peck’s cinematographic ambitions with reference to his social experience of geographic mobility and to his current position in the transnational field of cinema. The making of I Am Not Your Negro, ultimately led the Haitian-born director, with a commitment to producing a critical “auteur cinema” to create a cinematic testament to the opus of James Baldwin, an author in whom he discovered a language for thinking and for deconstructing racialization. This multi-facetted analysis of Peck’s documentary film and its making will enable us to shed light on the form and meaning of the intellectual quest Peck undertakes in his dialogue with Baldwin.

The War of the Worlds May Well Start in Latin America

This article analyses the literature-cinema dialogue established by the Ecuadorian writer Gabriela Alemán in her short story collection La muerte silba un blues (2014). Firstly, I revise how Alemán borrows the production methods of the cult Spanish filmmaker Jesús “Jess” Franco to craft a collection that aids us to see the world as an interconnected whole. Secondly, I close read the story that opens the collection, El extraño viaje, which takes Orson Welles’ radiophonic adaptation of The War of the Worlds to the Ecuadorian context. My argument is that, in making the city of Quito the target of H.G. Wells’ Martian invasion, Alemán engages with a rich history of multimedia adaptations and places Ecuador’s capital at the centre of a global narrative. I argue that her work decentres and recentres world literature dynamics where Latin American literature in general, and Ecuadorian writing in particular, sit at the periphery of world literary systems.

Time and Description in Sátántangó and The Melancholy of Resistance (Novel into Film)

The collaboration between László Krasznahorkai and Béla Tarr has resulted in one of the most celebrated recent works of world cinema. The adaptation aspect of films like Sátántangó (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) is sometimes overlooked by adaptation studies. I will argue that the concept of fidelity criticism, disregarded by recent studies of adaptation, is still valuable for analysing the way in which literariness can travel through the transmedial modality of time and duration. These case studies suggest that a transmedial approach to the relation between world literature and world cinema is possible by putting forward a different understanding of the concept of fidelity as circulation, a concept that is common to both world cinema and world literature studies.

“In the Key of Loss”

This article addresses a particular example of the intersection of literature and cinema in the film Call Me By Your Name, made by Luca Guadagnino and based on the novel of the same title by André Aciman, and the themes of nostalgia and loss in the work of both. The film results from the encounter, in its production and in a large number of retrospective discussions, between the cosmopolitan writer André Aciman and the Italian director Luca Guadagnino who, while attentive to global issues such as the trans-Mediterranean migration which features in the film, is very much grounded in his home region of northern Italy. The (rather differently figured) Jewish and homosexual identities of the two protagonists in the novel and the film are also addressed.