What Is World Literature?
... In the changing landscape of global literature, the concept of Weltliteratur serves as a guiding light, embodying the timeless Romantic vision of a literary world that transcends borders and cultures. Weltliteratur has come to refer to a vast panorama of literary forms united by a singular thrust: providing a perspective that embraces multilingualism and multiculturalism within literature and sheds light on cultural diversity in and through literature (Damrosch, 2003;D'haen et al., 2004;Giusti & Robinson, 2021). At the heart of this transformative vision, translation assumes an indisputably indispensable role as it acts as the bridge that enables diverse voices to resonate across linguistic and cultural boundaries, fostering an interconnected and inclusive literary realm. ...
... The term was coined by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who, beyond his reputation as a writer, earned acclaim as a profound thinker. Ever since the first articulation of the ideal, Weltliteratur stood as a nebulous yet influential term, synonymous with an idealised "global" literature that encompasses diverse cultural and linguistic forms of expression (D'haen et al., 2004;Damrosch, 2003). To this day, the notion compels scholars to engage with it on a conceptual basis as well as with its theoretical implications and its imperatives for society. ...
This article is situated at the interstices of literary translation and language technology, and revolves around the multifaceted concept of Weltliteratur. It is conceived of as an invitation to a critical dialogue on leveraging machine translation to promote linguistic and cultural diversity in literature. In a globalised world where cultural flows are not equally distributed, the need arises to examine the role of machine translation as a tool to promote diversity in the linguistic and cultural landscape, thus establishing what might be considered a Weltliteratur. Drawing from mainstays in translation studies, computational linguistics, cultural and literary studies, this article proposes strategies for leveraging machine translation effectively, but also cautions against an all too simplistic adoption of language technology in the steadfast pursuit of a more diverse and inclusive literature. Ultimately, this article aims to spark a debate on the balance between technological efficiency and the complexities of cultural representation in literary translation.
... The most frequent is the one based on the use of history. According to this theory, each of the different Peoples that have passed through the Peninsula have left important traces of their musical ideas and tastes which have become part of the musical traditions of the population already settled there (Damrosch, 2003). At the same time, the receiving population has impregnated these peoples with its musical culture, songs and dances, resulting in an interesting and enriching fusion. ...
The romance de El Señor Don Gato is a clear example of how oral transmission and geographical location can modify both the text and the melody of a song. The research presented below is an analysis of sound recordings and textual transcriptions from different parts of the world, especially Spain, which show how geographical location, cultural context and social interaction, among other aspects, have a significant impact on traditional music, the most tangible consequences of which are reflected in both literary and musical alterations which, nevertheless, have served to adapt and enrich this well-known piece of music, maintaining the essence and the main idea of its original message.
... De hecho, para él, el sistema de la literatura mundial dota a los textos de mayor valor y calidad conforme más circulen dentro de un espacio elíptico de doble refracción, dice él. Cobran mayor valor por su doble pertenencia, a la cultura de origen y a la cultura de recepción, sin circunscribirse exclusivamente sólo a una de ellas (Damrosh, 2003). ...
La voluntad de conocer lo que llamamos mundo se tradujo en un esfuerzo imaginativo por el que un supuesto todo reunía sus partes y englobaba sus particularidades. La historiografía ilustrada europea combinó esta dialéctica entre lo universal y lo particular con otra dialéctica entre lo geográfico y lo histórico. Logró así justificar su política y económica al enlazar un hipotético centro geográfico occidental con el progreso político, el desarrollo científico y el refinamiento cultural. Una vez agotada la narrativa de dicha imaginación, desde el ámbito estético-político surgen dos alternativas. La primera opción está relacionada con el orden postsoviético y promovería la imaginación del “demasiado mundo” mediante el “comunismo literario”, a partir sobre todo de las propuestas de Jacques Rancière y Jean-Luc Nancy. La segunda opción se desmarcaría del cosmopolitismo retórico y promovería la imaginación cosmopolítica del sin mundo para pensar una hospitalidad literaria universal, sin límites ni restricciones.
... Nem sempre parece que sim. Um exemplo é que essa sucinta e não exaustiva genealogia brasileira do pensamento da circulação é anterior no tempo aos textos de Bourdieu (1989), Casanova (1999), Franco Moretti (2000) -o qual, aliás, se inspira em Roberto Schwarz -, David Damrosch (2003) e Gisèle Sapiro, mas é, geralmente, desconhecida fora do Brasil. ...
A desconstrução teve um por-vir fecundo e plural no Brasil. Este artigo pergunta-se sobre a disseminação de alguns gestos do pensamento derrideano no Brasil e por como o pensamento da diferença contribuiu à emergência de um certo caráter liminar do Brasil e da América Latina, no chamado “Ocidente”. Interpretam-se aqui os conceitos de “entre-lugar” (Silviano Santiago), “transcriação” (Haroldo de Campos), “diferOnça” (Viveiros de Castro) ou “literatura pensante” e “pensamento vegetal” (Evando Nascimento) como intervenções e lançadas (jetées) teóricas que ativam a herença da desconstrução, fazendo dela um uso creativo e não reverencial.
Artykuł stanowi próbę zilustrowania przy pomocy lokalnego przykładu lterackiego najnowszych teorii komparatystycznych, które zrównują studia porównawcze z badaniami nad przekładem. Posługując się kategorią niewspółmierności i figurą Kreola z prac Emily Apter oraz refleksją nad językami kreolskimi Edouarda Glissanta, analizuje oryginalne wersje utworów romskiej poetki Bronisławy Wajs (Papuszy). Utwory Wajs do 2020 roku były znane czytelnikom w wersji zredagowanej przez cyganologa Jerzego Ficowskiego. Ich oryginalna forma nosi znamiona hybrydyczności językowej i kulturowej. Podobnie jak w przypadku języków kreolskich ta uznana przez tłumacza za nieliteracką cecha została zatuszowana w przekładzie. Heteroglotyczność Papuszy ilustruje specyfikę języków lokalnych i społeczności wielojęzycznych, dla których charakterystyczne jest zjawisko ciągłego przekładu i dialogu międzykulturowego.
Richard Wright is exemplary of an interwar version of world literature, undergirded by the cultural centers of Moscow and Paris, that valorized progressive antiracist nationalism. Influenced by leftist writers like André Malraux, Wright created the masterpiece of this literary Popular Front, Native Son . During the postwar Red Scare, Wright continued his Popular Front–style cultural politics in Paris, helping France resist the CIA-engineered cultural Cold War. His underappreciated The Outsider resists the construction of a politically quietist canon of high modernist world literature. Although Wright himself later advanced an American exceptionalist perspective in the 1950s, the circulation and translation of his early work inspired a generation of anticolonial writers, such as Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Ousmane Sembène, and Frantz Fanon. Today's globalization-driven world literature models overlook or actively seek to discredit Wright's progressive and antiracist model.
Este artículo aborda el manuscrito del diario de viaje a China de Ricardo Pigliay reconstruye las condiciones de enunciación a partir de su iniciación como escritor y su trabajo en la industria cultural en el tránsito de La Plata a Buenos Aires. En un momento en que teoría y política están próximas, el diario a China formula una ficción teórica donde se reconocen problemas como la relación entre la provincia y el mundo,el provincianismo cosmopolita y la posición de Piglia como traductor entre una provincia latinoamericana (Argentina) y China durante la Revolución Cultural.
This chapter highlights three instances of world-literary registration in the criticism of Roberto Schwarz. Although he is best known for his reading of ‘volubility’ in The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, which describes Machado’s self-conscious transformation of formal fissures into sources of innovation, Schwarz’s work also contains examples of literary registration that do not involve the critical consciousness of the individual writer. To the Victor, the Potatoes!, for example, is not primarily concerned with the successful transposition of social reality into literary form, but rather with the failures of Brazilian authors like José de Alencar to adapt the formula of European realism. Furthermore, in Schwarz’s interpretation of Antonio Candido’s reading of the ‘dialectic of roguery’ in Manuel Antonio Almeida’s novel Memoirs of a Militia Sargent, it is not the author’s conscious engagement with the most pressing issues of his time that allows him to aesthetically register Brazilian society, but rather their textual suppression and exclusion. Here, then, are three modalities of registration: not only registration through the successful and self-conscious transformation of existing forms, but also registration through the failure to achieve this transformation, and through the exclusion of the very social material that is to be registered.
This article briefly explores some of the current main theoretical frameworks in studying world literature, with a focus on David Damrosch’s recent books Comparing the Literatures (2020) and Around the World in 80 Books (2020). As both of these works have been translated into Romanian in 2023, the travelling notion of world literature and its particular horizons and possible meanings in Romanian raise questions about the concept’s “refractions” and nuances in local and regional contexts. I argue that although Damrosch’s reception in Romanian academia long predates his translation into Romanian language, there is still little consensus with regard to appropriate equivalents of world literature concepts in Romanian. In a small national culture which still negotiates its positions within the networks of world literature, responses to major paradigms can be shaped not just epistemologically, but also ideologically.
Dalam era globalisasi yang serba cepat, terdapat kekhawatiran bahwa generasi muda semakin tercerabut dari akar budaya dan warisan leluhur mereka. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengeksplorasi potensi karya sastra sebagai jembatan penghubung antargenerasi, serta mengusulkan strategi pengajaran yang efektif untuk menghubungkan siswa dengan warisan budaya melalui karya-karya sastra. Penelitian ini melibatkan 5 guru sastra dan 50 siswa SMK Negeri 1 Kediri. Studi ini menggunakan pendekatan kualitatif dengan menganalisis data dari observasi kelas, wawancara dengan guru dan siswa, serta analisis konten terhadap karya sastra yang digunakan dalam pembelajaran. Sedangkan Pengumpulan data dilakukan selama 3 bulan, dari Maret hingga Mei 2024. Teknik analisis data yang digunakan adalah analisis tematik untuk mengidentifikasi pola dan tema dalam data, yang kemudian dipadukan dengan analisis konten terhadap karya sastra yang dipelajari. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa penggunaan karya sastra klasik dan kontemporer yang kaya akan muatan budaya lokal dapat membantu meningkatkan apresiasi siswa terhadap warisan budaya mereka. Strategi pengajaran yang efektif mencakup diskusi terbimbing, proyek berbasis budaya, dan kolaborasi dengan narasumber budaya. Penelitian ini berkontribusi pada pemahaman tentang peran sastra dalam menjembatani kesenjangan antargenerasi dan mempromosikan pelestarian warisan budaya melalui pendidikan.
Up to now, the Handbook of Translation Studies (HTS) consisted of four volumes, all published between 2010 and 2013. Since research in TS continues to grow and expand, this fifth volume was added in 2021. The HTS aims at disseminating knowledge about translation, interpreting, localization, adaptation, etc. and providing easy access to a large range of topics, traditions, and methods to a relatively broad audience: not only students who prefer such user-friendliness, but also researchers and lecturers in Translation Studies, Translation & Interpreting professionals, as well as scholars and experts from other adjacent disciplines. All articles in HTS are written by specialists in the different subfields and are peer-reviewed.
According to many British Orientalists, Malay was decidedly inferior to Sanskrit or Arabic. This essay examines Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir’s efforts to counter the second-rate status accorded to Malay literature in his autobiography, the Hikayat Abdullah (1849). The text represents an attempt to present Malay writing to European audiences as a coherent national and, by extrapolation, world literature. Retracing Abdullah’s strategic textual work is important not only because it helps explain his status as the “Father of Modern Malay Literature,” but also because it exposes the processes contributing to the construction of nineteenth-century world literature. In its critique of and appeal to Euro-American readers, the Hikayat Abdullah illustrates the degree to which world literature depended on imperial preoccupations with “nationness,” which meant that debates over the “world” status of non-Western texts often played out in colonial microencounters rather than European metropoles. Moreover, Abdullah’s text demonstrates how the secular logics undergirding world literature were significantly produced by missionary institutions, given their involvement in colonial publishing. Contextualizing the Hikayat Abdullah and the broader concept of world literature in this imperial frame, this essay develops a literary microhistory to illumine the criteria to which non-Western texts conformed in order to be regarded as properly “literary.”
This paper compares Gabriel’s new ontology after metaphysics to Martiniquan prose writer Édouard Glissant’s parallel endeavor to think the world beyond totality. It explores substantial affinities between the no-world view of field of sense ontology and Glissant’s pluralistic concept of “tout-monde,” proposed in the Traité du Tout-monde (1997; trans. Traktat über die Welt). Because Glissant’s background is in Caribbean culture and literature and his focus is on its characteristic trans-cultural dynamics, the analogies with fields of sense ontology are especially interesting. In the Traité, Glissant expands his theory of creolization to a theory of globalization. Reading Caribbean creolization as a blueprint for the cultural dynamics of the globalizing world, he argues that the mixed-race composite cultures of the Caribbean model the trans-cultural processes of globalization. Glissant’s cultural theory joins Gabriel’s philosophy in outlining a non-reductionist, pluralistic “new realist” ontology.
The paper examines the process of national and world canonization of Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin and Milorad Pavić, as well as the efforts to decanonize these writers and revalue their works from the point of view of reductive political reception and to treat them as paraliterary givers of legitimacy to hegemonic national politics. Such tendentious and simplified evaluations of the representative writers' of two Slavic literatures largely arise from the image of the Yugoslav and (post)Soviet crises starting at the end of the 1980s, as well as from geopolitical efforts to rearrange the mentioned areas politically, culturally and nationally. Such reductive interpretations as imposed by the prevailing part of the Western political and media discourse - the key feature of which is the thesis about Serbian and Russian responsibility for war conflicts and the disintegration of socialist Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union - conditioned not only a malicious attitude towards the constitutive factors of Serbian and Russian political existence, but also the manifestation of a discriminatory attitude towards the culture of sanctioned 'political opponents'.
Despite growing attention to the global dissemination of cross-cultural literature, rigorous research on cross-linguistic sentiment analysis remains limited, especially for works like Wolf Totem, which hold both worldwide reach and cultural depth. This study conducted a cross-language sentiment and thematic analysis of online book reviews by Chinese and English readers, utilizing advanced linguistic techniques such as BERT, MAXQDA, and ProtAnt. The analysis reveals that Chinese readers are more critical of the themes “Ethnicity and Culture”, “Society and Politics”, and “Wolf and Wolf Nature”, while English readers respond more positively to “Historical Context and Background”, “Plot and Theme”, and “Emotional Response and Reading Experience”. This study not only highlights these emotional variations but also provides robust methodological insights for cross-linguistic sentiment analysis, showcasing the integration of quantitative and qualitative approaches and enhancing understanding of how cultural identity shapes reader engagement.
In the context of world literature, target readers’ aesthetic reception of literary works has shifted from single culture to multiple cultures and has become a crucial factor in social-cultural communication. Shandong dialect, previously misidentified as vulgar expressions in literary research, has proved to have specific aesthetic values as explored in this research. This paper aims to analyse reasons for aesthetic criticism and find solutions to enhance the aesthetic acceptability of Shandong-English translation in Red Sorghum among English readers. Data were collected from different channels, including scholarly critiques, book reviews, blog posts by literary critics, and online forums. A corpus-based methodology is utilized to examine the aesthetic acceptability and reasons for aesthetic criticism by employing a re-framed aesthetic reception theory. Results showed greater frequency of aesthetic acceptance in book reviews than in online forums and blog posts by literary critics, with 53.7 per cent aesthetic acceptance versus 39.7 per cent aesthetic criticism from a total 529 sample data, excluding 6.6 per cent neutrality. Furthermore, book reviews showed a greater tendency towards aesthetic acceptance (64.3%) than online forums (51.5%) and blog posts by literary critics (33.3%). Lastly, the reasons for aesthetic criticism were mainly demonstrated in cultural disparity and defamiliarization of Shandong dialectal expression. The paper concludes by underscoring the significance of shifting from a text-oriented tendency to readers’ expectancy, initiative interaction, and social consciousness in the interaction with literary works. The study contributes reconstructed theory and practical insights for translators to balance the original cultural references and acceptability among English readers.
The theorisation and praxis of socialism in China has had tremendous influence on Western understandings of Marxism, and yet the ways in which Chinese socialism accomplished this, especially in Europe and the United States, remains understudied. The Chinese Communist Revolution not only led to a structural transformation in China, but also had an impact on the ways in which the West—both in socialist and non-socialist regions—engage with their own conceptions of socialism. Mao Zedong, for instance, has had a profound impact on many Western critical theorists, including Louis Althusser, who engaged with his “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” (1942) from the 1960s onwards. Similarly, French intellectuals like Jean-Paul Satre and Julia Kristeva were fascinated by Maoism and visited China during the Cultural Revolution (Žižek, 2007). Beyond these theoretical exchanges, the cultural arena also witnessed the ways in which Chinese socialism has been influential to Western cultural products. In an endeavour to excavate the cultural influence of Chinese socialism, this article examines Song of the Rivers (1954) directed by the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens and China—A Country Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (1956) by Joop Huisken, Ivens’ mentee, and Robert Ménégoz. Both films showcase China in the form of ethnographic travelogues, while foregrounding a sense of transnational political solidarity. In examining the reciprocity of and the interaction between China and East German socialism, I argue that, produced from a perspective of political solidarity, they challenge the kind of orientalist depiction of China exhibited in other Western cultural products. At the same time, the Chinese revolution serves as a form of self-reflection, through which artists in East Germany could envision their own blueprint of socialism and strengthen their understanding of the socialist ideals. Most importantly, bringing Chinese and East German socialist culture alongside each other sheds a new light on the conceptualisation of transnational socialist culture as a form of world literature.
Although Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible (1953) was written centuries after (‘post’) the events in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, it was through this play that we could relate to those events. In this sense, the play was ‘before’ (pre-) the past itself. The dynamic of preposterousness serves, I argue, to work through the past from the viewpoint of the present. The play, then, does not capture or describe a historical reality, but, in its relation to the past, it serves as an analysis not unlike psychoanalysis, as a ‘working through.’ Consequently, the things of the past are not ‘past.’ They are alive in an enacted or dramatized past, and they need to be relived for the purpose of a cure. The Crucible is self-consciously ‘presentist’ or contemporary and not historical in the conventional sense of the term, as Mieke Bal argues. According to the Dutch theorist, the past is present in the present in the form of ‘traces,’ not ‘influences’ (Bal, “Memories in the Museum” 179). However, as we saw in the US during the congressional anti-Communist hearings in the 1950s, such a cure does not materialize at the level of the play’s contemporaneous present, at least not at a collective level.
Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Diversity in a Global Perspective is a captivating collection of research articles. This volume explores the intricate connections between language, culture, and identity across the globe. An agenda-setting introduction by the editors and essays by Liliana Sikorska and Shin-ichi Morimoto establish the scope and stakes of the book as a whole. Chapters by Eri Ohashi, Ruth Karachi Benson Oji, Liliane Hodieb, Zheng Yang, Zhifang Li, and Wanwarang Softic investigate cultural diversity in film. Chapters by Mai Hussein, Wang Chutong, and Darja Zorc Maver offer insights into the linguistic and literary creativity of diasporic and immigrant communities, and a new global context for German literature is developed in chapters by Ekaterina Riabykh, Muharrem Kaplan, and Tomás Espino Barrera. Appealing to scholars, researchers, and students, this interdisciplinary work sheds light on the complexities of our globalized world. Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Diversity in a Global Perspective is a valuable addition to the field, offering fresh perspectives on language, culture, and identity.
What kinds of collectivities might come into being in literature in an age of diverse global readership? This question, pressing for twenty-first-century reevaluations of comparative literature, is not new to Latin American literature and its criticism. This article takes Manuel Puig’s 1980 novel Maldición eterna a quien lea estas páginas as an example of a text that engages in debates of its moment, including reader-response theory and Latin American testimonio, while also looking over their horizons to anticipate the ways the collective “we” of literary studies would be thrown into question in the decades to come. Though the novel, which was written during Puig’s exile in New York and anticipates a metropolitan readership, condemns its reader from the outset to read badly (incompetently, extractively, parasitically), it also suggests that there is ethical value in staying with the textual encounter in which meaning, power, and relation are negotiated. Miscommunication, distortion, and projection may be inevitable when continuity in culture, language, and life experience cannot be assumed between writer, characters, and readers, but Puig’s novel affirms that the creative collaboration (however conflictive) that takes place in the act of reading is what gives rise to new ways of saying “we.”
Dylan Thomas’s poetry can be seen both as minor Welsh literature and world literature. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of field and capital, this article explores the mechanism of translation selection and consecration of Thomas’s poetry in China by using his poetry published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press as an illustrative case study. In so doing, it is argued that the integrated forms of linguistic, economic, and symbolic capital associated with Thomas’s poetry, along with the expiration of its copyright, prompted the publisher to select his poetry for translation to maintain its own dominant position in the Chinese publishing field. The publisher, translator, and other agents have consecrated Thomas’s poetry as world literature in China. This article expands research on inter-peripheral translation flows and ‘sociologies of poetry translation’ and advances interdisciplinary studies of translation and world literature.
La ponencia parte de una suposición: las cuestiones relacionadas con una «conviviality» a nivel global se reflejan de manera particularmente elocuente en el actual debate sobre una «literatura mundial», sobre todo en lo que atañe a la influencia de ciertos actores del ámbito literario. Para ello, centraremos nuestra atención no tanto en un nivel programático de «conviviality», sino más bien en un concepto analítico-descriptivo del mismo: en el nivel descriptivo, esta ponencia aboga por una consideración más intensa, en el marco de ese debate, de las realidades materiales. Reunimos en un mismo análisis las reflexiones sociológico-literarias más recientes sobre el concepto de literatura mundial y las prácticas concretas del mundo editorial y literario. Tomando como base dos ejemplos de las literaturas latinoamericanas del siglo XX ––la, en un primer momento, inexistente recepción de la literatura testimonial de Elena Poniatowska (sobre todo en Alemania) y la circulación internacional, en grandes tiradas, de las novelas de Gabriel García Márquez–– intentamos responder a la pregunta sobre el aporte que podría realizar el trabajo con el material en lo relacionado con un concepto de «literatura mundial» que se entienda también como un espacio de convivialidad.
This article analyzes how Chinese writers in the early twentieth century translated and appropriated Russian literature through the intermediary of Japanese scholarly and creative writing. It traces how Japan began as the primary—and in some cases only—cultural broker in the Chinese reception of Russian literature during the late Qing dynasty and how its impact diminished as Western European sources became viable competitors. To illuminate Japan's unique mediating role in shaping Chinese understanding of both Russian literature and China's own literary and linguistic legacy, this article examines Wu Tao's 1907 relay translation of Chekhov's “The Black Monk” from Japanese. By probing the Sino-Japanese cultural connections that gave birth to this translation and comparing it with two later Chinese renderings from English and Russian versions, this article reflects on the factors that determine how intermediaries function in transcultural negotiations.
Just as reading in general can have an impact on a reader’s interpretation of reality, reading translated works can open up a distinctive understanding of the world, which then leads readers to act on their newly gained sentiments and ideals. The many foreign literary works translated into Chinese at the beginning of the twentieth century had a profound influence on Chinese readers’ perception of romance, marriage, and life. Chinese readers were obsessed with reading translated love stories that shed light on the way romantic love was conceived and expressed in the West. They often took what they read in novels like La dame aux camélias and Immensee to be principles of love in real life, and some even followed the life paths of the protagonists. This phenomenon can be best subsumed under the term Bovarysm, defined by Jules de Gaultier as “the human ability to conceive of oneself as other than one is.” Chinese writers actively engaged with translated love stories to create their own literary works, some of them autobiographical, while others parodied the perceived romantic love found in translated love stories.
In 2021, a 4K-restored rendition of Wong Kar-wai’s iconic film Happy Together (1997) returned to theatres across Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Argentina, marking the film’s enduring transnational appeal two decades after its Cannes premiere. This article investigates the film’s intricate cultural ties to Argentina. I argue that Happy Together not only enhances the cultural connections between Hong Kong and Argentina but also showcases Wong’s translingual and multimodal approaches to film adaptation. ‘Translingual’ refers to the film’s literary source: I demonstrate how Wong skilfully wove elements from Manuel Puig's 1973 novel The Buenos Aires Affair into his film through a threefold Spanish-English-Chinese process of rewriting. Subsequently, I contend that various cultural facets of Argentina—the literature of Puig, the soundscape of Piazzolla’s tango, and the landscapes of the Iguazú Falls and Tierra del Fuego—contributed significantly to the Hong Kong auteur’s multimodal adaptation. In short, this article proposes a dialogic perspective on Hong Kong cinema by considering Argentina as a reflective mirror brimming with aesthetic and geopolitical implications. Through the lens of Happy Together, this study moves beyond Western-centric reception paradigms by spotlighting the cultural and socio-political affinities between Latin America and Asia, thus bringing to the forefront the often-overlooked transpacific connections within the Global South.
Wie vergleichen wir, wenn wir lesen? Und wie lesen wir, wenn wir vergleichen? Die hier versammelten Beiträge widmen sich Verknüpfungen und Interferenzen zwischen Praktiken des Vergleichens und Praktiken des Lesens. Zentral für ihre Analysen sind drei Diskursfelder, in denen Literatur vergleichend gelesen wird: die Literaturwissenschaft, die Literaturkritik und die Literatur selbst. Im Fokus steht dabei, wie Praktiken des Vergleichens zwischen diesen Feldern zirkulieren und sich auf die Lektüre von Literatur auswirken - und wie vergleichendes Lesen in diesem Prozess Literatur als epistemisches, ästhetisches oder soziales Objekt hervorbringt.
Comparisons affect various ways of perceiving and interpreting the world, characterized by distinct legitimization strategies and knowledge application routines by different actors. The contributors to this volume explore the link between change and practices of comparing, focusing on order, representation, and models. They delve into how comparing influences knowledge production, but also focus on persisting orders of knowledge. This collection centers on the role of models and modeling in relation to practices of comparing, thus highlighting the representational and operational force of comparing as a way to form and organize reality.
Resumo O artigo apresenta um panorama conceitual sobre weltliteratur e world literature - em suas diversas articulações -, evidenciando a diversidade conceitual e metodológica que pauta estes conceitos a serem entendidos como paradigmas discursivos historicamente determinados (Pizer, 2006). Observando as transformações destes discursos, a partir de uma perspectiva diacrónica, é possível estabelecer um contraponto com os mais recentes desenvolvimentos do debate em torno da world literature, evidenciando suas potencialidade críticas e metodológicas para o estudo do romance africano contemporâneo.
The literary genre of science fiction in Chinese literatures has historically been inextricable from anxieties about Westernization, national power, and associated debates over terminology. This terminology is deeply invested in the concept of classification and boundary-crossing, through which literary, ideological, and linguistic categories are invested with meaning and value. As such, I analyze how the epistemological genealogies of SF are lost in the English gloss of the both the terms “science” and “science fiction,” leading to potentially significant lacunae in comparative approaches to Sinophone literature. Most notably, the recent interest among Chinese SF scholars in “recuperating” an originary national origin for science fiction in China ultimately relies upon a universal legibility of form that flattens the often very different meanings of “science,” “fiction,” and “science fiction” between Chinese and English. I argue that “Chinese science fiction” is itself a formal fiction of a genre system largely defined and enforced by English hegemony.
This article begins a debate in translation studies about the nature of self-translation in the Sinophone world. It demonstrates the continued influence of a history of cosmopolitan authorship and self-translation that emanated from Republican China and moved to Taiwan and beyond in the post-war period. This history and its contemporary effects, including diverse forms of self-translation in Taiwan and Indonesia, are shown to challenge the most prominent models of self-translation, notably those drawing on sociological frameworks such as Abram de Swaan’s “global language system,” which are proven to occlude local realities and multilingual writing. These new perspectives are shown to have consequences for both world literature studies and theoretical accounts of self-translation in the 21st century.
As the economic and political connections between Africa and China intensify, so too does the cultural exchange between the two. The quantity of translated African literature in China has increased drastically in the new millennium. However, this is not the first period in which African literature has been translated into Chinese; the first two waves of translation activity were in the 1960s and 1980s. How do we understand the cultural exchange and translation activity of the last century from a longue durée perspective? How do we situate them in a theoretical framework beyond the state’s influence while also taking power dynamics into account? What do they or their legacies mean for the present? This paper will first present an overview of Chinese translation of African literature in the twentieth century and its institutionalization in the university curriculum. Through specific cases, especially the canonization of David Diop’s poems, the paper argues for a focus on “crossings” to go beyond the triangulation of China-Africa via the West and exhibit a more diverse and cosmopolitan view of cultural exchange between Africa and China in the twentieth century.
This essay argues that translation, next to other kinds of language ferrying, can be profitably seen as remedial work. To make this point, I discuss five attempts at poetising ‘Cydalise’, a chimera dreamed into being by Théophile Gautier (1811–1872). After introducing it, I investigate three of Gautier's failed textualisations of this chimera and the resulting early tokens of literary chinoiserie and literary pastel. I then explore the disfigurations Cydalise suffers at the hands of Romanian writer Vasile Alecsandri (1821–1890) as he appropriates, refashions and explodes chinoiserie (and distorts pastel) in his endeavour to capture Gautier's ‘dream in its reality’. I next trace the translatorial moves Chinese poet Shao Xunmei (1906–1968) enacts finally to transport Cydalise into text, as he also pays discreet homage to the powers of translation. I conclude by giving firmer contours to the hypertextual landscape I imagine, which equally welcomes originals, translations and everything in between.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author/HTBA5FPDPZIIN9RHDPFY?target=10.1111/oli.12441
Bu makale, Halide Edib Adıvar’ın Ateşten Gömlek (1922) romanının İsveççe çevirisi Eldskjortan’ı (1928) ve bu çeviri temelinde Halide Edib’in İsveç’teki alınmlanmasını, İsveççe arşivlere dayanarak incelemektedir. Bu maksatla, makale öncelikleTürkçeden İsveççeye çevrilen ilk edebî metinlere kısaca değinmekte ve modern Türk edebiyatından bu dile çevrilen ilk metin ve roman olan Eldskjortan’ı söz konusu bağlam içinde konumlandırmaktadır. Makalenin ikinci kısmında, Eldskjortan’ın çeviri süreci ve stratejisi; çevirmenin önsözü ve kitaptaki ekler bölümü, çevirmen Hjalmar Lindquist ve Halide Edib arasındaki mektuplaşmalar ve İsveç Milli Kütüphanesinde bulunan arşiv belgeleri ışığında tartışılmaktadır. Makalenin son bölümündeyse, Eldskjortan’ın ve Türk edebiyatında önemli bir yazar ve tarihsel şahsiyet olarak Halide Edib’in İsveç’te nasıl alımlandığı incelenmektedir. Kısaca, bu makale, Ateşten Gömlek’in İsveççe çevirisinin tarihsel ve edebî bağlamına odaklanarak Türk edebiyatındaki kadın yazarların ulus-ötesi ilişki ve tanınırlığına dair tartışmalara yeni bir örnek vaka sunmaktadır. Ayrıca, bu makale Halide Edib’e ilişkin yeni belge ve bilgilere yer vererek Halide Edib’in biyografisine, özellikle de sürgün yıllarına dair literatüre katkıda bulunmaktadır.
This article seeks to account for the phenomenon where cultural productions are able to transcend different chronotopes and masquerade in myriad forms while sustaining an illusion of itself as a text. Using the Barthian distinction between work and Text as its framework, the article argues that multimodal semiotics offers a theoretically viable perspective on the global circulation of cultural artifacts by way of the concepts of memes, distribution, resemiotization, and assemblage. The central argument is this: what we call a text in common parlance is in fact a node within a networked assemblage of individually constituted works loosely connected through a substrate recognizability of memes. Operating at the level of this network is the Barthian Text that is always in‐progress and can never really be completed. The article concludes by proposing that with the imminence of Web 5.0 and in light of the ever‐pervasive influence of artificial intelligence in cultural production, it is imperative that we adopt nonlinear thinking to understand the shifting semioscapes in digital space and their impact on contemporary textuality.
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