Institutions of World Literature

Institutions of World Literature PDF Author: Stefan Helgesson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317565584
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
This volume engages critically with the recent and ongoing consolidation of "world literature" as a paradigm of study. On the basis of an extended, active, and ultimately more literary sense of what it means to institute world literature, it views processes of institutionalization not as limitations, but as challenges to understand how literature may simultaneously function as an enabling and exclusionary world of its own. It starts from the observation that literature is never simply a given, but is always performatively and materially instituted by translators, publishers, academies and academics, critics, and readers, as well as authors themselves. This volume therefore substantiates, refines, as well as interrogates current approaches to world literature, such as those developed by David Damrosch, Pascale Casanova, and Emily Apter. Sections focus on the poetics of writers themselves, market dynamics, postcolonial negotiations of discrete archives of literature, and translation, engaging a range of related disciplines. The chapters contribute to a fresh understanding of how singular literary works become inserted in transnational systems and, conversely, how transnational and institutional dimensions of literature are inflected in literary works. Focusing its methodological and theoretical inquiries on a broad archive of texts spanning the triangle Europe-Latin America-Africa, the volume unsettles North America as the self-evident vantage of recent world literature debates. Because of the volume’s focus on dialogues between world literature and fields such as postcolonial studies, translation studies, book history, and transnational studies, it will be of interest to scholars and students in a range of areas.

Institutions of World Literature

Institutions of World Literature PDF Author: Stefan Helgesson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317565584
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book

Book Description
This volume engages critically with the recent and ongoing consolidation of "world literature" as a paradigm of study. On the basis of an extended, active, and ultimately more literary sense of what it means to institute world literature, it views processes of institutionalization not as limitations, but as challenges to understand how literature may simultaneously function as an enabling and exclusionary world of its own. It starts from the observation that literature is never simply a given, but is always performatively and materially instituted by translators, publishers, academies and academics, critics, and readers, as well as authors themselves. This volume therefore substantiates, refines, as well as interrogates current approaches to world literature, such as those developed by David Damrosch, Pascale Casanova, and Emily Apter. Sections focus on the poetics of writers themselves, market dynamics, postcolonial negotiations of discrete archives of literature, and translation, engaging a range of related disciplines. The chapters contribute to a fresh understanding of how singular literary works become inserted in transnational systems and, conversely, how transnational and institutional dimensions of literature are inflected in literary works. Focusing its methodological and theoretical inquiries on a broad archive of texts spanning the triangle Europe-Latin America-Africa, the volume unsettles North America as the self-evident vantage of recent world literature debates. Because of the volume’s focus on dialogues between world literature and fields such as postcolonial studies, translation studies, book history, and transnational studies, it will be of interest to scholars and students in a range of areas.

Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature

Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature PDF Author: Gloria Fisk
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231544820
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
When Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, he was honored as a builder of bridges across a dangerous chasm. By rendering his Turkish characters and settings familiar where they would otherwise seem troublingly foreign, and by speaking freely against his authoritarian state, he demonstrated a variety of literary greatness that testified also to the good literature can do in the world. Gloria Fisk challenges this standard for canonization as “world literature” by showing how poorly it applies to Pamuk. Reading the Turkish novelist as a case study in the ways Western readers expand their reach, Fisk traces the terms of his engagement with a literary market dominated by the tastes of its Anglophone publics, who received him as a balm for their anxieties about Islamic terrorism and the stratifications of global capitalism. Fisk reads Pamuk’s post-9/11 novels as they circulated through this audience, as rich in cultural capital as it is far-flung, in the American English that is global capital’s lingua franca. She launches a polemic against Anglophone readers’ instrumental use of literature as a source of crosscultural understanding, contending that this pervasive way of reading across all manner of borders limits the globality it announces, because it serves the interests of the Western cultural and educational institutions that produce it. Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature proposes a new way to think about the uneven processes of translation, circulation, and judgment that carry contemporary literature to its readers, wherever they live.

Recoding World Literature

Recoding World Literature PDF Author: B. Venkat Mani
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823273423
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Winner, 2018 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures, Modern Language Association Winner, 2018 German Studies Association DAAD Book Prize in Germanistik and Cultural Studies. From the current vantage point of the transformation of books and libraries, B. Venkat Mani presents a historical account of world literature. By locating translation, publication, and circulation along routes of “bibliomigrancy”—the physical and virtual movement of books—Mani narrates how world literature is coded and recoded as literary works find new homes on faraway bookshelves. Mani argues that the proliferation of world literature in a society is the function of a nation’s relationship with print culture—a Faustian pact with books. Moving from early Orientalist collections, to the Nazi magazine Weltliteratur, to the European Digital Library, Mani reveals the political foundations for a history of world literature that is at once a philosophical ideal, a process of exchange, a mode of reading, and a system of classification. Shifting current scholarship’s focus from the academic to the general reader, from the university to the public sphere, Recoding World Literature argues that world literature is culturally determined, historically conditioned, and politically charged.

On the Horizon of World Literature

On the Horizon of World Literature PDF Author: Emily Sun
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823294811
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
On the Horizon of World Literature compares literary texts from asynchronous periods of incipient literary modernity in different parts of the world: Romantic England and Republican China. These moments were oriented alike by “world literature” as a discursive framework of classifications that connected and re-organized local articulations of literary histories and literary modernities. World literature thus provided—and continues to provide—a condition of possibility for conversation between cultures as well as for their mutual provincialization. The book offers readings of a selection of literary forms that serve also as textual sites for the enactment of new socio-political forms of life. The literary manifesto, the tale collection, the familiar essay, and the domestic novel function as testing grounds for questions of both literary-aesthetic and socio-political importance: What does it mean to attain a voice? What is a common reader? How does one dwell in the ordinary? What is a woman? In different languages and activating heterogeneous literary and philosophical traditions, works by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lu Xun, Charles and Mary Lamb, Lin Shu, Zhou Zuoren, Jane Austen, and Eileen Chang explore the far-from-settled problem of what it means to be modern in different lifeworlds. Sun’s book brings to light the disciplinary-historical impact world literature has had in shaping literary traditions and practices around the world. The book renews the practice of close reading by offering the model of a deprovincialized close reading loosened from confinement within monocultural hermeneutic circles. By means of its own focus on England and China, the book provides methods useful for comparatists working between other Western and non-Western languages. It establishes the critical significance of Romanticism for the discipline of literary studies and opens up new paths of research in global Romanticism and global nineteenth-century studies. And it offers a new approach to analyzing the cosmopolitan character of the literary and cultural transformations of early twentieth-century China.

UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary

UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary PDF Author: Sarah Brouillette
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503610322
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
A case study of one of the most important global institutions of cultural policy formation, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary demonstrates the relationship between such policymaking and transformations in the economy. Focusing on UNESCO's use of books, Sarah Brouillette identifies three phases in the agency's history and explores the literary and cultural programming of each. In the immediate postwar period, healthy economies made possible the funding of an infrastructure in support of a liberal cosmopolitanism and the spread of capitalist democracy. In the decolonizing 1960s and '70s, illiteracy and lack of access to literature were lamented as a "book hunger" in the developing world, and reading was touted as a universal humanizing value to argue for a more balanced communications industry and copyright regime. Most recently, literature has become instrumental in city and nation branding that drive tourism and the heritage industry. Today, the agency largely treats high literature as a commercially self-sustaining product for wealthy aging publics, and fundamental policy reform to address the uneven relations that characterize global intellectual property creation is off the table. UNESCO's literary programming is in this way highly suggestive. A trajectory that might appear to be one of triumphant success—literary tourism and festival programming can be quite lucrative for some people—is also, under a different light, a story of decline.

What Is World Literature?

What Is World Literature? PDF Author: David Damrosch
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691188645
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
World literature was long defined in North America as an established canon of European masterpieces, but an emerging global perspective has challenged both this European focus and the very category of "the masterpiece." The first book to look broadly at the contemporary scope and purposes of world literature, What Is World Literature? probes the uses and abuses of world literature in a rapidly changing world. In case studies ranging from the Sumerians to the Aztecs and from medieval mysticism to postmodern metafiction, David Damrosch looks at the ways works change as they move from national to global contexts. Presenting world literature not as a canon of texts but as a mode of circulation and of reading, Damrosch argues that world literature is work that gains in translation. When it is effectively presented, a work of world literature moves into an elliptical space created between the source and receiving cultures, shaped by both but circumscribed by neither alone. Established classics and new discoveries alike participate in this mode of circulation, but they can be seriously mishandled in the process. From the rediscovered Epic of Gilgamesh in the nineteenth century to Rigoberta Menchú's writing today, foreign works have often been distorted by the immediate needs of their own editors and translators. Eloquently written, argued largely by example, and replete with insightful close readings, this book is both an essay in definition and a series of cautionary tales.

World Literature in Motion

World Literature in Motion PDF Author: Flair Donglai Shi
Publisher: Ibidem Press
ISBN: 9783838211633
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
By bringing in different degrees of circulation in different regions and languages, this collection shows that while literary centers do exist in what Pascale Casanova calls "the international literary space," their power does not operate unilaterally and modes of intercultural circulation do exist beyond their control. The title World Literature in Motion highlights the fact that world literature is always already the product of certain modes of conceptual and material mobility and mediation.

World Literature in Theory

World Literature in Theory PDF Author: David Damrosch
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118407695
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 550

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Book Description
World Literature in Theory provides a definitive exploration of the pressing questions facing those studying world literature today. Coverage is split into four parts which examine the origins and seminal formulations of world literature, world literature in the age of globalization, contemporary debates on world literature, and localized versions of world literature Contains more than 30 important theoretical essays by the most influential scholars, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Hugo Meltzl, Edward Said, Franco Moretti, Jorge Luis Borges, and Gayatri Spivak Includes substantive introductions to each essay, as well as an annotated bibliography for further reading Allows students to understand, articulate, and debate the most important issues in this rapidly changing field of study

The Cambridge History of World Literature

The Cambridge History of World Literature PDF Author: Debjani Ganguly
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009064452
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1147

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Book Description
World Literature is a vital part of twentieth-first century critical and comparative literary studies. As a field that engages seriously with function of literary studies in our global era, the study of World literature requires new approaches. The Cambridge History of World Literature is founded on the assumption that World Literature is not all literatures of the world nor a canonical set of globally successful literary works. It highlights scholarship on literary works that focus on the logics of circulation drawn from multiple literary cultures and technologies of the textual. While not rejecting the nation as a site of analysis, these volumes will offer insights into new cartographies – the hemispheric, the oceanic, the transregional, the archipelagic, the multilingual local – that better reflect the multi-scalar and spatially dispersed nature of literary production. It will interrogate existing historical, methodological and cartographic boundaries, and showcase humanistic and literary endeavors in the face of world scale environmental and humanitarian catastrophes.

The Routledge Companion to World Literature

The Routledge Companion to World Literature PDF Author: Theo D'haen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113665576X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
In the age of globalization, the category of "World Literature" is increasingly important to academic teaching and research. The Routledge Companion to World Literature offers a comprehensive pathway into this burgeoning and popular field. Separated into four key sections, the volume covers: the history of World Literature through significant writers and theorists from Goethe to Said, Casanova and Moretti the disciplinary relationship of World Literature to areas such as philology, translation, globalization and diaspora studies theoretical issues in World Literature including gender, politics and ethics a global perspective on the politics of World Literature. The forty-eight outstanding contributors to this companion offer an ideal introduction to those approaching the field for the first time, or looking to further their knowledge of this extensive field.