Review of Michael Allan, "In the Shadow of World Literature" (original) (raw)
Related papers
Reading the World: What is World Literature?
This is a paper written to contemplate the make-up of the World Literature Canon and to discuss what should be included in that canon. This paper was written during my senior year at The University of Tampa for Dr. Dooghan's Contemporary World Literature (Lit 312) class.
2019
Literature and the World presents a broad and multifaceted introduction to world literature and globalization. The book provides a brief background and history of the field followed by a wide spectrum of exemplary readings and case studies from around the world. Amongst other aspects of World Literature, the authors look at: New approaches to digital humanities and world literature Ecologies of world literature Rethinking geography in a globalized world Translation Race and political economy Offering state of the art debates on world literature, this volume is a superb introduction to the field. Its critically thoughtful approach makes this the ideal guide for anyone approaching World Literature.
Four Perspectives on World Literature: Reader, Producer, Text and System
Tensions in World Literature
The central question of the summit dialogue on world literature, which was held in Beijing, was on the relation between the universal and the local. This question implicates that the phenomenon of world literature could be seen from a relational instead of from an essentialist perspective. Hence I would like to state that in order to understand what world literature is we have to understand it generally as a network of relations, not as a set of objects, for instance a set of literary texts. A central but not the only axis of these relations is the tension between the universal and the local. Objects we classify, while relations we discern as belonging to different types of relations. From this disparity, diverging approaches to the problem of world literature emerge. Understanding world literature as a relation allows us to comprehend its processual character. World literature does not exist, but takes place.
Four perspectives on world literature 220200528 80868 1ulbfcv
Four perspectives on world literature-reader, producer, text, and system The central question of the summit dialogue on world literature, which was held in Beijing, was on the relation between the universal and the local. This question implicates, that the phenomenon of world literature could be seen from a relational instead of from an essentialist perspective. Hence I would like to state that in order to understand what world literature is we have to understand it generally as a network of relations, not as a set of objects, for instance, as a set of literary texts. A central, but not the only axis of these relations, is the tension between the universal and the local. Objects we classify, while relations we discern as belonging to different types of relations. From this disparity, diverging approaches to the problem of world literature emerge. Understanding world literature as a relation allows us to comprehend its processual character. World literature does not exist, but takes place. In the following, I will try to provide a relational approach to world literature with some emphasis on the tension between the universal and the local. Such a relational approach makes it necessary to discern different focuses on the relation, in which world literature takes place. These four focuses I will discuss subsequently. My argument will be illustrated by significant examples-by Chekhov's shard reflecting the moonlight, Gombrowicz's national poets' showdown, Sartre's sad autodidact and David Damrosch's reading of Pavić's "Dictionary of the Khazars". The first and most obvious focus is the reader's perspective. Most debate on world literature is limited to it. Goethe, however, most likely did not have the reader's focus in mind, when he coined the term world literature, but rather the producer's focus. I call the producer's focus the second possible focus on world literature. What does it mean to produce world literature or literature for the (whole?) world? How can a producer of literature deal with world literature? How is he or she connected to world literature? There are, however, two more focuses on world literature. They are not held individually, but systematically, namely, by the single work of literature and by the literary system as a whole. According to Yuri Tynjanov ("On literary evolution"), 1 a work of literature simultaneously has an auto-function and a syn-function. From the perspective of auto-function, a work of art is a semantic system by itself, while from the
World Literature: Perspectives and Debates, Ed. Andrew N. Rubin
2014
As one of the fits non-EUROPEAN journals to critically analyze the category of world literature bilingually ªin arabic and english) from the global south, this special collections includes multiple perspectives, including the discussion of the first arabic translation of Erich Auerbach's "Philologie und Weltlitertur. "
The evident interconnectedness of the contemporary world, the increasingly porosity of borders and the development of communication technology necessarily forces us to think about literature on a global level. The study of World Literature, of what exactly World Literature entails, what it includes, and of how we, as readers, students and academics, can successfully tackle the global literary production effectively, allows us to access a wider, more inclusive perspective on the production of texts and culture in the world, while taking into consideration the dense network of international links we are inevitably a part of. From approximately the second half of the 20 th century, the academic debate regarding the choice of methodology for the study, teaching and analysis of World Literature, has become more heated and controversial, and it still hasn't exhausted itself. The chronological correspondence between the beginning of World Literature studies and the publication of seminal texts on post-colonial studies is not a coincidence: the Warwick Research Collective, amongst a variety of scholars holding a similar view, identifies an inherent connection between the issue of world literature studies and post-colonial (and neo-colonial) discourse: '"World literature" is in the first instance an extension of comparative literature, and might be understood as the remaking of comparative literature after the multicultural debates and the disciplinary critique of Eurocentrism' 1 .
Epilogue The Changing Concept of World Literature
World Literature in Theory, 2014
A critical survey of the various concepts of world literature in the past and the present, and argues for a more inclusive view of major literary traditions and their canonical works as part of world literature.
The Limits of World Literature
This essay examines recent work on world literature theory, with a particular focus on those theorists who treat individual texts as in dialogue with the circulations of linguistic and cultural translation. I treat world literature as the theory without an object and make the counterintuitive claim that its objectlessness makes it well suited for leaving behind antiquated modes of categorizing and canonizing so-called world texts, in order to make room for new kinds of structured thinking about the world. The essay begins with an introduction to the manifold interconnections of the new world literature, including its broad overlap with fields of globalization, translation studies, comparative literature, and postcolonialism. I position four key theorists of 21st century world literature – Emily Apter, Rebecca Walkowitz, Berthold Schoene, and David Palumbo-Liu – in oppositional pairs in order to show the underlying commonality in their thinking about the value of a literature of and for the world. My entry point into the " thinking machine " of the world literature text is the concept of the limit. Far from the commonplace understanding of limit as a limitation or boundary, I argue that understanding world literature at the limit allows literary texts and theory to be read as an event of thinking that is in-process, in-common, and incomplete, an analogue to the necessary impossibility of knowing the world. " in der beschränkung zeigt sich der meister " (" It is in the limit that the master is proven. ") Goethe I will begin with the premise that world literature does not exist. Or, more specifically, the object of world literature, much like the concordance in Jorge Borges's " Library of Babel, " cannot be located. The term itself is a stand-in for a constellation of loosely aligned fields of comparative literary studies, 1 and in its most recent iteration as the literary parallel to social/political/ economical globalization, it has become elastic to the point of transparency. 2 Indeed, world literature has, rightly or wrongly, been the bête noir of literary criticism for some time, " treated, " as Mads Rosendahl Thomsen reminds us, as " too antiquarian, too idealistic and almost void of any methodical ideas for handling what is obviously too much for any individual or group, even, to master " (5). With the exception of some vestigial efforts, that project of labeling and categorizing particular texts from national literatures into a world system of location and classification has largely been abandoned. 3 But the lingering suspicion that world literature retains much of its retrograde, neoliberal undergirding (the homogenizing of culture; the processes of globalization ; a naïve anglophilia; and conservative canon protection) has shadowed the recent emergence of a number of newly rebranded forms of world literature theory. 4 It comes as no surprise then that each of the theorist/critics that touched upon in this essay identifies themselves as operating in fields distinct from world literature; these include the following: new comparative literature, translation theory, globalization, cosmopolitanism, and postcolonialism. Despite arguments to the contrary, each of these modes of reading and mapping global systems and
Literature Is Us and We Are Literature: Global and Universal Perspective
International Journal of Culture and History , 2023
This paper takes into view literature on a global scale and from throughout time to investigate what we can say about its general and specific relevance for human society. The issue raised here pertains not only to the relevance of literature per se, but specifically to the question of how it relates to us as human beings, defining us in endless ways. In order to illustrate the central points addressed in this paper, numerous examples from the Middle Ages to the modern world are drawn from, such as Hartmann von Aue's Der arme Heinrich (ca. 1190), Don Juan Manuel's El Conde Lucanor (1335), Bertolt Brecht's ballads, and Robert Frost's modern poetry. The conclusion emphasizes that the critical function of literature in all human societies cannot be overestimated. At the risk of preaching to the converted, here we are confronted with the ultimate challenge in the Humanities once again. Insofar as literature has always mirrored, or engaged with, the fundamental issues in human life, we can establish its function as life-determining in philosophical, religious, political, ethical, or moral terms.