World Literatures Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

One of the principal yet not favored consequences of approaching al-nahḍah has been representing it as another paramount example of world literature. There is, however, little interest in foregrounding what the (Arab) nahḍah does not share with the other renaissances, that is, the literary/cultural phenomena that are closely culture-bound. In view of seeing al-nahḍah's “Big Picture,” a global-only or local-only approach is inadequate and short of intellectual insight. Therefore, the idiosyncratic, diverse, and, at times, complex textual and cultural productions of the (Arab) nahḍah call for a “glocal” approach. Al-nahḍah's diverse narratives and literacies invoke, among other things, questions of translingualism and multimodality. With the advent of printing, radical and lasting transformations underwent al-nahḍah's narratives and literacies, as with the reception of zajal recitals for both reading and listening audiences. In addition, the shift from manuscripts to printed books not only radically changed literacy conventions but likewise introduced “new” arts like book illustration, caricature, and comics, not to overlook fundamental developments in composition. More specifically, the journals of Ya'qūb Ṣannū' (1839–1912), where fuṣḥā Arabic, colloquial Egyptian, and French coexist, along with illustrated caricatures, can be viewed as evidence of al-nahḍah's translingual and multimodal literacies.

- by Alaaeldin Mahmoud
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- World Literatures, Literacy, Globalization, Glocalization

This is a pre-print English-language draft of an article that has been translated into Portuguese for a special issue on “A Literatura-Mundial e o Sistema-Mundial Modern”(World-Literature and the Modern World-System) of Via Atlântica 40 (2021), edited by Mário César Lugarinho, Paulo de Medeiros, and Emanuelle Rodrigues dos Santos, and available at https://doi.org/10.11606/va.i40.173463

- by Simone Pettine and +2
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- Cultural Studies, World Literatures, Humanities, Italian Literature

This article examines how Salman Rushdie's Fury (2001) registers a signal crisis of American hegemony through its hyperreal production of an aesthetics of excess, constituted by fragmented subjectivities, a frenetic narrative form, references to the decaying years of the Roman Empire, and irruptions of violence against women. The text's libidinal investment of personal anguish with public discontent, or a psychopathological fury, is read through Fredric Jameson's account of third-world allegory as a symptom of the novel's registration of America's hegemonic decline. The scalping of several upper-class young women in New York City by their financier boyfriends is examined as an aspect of the text's aesthetics of excess and use of allegory, which frames the violent interrelation between public discontent and private hubris. The murdered women are read as symbols of American hegemony and class under threat by turbulent financial markets, and hoarding their scalps is represented as a crude and violent attempt by their boyfriends to halt the dwindling value of America's cultural capital and financial markets.

- by Treasa De Loughry
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- World Literatures, Postcolonial Studies
- by Marc Caplan
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- World Literatures, Comparative Literature, Yiddish Literature, Jewish Studies

NEW BOOK SERIES: Maritime Literature and Culture offers alternative rubrics for literary and cultural studies to those of nation, continent and area, which inter-articulate with current debates on comparative and world literatures, globalization and planetary or Anthropocene thought in illuminating ways. The humanities have paid increasing attention to oceans, islands and shores as sites of cultural production, while the maritime imagination in contemporary literatures and other cultural forms has presented ways of responding to human migration, global neoliberalism and climate change. This series provides a forum for discussion of these and other maritime expressions, including enquiries that engage maritime and coastal zones as spaces that enable reflection on labour and leisure; racial terror and performances of freedom; environmental wonder and degradation; metaphor and materiality; and the various implications of globe, world and planet.

- by Meg Samuelson
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- Cultural Studies, World Literatures, Pacific Island Studies, Literature
- by Firuza Melville
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- World Literatures, Persian Literature

Geçmişin savaşçı kültürlerinin edebiyat alanındaki izdüşümü olan destanlar, anlatı türü olarak tanımlanabilmek için belirli birtakım özellikler sergilerler. Savaşçı, cesur ve neredeyse insanüstü özelliklere sahip kahramanların ekseninde gelişen olaylar savaşçı kültür kodları ile beslenir. Soylu akrabalardan oluşan yönetici sınıfa mensup savaşçıların hükümdarlarına her koşulda sadık kalması gerekirken hükümdarlarının onları ganimet, toprak veya diğer savaş yağmaları ile cömertçe ödüllendirmesi beklenir. Modern adalet sisteminin henüz oluşmadığı zamanları hikâyelendiren destan kahramanları, toplumlarının içinden ya da dışından düşmanlara ve hatta ejderha ve devler gibi doğaüstü güçlere karşı kendinden yardım bekleyen halkları korumak zorundadır. Tetikte bekleyen ölüme karşı kazanılan her zafer, varoluşsal bir sevinci simgeleyen ziyafetlerle kutlanır. Dünya edebiyatında ilk ve orta çağ dönemlerine ait, çoğu sözlü gelenek ürünü, farklı coğrafyalarda ortaya çıkmış birçok destan bulunmaktadır. Bu destanlar anlatı türünün gerektirdiği ortak unsurları taşımalarına rağmen var oldukları kültürlerin aralarındaki farklılıklar sebebiyle birbirlerinden ayrışırlar. Bu çalışmada Türk edebiyat geleneğinin en önemli epik eserlerinden Dede Korkut Kitabı ile eski İngiliz edebiyatının en bilinen örneklerinden Beowulf destanı karşılaştırmalı edebiyat çerçevesinde ele alınacaktır. Dede Korkut Kitabı on üç boylamadan oluşur ve her boylamanın odağında farklı kahramanlar bulunmaktadır. Bu anlatıları bir araya getiren ve destanları birbirine bağlayan ana kahraman ise Oğuz toplumunun en saygın kişisi bilge Dede Korkut’tur. Çeşitli Anglosakson kabilelerinin ıstıraplarını anlatan Beowulf destanında ise olaylar bir kahramanın merkezinde gelişir. Bu iki destan evlilik, aile yapıları, kadın erkek ilişkileri gibi konularda Oğuz ve Anglosakson toplumlarına dair birçok detaya işaret eder.

- by Fatoş Işıl Britten (Cihan)
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- World Literatures, Comparative Literature
- by Historically Digitized
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- Cartography, Law, World Literatures, Renewable Energy
- by Annika Mörte Alling
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- World Literatures, Comparative Literature, French Literature, Literature
- by César Domínguez and +1
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- World Literatures, Comparative Literature, World Literature

Purple Hibiscus is an African postcolonial Gothic tale cautioning and warning against the falsely assumed sense of absolutism of the Roman Catholic Church and its definitive contestation with the concept of tradition. Adichie’s auto-fiction tells a tale of a child transgressing beyond a complicated set of interwoven boundaries in order to find herself and establish herself in the realms of religion and tradition – embodying two assumed contesting concepts. It is only through an extreme disassociation with herself that Kambili finds a sense of physical and emotional piece and forgiveness – she assumes the role of Kambili that was previously denied by her tyrannical father. Kambili’s shared, yet emotionally exclusive experiences with her mother and brother Jaja, provided the opportunity for these characters to emancipate themselves from the absolutist dystopian reality they were led to believe was the only reality.

- by Dedre Engelbrecht
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- African Studies, World Literatures, English Literature, African History

The systematic review focused on the prognosis, mortality, medications, and promising vaccines for COVID-19. COVID-19 severity varies. Mild cases often recover within two weeks, while people with severe diseases may take 3 – 6 weeks to recover. Among people who died, the time from the onset of symptom to death ranged from 2 – 8 weeks. Children constitute a small percentage of reported cases, with around 1% of cases under 10 years and 4% aged 10 to 19 years. The risk of death is below 0.5% in those younger than 50 years, while more than 8% in those older than 70. Most of the people who die of COVID-19 have pre-existing conditions, including diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular disease, and hypertension. The impact of COVID-19 and its rate of mortality are different for both men and women; mortality rate is higher in men. As of May 2020, it is not known if past infection provides long-term and effective immunity in those who recover from the viral disease. Some of the infected people were reported to develop protective antibodies; the acquired immunity is presumed possible, based on other coronaviruses’ behaviour. The total infection fatality rate (IFR) is estimated to be 0.66%. No approved vaccine to treat the disease yet. International research on medicines and vaccines in COVID-19 is underway by academic groups, industry researchers, and government organizations. As of May 2020, there are over 300 active clinical trials underway. Many existing medications are under evaluation for COVID-19 treatment, including remdesivir, chloroquine, lopinavir/ritonavir, hydroxychloroquine, and lopinavir/ritonavir combined with interferon beta; as of May 2020, there is tentative evidence for remdesivir efficacy. Other candidates in trials are vasodilators, immune therapies, lipoic acid, corticosteroids, recombinant angiotensin-converting enzyme 2, bevacizumab, etc. Preliminary evidence suggests hydroxychloroquine might have anti-cytokine storm properties. Transferring concentrated and purified antibodies produced by immune systems of those who recovered from COVID-19 to those who need them is being investigated as non-vaccine method of passive immunization.

- by Chinaza G Awuchi
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- Microbiology, World Literatures, Infectious disease epidemiology, Vaccines

Taking up the roles that Salman Rushdie himself has assumed as a cultural broker, gatekeeper, and mediator in various spheres of public production, Ana Cristina Mendes situates his work in terms of the contemporary production, circulation, and consumption of postcolonial texts within the workings of the cultural industries. Mendes pays particular attention to Rushdie as a public performer across various creative platforms, not only as a novelist and short story writer, but also as a public intellectual, reviewer, and film critic. Mendes argues that how a postcolonial author becomes personally and professionally enmeshed in the dealings of the cultural industries is of particular relevance at a time when the market is strictly regulated by a few multinational corporations. She contends that marginality should not be construed exclusively as a basis for understanding Rushdie’s work, since a critical grounding in marginality will predictably involve a reproduction of the traditional postcolonial binaries of oppressor/oppressed and colonizer/colonized that the writer subverts. Rather, she seeks to expand existing interpretations of Rushdie’s work, itineraries, and frameworks in order to take into account the actual conditions of postcolonial cultural production and circulation within a marketplace that is global in both orientation and effects.

- by Ana Cristina Mendes
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- Cultural Studies, World Literatures, Postcolonial Literature, Salman Rushdie
- by Arif Tapan
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- World Literatures, Comparative Literature, Literature, Literary Criticism

Myriad iterations of Debord's society of the spectacle circulated in a frenzy as the visual horror of September 11 unraveled on screens around the world. Another auteur/theatrical personage who was variously invoked as the world witnessed falling figures from the towers was Anton Artaud, the celebrated exponent of the Theatre of Cruelty. This chapter explores the ramifications for the world novel of the aesthetic excess of these visual and performative interpretations that variously came into play during this unprecedented act of terrorist warfare. How, I ask, does the contemporary novel constellate twenty-first century warfare as sensorium, performance and spectacle? What narrative and tropological strategies does it marshal? I begin with an exploration of the aesthetic and ethical conundrum that the performative model of the theatre of cruelty poses in accounting for the WTC terrorist attack, and then explicate in some detail the ways in which the novel addresses this conundrum. The tense interplay between performance as trope and performance as terror will be central to my explication. Theatres of Cruelty Art Spiegelman's iconic graphic novel, In the Shadow of No Towers, begins with a preface entitled 'The Sky is Falling', where he vividly describes the prolonged temporality of the end-of-the-world kind of terror he experienced on seeing the burning towers. A 'Slow motion diary,' he calls it. Tempered by his reflections on the radical transformation of America and the world, and his desire to make sense not just of the immediate horror of the event but its long-term ramifications, the preface is a snapshot of a novelistic imagination at work. It promises a careful calibration of the event, points of view, plots, characters, tropes and images-in other words, a mode of aesthetic meditation that is simultaneously sensitive to the incomprehensible horror of the event and distant from the visual noise of the spectacle. The object of his meditation is an image that haunted him for years after the tragedy. This was, as he

This article reconsiders Richard Wright's Native Son by comparing divergences between the published novel and an earlier typeset manuscript. It argues that such revisions render protagonist Bigger Thomas an icon of global class conflict rather than a national figure of racial tension. By revealing the continuities among critical essays that bookend the writing of Native Son, this essay also reveals how the novel's restructuring further elaborates Wright's globalism – highlighting his desire to produce work that transcended both national and racial categories. Finally, it considers Native Son as a work of “world literature” and a model for global minoritarian discourse. By examining “translations” of the novel into postcolonial contexts, it argues that the global afterlife of Native Son is no departure from the localized vision of the novel, but rather the recapitulation of its explicit globalism. This article thereby challenges critical convention dividing Wright's c...

This paper follows with detail the history of the way in which comparative literature is born in France and the history of its tradition until today, especially in the United States. It intends to show that the reasons of the discipline emergence are the need to complement the model imposed by the study of literature in its strictly national context. In fact, we will show that this emergence is completely subordinated to the hegemony of those national literatures. Moreover, the article studies certain symptomatic moments in which, by getting rid of that hegemony, its object of study and methodology become more imprecise; actually, the discipline acknowledges receipt of the inconveniences brought by that amplitude. Finally, the paper argues that the way in which comparatism is articulated in the field of American cultural studies reveals a basis in determined hegemonic spaces, built in first person, that puts again at the forefront the problem of national identity.

- by Manuel Abeledo
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- World Literatures, Comparative Literature, Political Science, World Literature

Found in *Teaching Arabic Literature in Translation* edited by Michelle Hartman (MLA Publications 2018; pp 41-61), this essay is an exploration of the potential pedagogical spaces of alternative methodologies and theories for teaching Arabic literature in English translation in North American university classrooms. This proposal encourages academics—specialists, comparativists, and generalists alike—to reflect not only on the contexts of Arabic literary production (i.e., the context of the text, author, language, etc.) but also on the social relations in which educators, their students, classrooms, and institutions are enmeshed with the translation, circulation, deployment, and reading of Arabic texts within any given political moment. In exploring teaching Arabic literature in translation, this chapter takes a decolonial approach where the students and instructor not only locate themselves in regards to the text and the origins of that Arabic text (for example, in the age of the Cold War, the American Unipolar World, or post-American Empire). But also, the pedagogical thoughtfulness considers ideological constructs of reading and writing (the commuting between the context, history and contact points of Arabic and English) that might be mutually untranslatable but also could yield ways to decenter the coloniality of the learning process in US higher education and its experience with the Global South.

- by Stephen Sheehi
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- World Literatures, Translation Studies, Arabic Literature, Translation

Rose Harris-Birtill analyses the secular reworking of Buddhist religious influences across David Mitchell’s complete fictions, including his novels, short stories, and libretti, arguing that their shared ethical perspectives draw them into a continuous post-secular world, and introducing the Tibetan Buddhist mandala as a fittingly post-secular comparative model through which to analyse Mitchell’s fictional worldview. Harris-Birtill demonstrates that Mitchell’s fictions cumulatively map not a physical terrain but the metaphysical world of belief, creating an interconnected world-system in order to suggest new ethical approaches to global humanitarian crises, revaluing the role of secular belief in galvanising both compassionate action and collective resistance. This study also reads the recurring character of Marinus as a form of secular bodhisattva, analysing Mitchell’s use of reincarnation as a form of non-linear temporality aimed at generating future-facing ethical action amidst the worryingly linear temporality of the Anthropocene. Harris-Birtill also identifies shared post-secular world-building in other contemporary literature, analysing novels by Michael Ondaatje, Ali Smith, Yann Martel, Will Self and Margaret Atwood in order to suggest the emerging literary category of mandalic literature. This perceptive study combines Buddhist philosophy with critical theory, drawing on Jung, Derrida, Foucault and Spivak, alongside contemporary theories of metamodernism and globalization. Taking a post-Jungian approach to the Tibetan mandala not as an ahistorical symbol but as a living socio-cultural artefact in diaspora, Harris-Birtill also identifies the wider implications of the mandala’s theorisation, noting the urgent need to resituate this ‘holistic’ symbol within the ongoing socio-political struggles that led to its increased international visibility.

- by Rose Harris-Birtill
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- Buddhism, World Literatures, Buddhist Philosophy, Jungian psychology

Although the first world, as seen through the lens of academia, seems to be prospering, and the third world has found its own place in the postcolonial intellectual order, the post-cold war world of semi-peripheries in East and Central Europe (ECE) has largely disappeared from the discourse of Comparative Literature. It sometimes appears as a convenient intellectual counterpoint or is included in postmodernist or postcolonial narratives; in both cases, however, it doesn’t convey regional specificity or allow local voices to speak. Both strategies – core and postcolonial – expropriate the semi-peripheral realm of second-world non-places.

- by Adam F. Kola
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- Philology, Intellectual History, World Literatures, Comparative Literature

These poems, composed in Somali and in English, provide a poetic reflection of the recently emerged debate on the theme of Caddaan Studies which means "White Studies". The criticism and counter-criticism contained in the debate dug so deep into life nerve of Somali Studies that over a thousand people participated. The poems, under the title "Inaugurating Caddaan Studies" were composed with a critical observation of the debate.

- by Mohamed A Eno
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- Critical Theory, American Literature, African Studies, World Literatures
- by Christopher L Hill
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- Intellectual History, Japanese Studies, World Literatures, Japanese Literature
- by S. N. Sridhar
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- American Literature, World Literatures, Translation Studies, Indian Philosophy
- by Rob S E A N Wilson
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- American Literature, Cultural Studies, American Studies, World Literatures

This essay makes a case for the categories of littoral literature and coastal form through which it aims to take up the expansive possibilities of the maritime turn while keeping both the materiality of the ocean and the locality of the shore in sight. It elaborates the notion of coastal form through a focus on the African Indian Ocean littoral and with reference to the oeuvres of Mia Couto and Abdulrazak Gurnah. Both are shown to muddle the inside-outside binary that delineates nations and continents, and which has been particularly stark in framing Africa in both imperial and nativist thought. At the same time, coastal form is found to decenter, extend and thicken constructions of world literature, while opening to a planetary perspective sensible to the prodigious and implacable forces of the Anthropocene.

- by Meg Samuelson
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- African Studies, World Literatures, African Literature, World Literature

Extended review and discussion of Emily Apter's "Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability" (New York: Verso, 2013). The book's most powerful argument, in my view, is that the "untranslatable" profitless excreta of the world's literatures are both the matter with which to rethink comparison and the limits of the inflationary World Literature industry.

- by Ben Baer
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- World Literatures, Comparative Literature, Translation Studies, Poststructuralism

This article is a genuine tribute to Shiv K. Kumar, who began his poetic journey with Articulate Silences (1970), consummated it mysteriously with Where Have the Dead Gone? and Other Poems (2014). Where Have the Dead Gone & Other Poems” (2014) is a collection of 67 poems which reveal Kumar’s maturity, imagination and intuitions. He does not wish to give any message through his poetry though the reader himself becomes aware and shows his interest in understanding life through his poems—the poems which speak of the experiences in life.

- by Sudhir K Arora
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- World Literatures, Literature, Poetry, Spirituality

Diálogo con Italo Calvino, publicado en el diario "La Prensa", en Buenos Aires, en 1986

- by amelia barili
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- World Literatures, Social Sciences, Literature, Jorge Luis Borges

Si bien las antologías son libros que pertenecen al que Marrero Henríquez denomina “género de la disculpa”, libros ad hoc y finalistas que mantienen el precario equilibrio de su objetividad como lo mantiene una moneda que se sostiene por un instante sobre su canto antes de mostrar caprichosamente su cara o su cruz, no por sus aporías renuncia El paisaje literario a ser útil, ni por ellas desatiende sus fines programáticos, antes al contrario, en las dificultades de seleccionar y ordenar el corpus de la descripción paisajística de las literaturas hispánicas halla El paisaje literario el estímulo para la consecución de los retos que desde su título anuncia. El paisaje literario privilegia los hechos de la historia de la literatura y se pliega a sus evidencias porque sus fines son servir al conocimiento de las condiciones en las que el paisaje se origina y desarrolla y reflejar la evolución de la descripción paisajística en tanto tal evolución afecta tanto a los lugares a los que los textos literarios han prestado atención descriptiva como al tratamiento literario que tales lugares han tenido a lo largo del tiempo. No en vano, y muy lejos ya de la hipotiposis de la naturaleza, o del topos retórico que da lugar al locus amoenus en la forma breve de la enumeratio o en la forma prolija de la descriptio, el paisaje, sin dejar de ser un elemento retórico, sin dejar de ser lo que ha sido, es hoy lo que ha ido siendo y lo que va siendo con la riqueza de los nuevos sustratos que abonan día a día su magia literaria.

Planetary Spaces.
The Humanities at the Crossroads of the Local and the Post-Global

- by Corin Braga
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- World Literatures, Comparative Literature, Imagination Studies

My chapter analyzes Kazuo Ishiguro’s attraction to genres of speculative fiction according a theory of world literature that relies upon epistemological limits. My contention is that this shift in his novelistic project can be understood as a career-spanning interest in the dynamic between constraint and freedom that generic conceits force upon us in any conceptualization the world. The genre conventions of The Buried Giant, and Never Let Me Go signify not unbounded fantasy, but indeed the opposite: a writer hemming his style and characters into worlds in which structures necessary for understanding have been reduced to
the barest elements by which meaning might be produced. Such constraints flag a parallel concern about the way the novel can and should be read as it concerns knowledge gleaned about the world. Thinking with the structures of the novel’s limits are in this way the
beginning of meaning-making, rather than the end.

- by Chris Holmes
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- British Literature, World Literatures, Speculative Fiction, Kazuo Ishiguro
- by Kevin Riordan
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- World Literatures, Translation Studies, History of the Book, Periodical Studies

Background: Society, as a whole, regards rag pickers as antisocial elements, an embarrassment to the community, and unfits to live. However, their useful contribution to society and ecology is little understood and generally ignored. The waste collected by these women is recycled and produces 25% of the paper, the packing materials, egg trays, plastic and metal household items, etc., used in homes. This benefits the society and world-ecology enormously by the production of cheaper household goods, and the slowing down of the destruction of the already threatened forests.
Objectives: To study the socio-economic condition of women rag pickers in the present-day scenario. To understand the health problems of women rag pickers. To examine the earning, spending and debt patterns of women rag pickers. Methods: The present study is based on primary and secondary data. The primary data have been collected from three towns of Warangal, Karimnagar and Khammam of Telangana State, India and the sample of the study comprised of 100 rag pickers and selected purposively by using a snowball sampling technique. Results: Majority of women rag pickers age group 21-30 years, 80 per cent are married, 74 per cent of illiterates, 50 per cent of scheduled caste, 87 per cent belong to the nucleus family, their family size is 5-7 members and 83 per cent staying at small huts. Nearly 68 per cent of women rag pickers income is below Rs.11,000/ per annum. Eighty per cent are in debt. Fifty-two per cent has drawn loan from moneylenders, the purpose of the debt on medical expenses, 90 per cent means of transportation for collecting garbages on foot. Majority of women rag pickers opinion that they do not continue this job for a long period, 85 per cent are facing health problems and 94 per cent also opinion that rag-picking is not an appreciated job. Most of the hazardous content was quite high in developing countries since the regulatory and enforcement system to control such waste disposal is usually not in operating.

- by B Suresh Lal, PhD
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- World Literatures, Poverty, Women's Rights, Women
- by Christopher Hogarth
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- History, African Studies, World Literatures, Comparative Literature
- by Paul Jay
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- World Literatures, Globalization, Literature, Post-Colonialism