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- Introduction
Abstract: Since its emergence in the 1990s as a field of research in its own right, world literature has typically been studied through maps. Cartography, Francesca Orsini points out, “seems more generally to be the first technology to which literary scholars reach out when they seek to spatialize literature” (349), especially in the case of those texts that span different countries and are characterized by global circulation. Mapping has been used as a metaphor to locate the power relations between major and minor literatures in the world literary system or as a visual tool to trace the unidirectional movements from the centres of production in Western Europe, which determine the literary norm, to the literary periphery ... Read More
PubDate: 2024-07-15T00:00:00-05:00
- Flemish Literature and World Literature
Abstract: Goethe is routinely credited with having coined the term and concept of Weltliteratur or “world literature.” We now know that Goethe actually was not the first to use the term; that distinction goes to the eighteenth-century Göttingen historian August Ludwig von Schlözer, who used it in his 1773 Isländische Literatur und Geschichte. Goethe’s use of the term was triggered by his reading of a Chinese novel; there apparently is still some discussion as to which novel this precisely may have been, and whether he read it in an English or a French translation. During Goethe’s lifetime, Germany as such did not yet exist, remaining, as it had been since the Middle Ages, a motley array of larger and smaller political ... Read More
PubDate: 2024-07-15T00:00:00-05:00
- Acting Like a White Woman: Cynthia Jele’s Black South African Chick Lit
Novel Happiness Is a Four-Letter Word (2010) as New Weltliteratur
Abstract: Chick lit purportedly originated in the mid-1990s with works such as Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City (both 1996). Initially defined as a new subgenre of romance, chick lit also departed from some well-established conventions of the romance genre, such as the single-minded focus on the search for true love and the one-man-per-woman ratio. Instead, the often ironic and humorous novels typically focus on more emancipated, metropolitan heroines—heterosexual, affluent, and (notably) white—who face the everyday challenges of their careers and the search for Mr. Right along with their friends. Early reactions to chick lit were often extreme, either attracting “the ... Read More
PubDate: 2024-07-15T00:00:00-05:00
- From Major to Minor: Swedish Working-Class Fiction in the UK and the US
Abstract: I noticed the stain of black ink directly when I collected Cape Farewell from the loan counter at the New York Public Library. Where it should have said “Harry Martinson” on the spine of the American edition of the author’s Kap Farväl!, it actually read “Harry Martins•on.” But was it a stain' No; at a closer look, it turned out to be more of a neatly added dot concealing an erroneous second “s” in the Swedish author’s name. When I opened the book, I saw that the same correction had been made on the title page. Sometime between when the American edition had been published in 1936 and my visit to the library in 2014, a librarian had noticed the publisher’s mistake and corrected the name twice. Perhaps the misspelling ... Read More
PubDate: 2024-07-15T00:00:00-05:00
- Double Consciousness Squared: James Baldwin and the Minorities of World
Literature
Abstract: James Baldwin occupies a minor position in world literature in different ways. As an African American writer commuting between the US, France, and Turkey, he is a prime exponent of what Paul Gilroy has dubbed “the Black Atlantic” (4, 19)—a cultural constellation that self-consciously unsettles received accounts of Western modernity. Baldwin’s queer identity, central to his fictional work but markedly absent from most of his autobiographical essays, has made him a popular literary subject of queer theory, even if this dimension has mostly been erased from his activist persona.1 At the same time, on both sides of the Atlantic, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement draws inspiration from Baldwin’s political ... Read More
PubDate: 2024-07-15T00:00:00-05:00
- A Journey into Mapuche Memory: Self-Translation and Postmemory as a
Strategy of World Literature in Liliana Ancalao’s Rokiñ (2020)
Abstract: As much as world literature represents a shift from earlier Eurocentric approaches to comparative literature, contemporary production by Indigenous authors in Abya Yala, the greater American continent, remains virtually absent in scholarly discussions and literary anthologies, especially when compared to postcolonial Anglo- and Francophone literatures. As suggested by Vilashini Cooppan, the crafting of maps, anthologies, and companions can lead to the dangerous articulation of a congealed “world literature ‘we’” that obdurates the constant becoming of the field and, we might add, renders invisible the contemporaneity of certain minorized productions (195). Anna Brígido-Corachán and César Domínguez have already ... Read More
PubDate: 2024-07-15T00:00:00-05:00
- L’entrée sur la scène internationale d’un écrivain tamoul :
édition, traduction et réception des œuvres de Shobasakthi
Abstract: Situées au confluent des études postcoloniales, transnationales et diasporiques, les littératures de migration sont entrées dans le champ du comparatisme à la fin des années 1990 comme proclamé par Homi Bhabha dans The Location of Culture : « Where once the transmission of national literatures was a major theme of a world literature, perhaps we can now suggest that transnational histories of migrants, the colonized, or political refugees—these border and frontier conditions—may be the terrains of world literature » (17). Ces « textes sans domicile fixe » (Ette), thématisant une expérience de la migration souvent vécue par leurs auteurs mêmes, sont jugés particulièrement actuels. Leur hybridité culturelle, en phase ... Read More
PubDate: 2024-07-15T00:00:00-05:00
- Entre majorations ambiguës et minorations créatrices : la traduction des
épopées orales d’Afrique et d’Asie en langues occidentales
Abstract: Le terme « mineur » est affecté en français—et dans les autres langues ayant hérité du comparatif latin—d’une redoutable plasticité. S’appliquant aussi bien à un individu jeune destiné, sauf accident, à devenir majeur, qu’à un mode musical construit par altération à partir du majeur, il se fait volontiers ambigu et labile, à l’image de ce qu’il désigne, tantôt état doué de devenir, tantôt produit fixé d’un devenir passé. C’est cette relativité qu’ont exploitée Deleuze et Guattari dans leur concept de « littérature mineure », utilisé depuis la fin des années 1970, conformément à la définition donnée par ses auteurs, pour désigner la littérature « qu’une minorité fait dans une langue majeure » (29). Le terme est ... Read More
PubDate: 2024-07-15T00:00:00-05:00
- Lire les littératures anciennes (grecque et chinoise) comme des
littératures mineures
Abstract: Quand Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari choisissent en 1975 d’employer l’adjectif « mineur » pour qualifier des langues et des littératures, dans Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure (1975), ouvrant ainsi la voie à toute une tradition d’interprétations et d’applications fécondes, mais aussi à quelques malentendus, ils ne placent évidemment pas les langues et littératures anciennes au centre de leur analyse, pas plus que leur fonction historique et symbolique dans ce que nous appelons aujourd’hui la littérature mondiale.1 Pourtant, la valeur heuristique dont le terme de « mineur » est alors doté avec une connotation méliorative pourrait s’avérer précieuse pour les comparatistes d’aujourd’hui, régulièrement placé.e.s ... Read More
PubDate: 2024-07-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Open Access journal
