Search results
For Sharon Kinoshita A scribe who knows no Sumerian, what kind of scribe is he? – Akkadian Proverb What role does distributed authorship play – or, more accurately, what role should it play – in the emergent field of ‘world literature’? 1 Roy Ascott, Britain's ‘visionary
For several years now, James Baldwin’s life, portrait, and work have enjoyed a central place in the public eye. Although social and audiovisual media have made significant contributions to Baldwin’s return to the cultural and political limelight, the circulation of his published writings remains a vital part of the author’s ubiquity. Moreover, since Baldwin’s omnipresence in bookstores transcends an American or even Anglophone context, this international and multilingual circulation contributes to Baldwin’s world literary standing, as befits the self-described “transatlantic commuter.” This article moves beyond the customary approach to Baldwin’s published success by tracing presently circulating European translations of his work. The article examines the historical developments in Baldwin’s European circulation-through-translation from the time of his death (1987) up until the present, including brief discussions of the French, Italian, and West German translations from the 1960s onward. Of special interest are the pioneering and dominant roles that French and Italian publishers have played since the late 1990s, and the acceleration in circulation that took place across the continent in the wake of the films I Am Not Your Negro and If Beale Street Could Talk. The article concludes with a few remarks on the translation strategies of several key publishers in France, Italy, Germany, and Romania.
This collection brings together for the first time literary studies of British colonies in nineteenth-century Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Drawing on hemispheric studies, Indigenous studies, and southern theory to decentre British and other European metropoles, the collection offers a latitudinal challenge to national paradigms and traditional literary periodisations and canons by proposing a new literary history of the region that is predicated less on metropolitan turning points and more on southern cultural perspectives in multiple regional centres from Cape Town to Dunedin. With a focus on southern orientations, southern audiences, and southern modes of addressivity, Worlding the south foregrounds marginal, minor, and neglected writers and texts across a hemispheric complex of southern oceans and terrains. Drawing on an ontological tradition that tests the dominance of networked theories of globalisation, the collection also asks how we can better understand the dialectical relationship between the ‘real’ world in which a literary text or art object exists and the symbolic or conceptual world it shows or creates. By examining the literary processes of ‘worlding’, it demonstrates how art objects make legible homogenising imperial and colonial narratives, inequalities of linguistic power, textual and material violence, and literary and cultural resistance. With contributions from leading scholars in nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies, the collection revises literary histories of the ‘British world’ by arguing for the distinctiveness of settler colonialism in the southern hemisphere, and by incorporating Indigenous, diasporic, settler, and other southern perspectives.
Global processes, local niches The study of world literature is rapidly growing in contested terrains: world literature as the best; as bearer of universal values; as circulating in translation/remediation; in relation to power and domination (in relation to postcolonial studies, for example); in relation to globalisation; in relation to commodification. Central to current debates about the value of world literature is the relation of world, a place or lifeworld that we inhabit, to globalisation, a process
At a time when monolingualist claims for the importance of ‘speaking English’ to the national order continue louder than ever, even as language diversity is increasingly part of contemporary British life, literature becomes a space to consider the terms of linguistic belonging. Bad English examines writers including Tom Leonard, James Kelman, Suhayl Saadi, Raman Mundair, Daljit Nagra, Xiaolu Guo, Leila Aboulela, Brian Chikwava, and Caroline Bergvall, who engage multilingually, experimentally, playfully, and ambivalently with English’s power. Considering their invented vernaculars and mixed idioms, their dramatised scenes of languaging – languages learned or lost, acts of translation, scenes of speaking, the exposure and racialised visibility of accent – it argues for a growing field of contemporary literature in Britain pre-eminently concerned with language’s power dynamics, its aesthetic potentialities, and its prosthetic strangeness. Drawing on insights from applied linguistics and translation studies as well as literary scholarship, Bad English explores contemporary arguments about language in Britain – in debates about citizenship or education, in the media or on Twitter, in Home Office policy and asylum legislation – as well as the ways they are taken up in literature. It uncovers both an antagonistic and a productive interplay between language politics and literary form, tracing writers’ articulation of linguistic alienation and ambivalence, as well as the productivity and making-new of radical language practices. Doing so, it refutes the view that language difference and language politics are somehow irrelevant to contemporary Britain and instead argues for their constitutive centrality to the work of novelists and poets whose inside/outside relationship to English in its institutionalised forms is the generative force of their writing.
Between 1598 and 1800, an estimated 3, 271 Catholic women left England to enter convents on the Continent. This study focuses more particularly upon those who became Benedictines in the seventeenth century, choosing exile in order to pursue their vocation for an enclosed life. Through the study of a wide variety of original manuscripts, including chronicles, death notices, clerical instructions, texts of spiritual guidance, but also the nuns’ own collections of notes, this book highlights the tensions between the contemplative ideal and the nuns’ personal experiences. Its first four chapters adopt a traditional historical approach to illustrate the tensions between theory and practice in the ideal of being dead to the world. They offer a prosopographical study of Benedictine convents in exile, and show how those houses were both cut-off and enclosed yet very much in touch with the religious and political developments at home. The next fur chapters propose a different point of entry into the history of nuns, with a study of emotions and the senses in the cloister, delving into the textual analysis of the nuns’ personal and communal documents to explore aspect of a lived spirituality, when the body, which so often hindered the spirit, at times enabled spiritual experience.
time into a single year, 1913, and a single space, France – even, Paris. French Modernist Studies comes into being at a time when the national paradigm for literary study has been fading, even in its institutional forms, as language departments merge, as the reformulated field of world literature gains momentum, and as nation-state fields morph into regional and global studies – for example, American Studies encompassing the Atlantic, the Hemispheric, Pacific Rim and most recently the Archipelagic in the Caribbean and Oceania – and as global linguistic fields expand
’s writing (an effect 186 David Malouf of her postcolonial commitment); she finally situates Malouf’s envisioning of Australia in a compromise between reconception and recuperation. Nettelbeck’s collection includes work by two other notably productive Malouf critics, Andrew Taylor and Peter Pierce, both of whom subsequently contributed to the 2000 collection of essays on Malouf published in World Literature Today. In his 1994 writing, Pierce coordinates with Nettelbeck, giving much of his attention to Malouf’s engagement with history. He importantly notes in Remembering
an increasingly transnational gyre in Azade Seyhan’s Writing Outside the Nation (2001), Brian Lennon’s In Babel’s Shadow: Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States (2010), and Yasemin Yildiz’s Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (2012), as well as Emily Apter’s The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006) and Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013).52 Perhaps the most significant in the context of my discussion is Joshua L. Miller’s Accented America: The Cultural Politics of Multilingual Modernism
Leo Duclassen ( 2012 ) “ European Migration History ,” in Routledge International Handbook of Migration Studies. Steven J. Gold and Stephanie J. Nawyn , eds. New York : Routledge , pp. 52–63 . Eisner , Martin ( 2020 ) “ Vernacularization and World Literature: The Language of Women in the World of God ,” in A Companion to World Literature. Ken