How is World Literature Made?

How is World Literature Made?
Author: Gesine Müller
Publisher: de Gruyter
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2021
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9783110748376

The debate over world literature, and the underlying questions of global interconnections in a polycentric world, has recently become very visible. Until now, however, the theoretical discussion has lacked material-based approaches to analyze the co

The Routledge Concise History of World Literature

The Routledge Concise History of World Literature
Author: Theo D'haen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2013-03-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 113663570X

This remarkably broad and informative book offers an introduction to and overview of World Literature. Tracing the term from its earliest roots and situating it within a number of relevant contexts from postcolonialism to postmodernism, Theo D’haen examines: the return of the term "world literature" and its changing meaning Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur and how this relates to current debates theories and theorists who have had an impact on world literature non-canonical and less-known literatures from around the globe the possibility and implications of a definition of world literature. This book is the ideal guide to an increasingly popular and important term in literary studies. It is accessible and engaging and will be invaluable to students of world literature, comparative literature, translation and postcolonial studies and anyone with an interest in these or related topics.

What is World Literature?

What is World Literature?
Author: David Damrosch
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2003-03-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780691049861

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.

Institutions of World Literature

Institutions of World Literature
Author: Stefan Helgesson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2015-06-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317565576

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.

The Cambridge History of World Literature

The Cambridge History of World Literature
Author: Debjani Ganguly
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2021
Genre: Comparative literature
ISBN: 9781108557269

"World literature dwells in our time and in times past. As a treasured heritage of artistic expression in oral, visual and written forms, it is an indelible part of the story of evolution of human civilization. As a scholarly field, however, world literature has had a rather sporadic presence in the disciplinary landscape of modern universities, surging and receding in accordance with political and socio-cultural transformations. The contemporary era is witnessing one such resurgence. The term world appears to have made a spectacular re-entry as a literary critical rubric in the twenty-first century. One hears of the 'world' all too frequently in academic circles, and in ways that mark our current global conjuncture as, perhaps, the most apposite moment for its articulation. One is reminded of Walter Benjamin's phrase 'the now of knowability' when certain historical periods offer just the right temporal traction for an idea to gain rhetorical currency. The term 'world' now appears to inhabit its true potential as the philological and literary home of maximal extension and maximal connectivity"--

World Literature in an Age of Geopolitics

World Literature in an Age of Geopolitics
Author: Theo D'haen
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2021-07-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004468072

If you want to know how globalisation affects literary studies today this is the book for you. Why has world literature become so hotly debated? How does it affect the study of national literatures? What does geopolitics have to do with literature? Does American academe still set an example for the rest of the world? Is China taking over? What about European literature? Europe’s literatures? Do “minor” European literatures get lost in the shuffle? How can authors from such literatures get noticed? Who gains and who loses in an age of world literature? If those are questions that bewilder you look no further: this book provides answers and leaves you fully equipped to dig deeper into the fascinating world of world literature in an age of geopolitics.

The Idea of World Literature

The Idea of World Literature
Author: John Pizer
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2006-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0807131199

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe introduced the concept of Weltliteratur in 1827 to describe the growing availability of texts from other nations. Although the term "World Literature" is widely used today, there is little agreement on what it means and even less awareness of its evolution. In this wide-ranging work, John Pizer traces the concept of Weltliteratur in Germany beginning with Goethe and continuing through Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels to the present as he explores its importation into the United States in the 1830s and the teaching of World Literature in U.S. classrooms since the early twentieth century. Pizer demonstrates the concept's ongoing viability through an in-depth reading of the contemporary Syrian-German transnational novelist Rafik Schami. He also provides a clear methodology for World Literature courses in the twenty-first century. Pizer argues persuasively that Weltliteratur can provide cohesion to the study of World Literature today. In his view, traditional "World Lit" classes are limited by their focus on the universal elements of literature. A course based on Weltliteratur, however, promotes a more thorough understanding of literature as a dialectic between the universal and the particular. In a practical guide to teaching World Literature by employing Goethe's paradigm, he explains how to help students navigate between the extremes of homogenization on the one hand and exoticism on the other, learning both what cultures share and what distinguishes them. Everyone who teaches World Literature will want to read this stimulating book. In addition, anyone interested in the development of the concept from its German roots to its American fruition will find The Idea of World Literature immensely rewarding.

How Literatures Begin

How Literatures Begin
Author: Joel B. Lande
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2021-07-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0691219842

A comparative history of the practices, technologies, institutions, and people that created distinct literary traditions around the world, from ancient to modern times Literature is such a familiar and widespread form of imaginative expression today that its existence can seem inevitable. But in fact very few languages ever developed the full-fledged literary cultures we take for granted. Challenging basic assumptions about literatures by uncovering both the distinct and common factors that led to their improbable invention, How Literatures Begin is a global, comparative history of literary origins that spans the ancient and modern world and stretches from Asia and Europe to Africa and the Americas. The book brings together a group of leading literary historians to examine the practices, technologies, institutions, and individuals that created seventeen literary traditions: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, English, Romance languages, German, Russian, Latin American, African, African American, and world literature. In these accessible accounts, which are framed by general and section introductions and a conclusion by the editors, literatures emerge as complex weaves of phenomena, unique and deeply rooted in particular times and places but also displaying surprising similarities. Again and again, new literatures arise out of old, come into being through interactions across national and linguistic borders, take inspiration from translation and cultural cross-fertilization, and provide new ways for groups to imagine themselves in relation to their moment in history. Renewing our sense of wonder for the unlikely and strange thing we call literature, How Literatures Begin offers fresh opportunities for comparison between the individual traditions that make up the rich mosaic of the world’s literatures. The book is organized in four sections, with seventeen literatures covered by individual contributors: Part I: East and South Asia: Chinese (Martin Kern), Japanese (Wiebke Denecke), Korean (Ksenia Chizhova), and Indian (Sheldon Pollock); Part II: The Mediterranean: Greek (Deborah Steiner), Latin (Joseph Farrell), Hebrew (Jacqueline Vayntrub), Syriac (Alberto Rigolio), and Arabic (Gregor Schoeler); Part III: European Vernaculars: English (Ingrid Nelson), Romance languages (Simon Gaunt), German (Joel Lande), and Russian (Michael Wachtel); Part IV: Modern Geographies: Latin American (Rolena Adorno), African (Simon Gikandi), African American (Douglas Jones), and world literature (Jane O. Newman).