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Against world literature : on the politics of untranslatability
TLDR
In this paper, Apter argues that incommensurability and what Apter calls the "untranslatable" are insufficiently built into the literary heuristic, and argues that the assumption of translatability should be replaced by a polemical critique of recent efforts to revive World Literature models of literary studies (Moretti, Casanova, etc).Abstract:
The book engages in a polemical critique of recent efforts to revive World Literature models of literary studies (Moretti, Casanova, etc) on the grounds that they construct their curricula on an assumption of translatability. As a result, incommensurability and what Apter calls the "untranslatable" are insufficiently built into the literary heuristic. Drawing on philosophies of translation developed by de Man, Derrida, Sam Weber, Barbara Johnson, Abdelfattah Kilito and Edouard Glissant, as well as on the way in which "the untranslatable" is given substancein the context of Barbara Cassin's Vocabulaire europeen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, the aim is to activate Untranslatability as a theoretical fulcrum of Comparative Literature with bearing on approaches to world literature, literary world systems and literary history, the politics of periodization, the translation of philosophy and theory, the bounds of non-secular proscription and cultural sanction, free versus privatized authorial property, and the poetics of translational difference.read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
Imagining Cosmopolitanism, Conviviality, and Coexistence in World Literature: Jews, Muslims, Language, and Enchantment in Joann Sfar's The Rabbi's Cat
TL;DR: The authors analyzes Joann Sfar's Rabbi's Cat and Rabin's Cat 2 through the concepts of conviviality and world literature, drawing on the scholarship of Paul Gilroy and Pheng Cheah, arguing that Sfar offers through a decolonial lens a "world literature" with a normative world-making vision.
Journal ArticleDOI
“From Postcolonial Literature to World Literature”: Performative Historiography and the Reinvention of Taiwan Literature in a New Age
TL;DR: This article argued that the film's reconstruction of Le Moulin Poetry Society in colonial Taiwan suggests world literature as an alternative framework for studying Taiwan literature within cross-cultural contexts, and highlighted the connection of Taiwan literature to world literature through the mediation of Japanese writers.
Book ChapterDOI
Anglophone World Literature and Glocal Memories: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss
TL;DR: The authors argue that one powerful scenario in which the world-making potential of Anglophone literature plays itself out are literary representations of memories that travel across different cultures and shuttle between the local and the global.
Journal ArticleDOI
Rewriting the Legacy of the Turkish Exile of Comparative Literature: Philology and Nationalism in Istanbul, 1933–1946
TL;DR: In this paper, a critical analysis of how the Turkish end of humanism was entangled with the politics of Kemalist cultural reforms is presented. But the authors focus on the role of the experience of cultural displacement in the intellectual transformation of the emigre scholars.
Journal ArticleDOI
“My Tale Is Too Long to Tell”: The Locust and the Bird between South Lebanon and New York City
TL;DR: The authors argue that the changes the text undergoes as it moves from Arabic into English refocus this novel and transform it into a work about transnational migration, and show how domesticating translation strategies operate to reinforce the text's and the narrator's difference and exoticism.