Open AccessBook
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
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
World literature in and through translation
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors frontally address the issues raised by scholars working in the field of world literature in relation to renewed challenges to translation and for that matter, Translation Studies.
Journal ArticleDOI
Introduction: Thinking Comparison with the Politics of Storytelling
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose to reconceptualize island worlds as situated historical places, that is, islands and their networks as spaces that come to life through the multiple and contested meanings constantly attached to them, formed in the milieu of overlapping and competing European, US and Southeast Asian empires and diasporas.
Dog Barking at the Moon: Transcreation of a Meme in Art and Poetry
TL;DR: This paper explored the dynamics of transcreation in art and poetry, focusing on the image of a dog barking at the moon in four Taiwanese poems and put them in connection with each other and with other texts from different times and artistic traditions.
Journal ArticleDOI
Telling the Story of Literature from Inside Out: Methods and Tools for Non-European Poetics
TL;DR: This document is for the purpose of private study or non-commercial research, and users may not further distribute the material nor use it for the purposes of commercial gain.