Book•
Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900
01 Jan 1998-
TL;DR: Moretti as mentioned in this paper explored the fictionalization of geography in the nineteenth-century novel and found that space may well be the secret protagonist of cultural history, in a series of one hundred maps, alongside Spanish picaresque novels, African colonial romances and Russian novels of ideas.
Abstract: In a series of one hundred maps, Franco Moretti explores the fictionalization of geography in the nineteenth-century novel. Balzac's Paris, Dickens's London and Scott's Scottish Lowlands are mapped, alongside the territories of Spanish picaresque novels, African colonial romances and Russian novels of ideas, in a path-breaking study which suggests that space may well be the secret protagonist of cultural history.
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TL;DR: Moretti as mentioned in this paper describes the Baptism on the Savica as a "world text" of the kind that Moretti describes based on Goethe's Faust, in view of the fact that it stages local history and the hagiography of a converted national hero against the backdrop of world history and within the aesthetic discourse of world literature.
Abstract: "The Baptism on the Savica is...a “world text” of the kind that
Moretti describes based on Goethe’s Faust, in view of the fact that it stages local history and the hagiography of a converted national hero against the backdrop of world history and within the aesthetic discourse of world literature. It is a story about the inevitable compromise between the universalism of European Christian civilization and the ethnicity of Slovenians. As opposed to the cacophonic polyphony and the act of ascribing actual spaces to historical periods in the modern epic represented by Faust, the world’s sacred text and the generator of a multiplicity of incommensurable interpretations (Moretti, Modern 45-50), Preseren’s poem, including its form and genre, is a compromise between epic and novelistic discourse. Preseren’s Byronic verse tale is a hybrid of the epic and the novel, of drama and elegy. But this generic compromise is so exceptional that it aesthetically empowers the depicted Slovenian world story and, through a history of effects, transforms itself into a Slovenian sacred text."
2 citations
01 Jan 2007
TL;DR: Bennett et al. as discussed by the authors found that book reading is actually less popular than movie reading in Australia compared to media and media and cultural studies in the United States and other Anglophone societies.
Abstract: Media and cultural studies have been one of few recent growth areas in the academic humanities and social sciences, especially in the United States and other Anglophone societies. At times, they have clearly threatened to subsume or sideline more traditional forms of literary study. Given that the latter had often exhibited a kind of cultural elitism simultaneously contemptuous of “mass culture„, women and the non-Western world, this is not necessarily the occasion for much regret. But we need to remember that print literature is still an important mass medium in its own right and a significant element in contemporary culture. Reading the curricula for cultural studies programmes or the conference abstracts for cultural studies conferences, one could be forgiven for supposing that film had somehow supplanted print in the late twentieth century. But, as Bennett, Emison and Frow, for example, found from the most comprehensive survey to date of Australian cultural practices and preferences, cinema is actually far less popular than book reading (Bennett et al. 84). Similar findings have been reported from many other western societies. Moreover, even if literature were to disappear from the cultural repertoire — as, of course, it eventually might — it would continue to be a crucial resource for cultural studies approaches to the historical past. As Raymond Williams — one of the “founding fathers„ of British cultural studies, no less — rightly insisted: here, “in the only examples we have of recorded communication that outlives its bearers, the actual living sense, the deep community that makes the communication possible, is naturally drawn upon.„ (Williams 1965: 64-5)
2 citations
TL;DR: The uproar incited by Driss Chraibi's Le passe simple resulted from the political climate at the time of the novel's publication in 1954, skewing the interpretation of the text as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The uproar incited by Driss Chraibi's Le passe simple resulted from the political climate at the time of the novel's publication in 1954, skewing the interpretation of the text. The novel allegorically describes tensions between different political groups in terms of family conflict. The hero Driss's rebellion against his father, ’Le Seigneur‘,hence assumes the dimensions of a revolt against the king, as he tries to rally his brothers to a ‘coup d'etat’. The author's images, both historical and novelistic, are modelled on the French revolution and the family romance novels that were its literary complement. Le passe simple draws a historical blueprint for the Moroccan nation, one that was not executed in the short run, but was partially realised over time. The novel dramatises (and predicts) the conflict between the monarchy and elites such as the intelligentsia, symbolised as a father‐son conflict. Most analyses have reduced the work to its psychoanalytic dimensions, eliding its political substratum.
2 citations
TL;DR: This article used a case study of Lin Shu (1852-1924) and Chen et al. to argue for an approach to world literature called "reading distance" to understand how intellectuals in those places grappled with difficult questions concerning translation, language reform, and changes in reading publics.
Abstract: This essay uses a case study of Lin Shu (1852-1924) and (1876-1924) to argue for an approach to world literature called “reading distance.” Through a close reading of Lin Shu's and translations of Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie (Paul and Virginia) into Chinese and Arabic and a consideration of their work as translators and intellectuals, the essay reads between peripheries—places like Cairo and Beijing—to understand how intellectuals in those places grappled with difficult questions concerning translation, language reform, and changes in reading publics. By thinking with models of distant reading but also engaging with materials that are usually excluded from those models, the essay examines an important point of overlap in the intellectual and cultural histories of the Arab and Chinese enlightenments of the early twentieth century.
2 citations
Dissertation•
01 Jan 2010
2 citations