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.

Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900

Scenarios of Power in Turgenev’s First LoveRussian Realism and the Allegory of the State

Virginia Woolf’s statement that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’ remains a founding myth for British modernism.1 Reading Woolf’s polemical articles is, however, oddly reminiscent of Knut Hamsun’s literary manifestoes, some 30 years prior. In ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919) Woolf advocates novels that record how the mind ‘receives a myriad of impressions’ every day, ‘an incessant shower of innumerable atoms’, calling to mind Hamsun’s 1890 essay ‘Fra det ubevidste Sjaeleliv’ (‘From the Unconscious Life of the Mind’) that exhorted authors to focus on ‘the unpredictable disorder of impressions, the delicate life of the imagination’.2 Her description of James Joyce’s literary project, ‘to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes messages through the brain’ also recalls Hamsun’s wish for a literature that captures those interior phenomena that ‘last a second, a minute; they come and go like the blinking of passing lights’.3 In comparison with Hamsun, Woolf’s founding gesture looks increasingly belated, and the uncanny associations and parallelisms keep multiplying. If the Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910 that Woolf had in mind served to consolidate a modernist aesthetic through the confluence of the visual and the literary (while also setting the new movement apart by alienating the general public and offending the mainstream critics), then one could perhaps note a similar pattern around Edvard Munch’s 1892 exhibition in the Norwegian capital Kristiania. One critic noted of it ‘a certain correspondence’ between contemporary painting and

Modernism's Foreign Bodies: Strindberg and Hamsun

It is the autumn of 1910, and Ferdinand de Saussure has embarked on a series of lectures on general linguistics for the third time. He begins with the by now familiar point that the object of linguistics should not be the faculty which we all possess as individuals–the ‘faculty which can be called the faculty of articulated language’–but the social institution, the language system, that allows us to make use of this faculty. 1 But there is a problem for linguists: there is not simply a language system, there are many. ‘What is given’, he says, ‘is not only the language [la langue], but languages [les langues]’ (Third Course 9a.). And ‘[a]s far as linguistics is concerned, the diversity of languages is indeed the fundamental fact’ (Third Course 12a). This fundamental fact was the focal point for linguists in the nineteenth century, who misunderstood it more or less completely. The scholars who created the discipline of comparative philology spared no effort in describing and mapping this diversity, which they thought about with the help of some colourful organic metaphors. The different languages were like people or animals, in that they had a birth, maturation, and death; they had kith and kin, being grouped in families of languages–Indo-European, Semitic, Finno-Ugric–and their evolution could be diagrammed as a tree, with a parent trunk and several diverse branches. And, of course, many of them associated the most vigorous (and to their mind the most successful) branches of the family tree with particular peoples or races whose superiority was manifest in what was often called the ‘genius’ of their language, the elegance of its inner logic.

Language in 1910 (and after): Saussure, Benjamin and Paris

The literary work of Carlos Fuentes helped to shape Mexican identity in relation to both its historical past and its current conflicted modernity. His work also established a dialogue with literary modernity. In this article, we employ Franco Moretti’s theory to analyze these two ideas. In order to study the construction of Mexican identity, we place Fuentes’s characters in geographical maps in which we both reinforce previous hypotheses and create new ones. In order to understand Fuentes’s dialogue with literary modernity, we employ statistical graphics of all of the author’s translations and draw maps of the places where he wrote some of his books. The use of this cross-disciplinary methodology in the making of maps and statistical graphics allows us to visualize what was previously hidden or only partially visible.

Mapas literarios en la narrativa completa de Carlos Fuentes: Construcción de una identidad cultural mexicana y escritura de una obra desde la periferia

THIS ARTICLE IS ABOUT PLACE AND TRANSLATION in William Heinesen's (1900-1991) last work of fiction, Laterna Magica, a collection of short stories published in 1985. It is one of Heinesen's many provisional epilogues and his last work of fiction. This time, it turned out to be a definitive literary farewell to his home in Torshavn, the capital of the Faroe Islands. This last work is framed by a prologue and a provisional epilogue, and its ten short tales are intertwined by a strolling narrator. In his late prose, Heinesen was still deeply preoccupied with motifs concerning Torshavn that were never more strongly portrayed than in Laterna Magica. The book teems with place names: fictional, half-fictional, and real. This narrative strategy represents an approach to place that mixes fact and fiction. The narrator emphasizes memorable events and persons who are anchored in a cyclic course of life and death, of childhood and old age. Through his collected impressions of life, Torshavn appears as a place where people live and die. For one last time, the narrator strolls through the alleys of his hometown while reminiscing about his entire life. At the terminus called the Gray Skull Wharf, the Faroese version of the Greek god Charon waits. The stories are a memento mori with death as the driving narrative theme. With death looming as the constant background, Heinesen throws life in stark relief by drawing on a penetrating view of various situations. Death is stripped of its unfamiliarity and is thereby presented as a familiar, recognizable personification of a meaningful "begyndelse ogende" (10) ["beginning and end" (11)]. TRANSLATION One one level, Laterna Magica represents an existential account of grasping the broadest possible meaning of death. However, it is also about the narrator's moving from an old culture into a new. The goal of this paper is to look at these transitions from an old world to a new from the vantage point of translation. Translation was a cultural obsession for Heinesen, who translated masterpieces of European literature into Faroese, thereby rendering them part of that new literary tradition. According to David Damrosch, "An excellent translation can be seen as an expansive transformation of the original, a concrete manifestation of cultural exchange and a new stage in a work's life as it moves from its first home out into the world" (66). Heinesen's writings can be seen as an ambitious project of translating European cultural capital into Faroese cultural capital thus creating a distinctly Faroese version of cosmopolitan European literature. Myths of modern European individualism--Faust, Don Juan, Hamlet, and Robinson Crusoe, for example--all make guest appearances in Heinesen's fiction. He borrows these figures and recasts them in contrasting ways such that they, having been transplanted, emerge as translated characters (cf. Moberg "Op af historiens groft" and Moberg "Udfordring fra udkanten"). Explicit connections between the Faroese microworld and a global circulation of European motifs like these work as a "literary contract" or a "literary transfer" (Schoning 9-43), the purpose of which is to recode modernity and modernism. In Laterna Magica, the narrator bridges the gap between local literature and world literature in his allusions to broadly canonical works. One of the stories, "De stumme gagster" ["The Silent Guests"], is dedicated to two Faroese poets, the brothers J.H.O. Djurhuus and H.A. Djurhuus. (1) Laterna Magica also pays its regards to such examples of world literature as the Old Testament, Homeric poems, and Dante's Commedia, among others (Danish 64, English 73). Moreover, world literature is an explicit model for Laterna Magica in that the stories are inspired by A Thousand and One Nights and Boccaccio's Decameron, in both of which the narrator also postpones death by telling stories. These works serve as unforgettable examples of a certain tragic humor (64). …

Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900

Citations

Scenarios of Power in Turgenev’s First LoveRussian Realism and the Allegory of the State

Modernism's Foreign Bodies: Strindberg and Hamsun

Language in 1910 (and after): Saussure, Benjamin and Paris

Mapas literarios en la narrativa completa de Carlos Fuentes: Construcción de una identidad cultural mexicana y escritura de una obra desde la periferia

Place and Translation: Perspectives on Geomodernism and Periphery in William Heinesen's Laterna Magica

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