ABSTRACT
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|44 pages
Instituting Literature
chapter 1|16 pages
How Writing Becomes (World) Literature
part II|42 pages
The World Literature Market
part III|34 pages
Postcolonial Worlds
part IV|48 pages
Fields of Translation
chapter 9|17 pages
Strategies of Importation of Foreign Literature in France in the Twentieth Century
chapter 10|14 pages
How African Literature is Made
chapter 11|15 pages
The Scandinavian Literary Translation Field from a Global Point of View
part V|36 pages
Worlds in Translation