ABSTRACT
Genres play a key role in mitigating the balance between the strange and the familiar. The Japanese haiku is an example of a genre that has been very influential in many literary cultures, both in translation and in local appropriations. The best-selling historically-based works are Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind and The Diary of Anne Frank, which both feature an interesting relation between trauma and enchantment. Enchantment seems to be literary capital, and, given its huge influence on the dynamics of translation. In world literature studies, the difference between the familiar and the strange is perhaps the most intriguing. In A Common Strangeness, Jacob Edmond has written extensively on the relationship between strangeness and commonness across Eastern and Western literatures. During late twentieth century, avant-garde poetry took a transnational turn that was caught between poetic, personal, and collective assertions of strangeness and commonness and that shared with comparative literature a desire to avoid either radical nominalism or abstracted globalism.
