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Much discussion of world literature, as seen in the theories of Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova, is still not entirely able to rid itself of Eurocentric and Western-centric biases. More recently, Zhang Longxi, a leading Chinese cross-cultural scholar, despite his good intentions, displays Sinocentric limitations by claiming that imperial China “functioned as a center in the East Asian region”. Based on the assumption that Zhang’s argument is emblematic of a larger current of Sinocentrism in China, this article argues that East Asian countries, most notably Korea and Japan, developed their own literatures and cultures, although they have been influenced by Chinese culture. This article calls for a more globally-oriented paradigm and asserts that any form of ethnocentrism, Eurocentric or Sinocentric, is injurious, or even fatal, to the salutary development of world literature.
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This article seeks to examine the remarkable literary venture of Odia culture that took a crucial step in creating space for world literature. Amid the plurality of conceptualizations of world literature as a commercial entity, a mode of circulation, an intellectual problem, a medium of international literary exchange, a dynamic system, and an emerging discipline, it sees world literature as a tool for liberating the Indian region of Odisha from linguistic and cultural domination. The colonial controversy over the language policy and the constant struggle of the Odia-speaking territories prepared the grounds for the language movement which resulted in the formation of a language-based British province in 1936. The article explores the question whether the establishment of Odisha led to linguistic liberation or a paradigm shift from cultural dominance of Bengali and Hindi during the colonial era to the hegemony of English in the post-independence period. We argue that after India’s independence the Odia language and literature fell victim to neo-colonialism as a result of the adoption of the English language as the medium of internationalization. Additionally, we examine how world literature supported the liberation of the regional language and its literature from neo-colonialism by evaluating the contribution of the world literature book series titled Biswa Sahitya Granthamala, which was released in Odia by the publishing house Granthamandir in 1969–1970.
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The concept of world literature is traditionally applied to the process in which literary texts cross national borders in the process of translation, thus getting a desired added value to be recognized on a larger scale. While fully admitting the importance of translations from small literatures to the languages of more widespread communication, our aim in this article is to demonstrate that broad circulation of translated texts in smaller languages create fascinating patterns due to their specific interpretation in local contexts that expand reception perspectives and change the terms of interpretation of world literature. The complexity of these moves is traceable through the process in which translations of popular culture are integrated into 19th-century Latvian literary activities alongside recognized classics, explicitly setting an aim of fostering the creation of a national canon. On the other hand, elite works of European literature are “provincialized” in the process of domesticating them alongside other texts of lower literary quality. The translations from both elite and popular culture thus contribute to the rise of Latvian letters, expanding the limits of the potentially influential corpus of texts that can cross the borders of one national literature. With the use of specific examples, we follow the interplay of popular and elite translations that gradually transform 19th-century Latvian literature and create a comprehensive literary system representative of a small culture.
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This article focuses on the (dis)continuities between the German-language work of Paul Celan (integrated into a “large” literature where he becomes “Europe’s foremost poet after World War II”, in George Steiner’s opinion) and the scanty corpus of Romanian literature written by Celan in his Bucharest period, read in the post-national perspective. In his book Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age (2020), David Damrosch states that a unified Romanian literature should integrate literature written in several languages, disregarding the obsolete criterion of the national language. While agreeing with this proposition, the article remarks that Damrosch’s other theoretical proposition, that of the bifocal viewpoint, with the two foci represented by the literature of origin and that of insertion, proves ineffective in Celan’s case. The author proposes the use of “cultural triangulation”, Andrei Terian’s concept, for a better understanding of Celan as a post-national poet. In this model, Celan proves to be not a single poet but rather a network comprising all his possibilities of development in any language, intersecting possible (but abandoned) and accomplished versions of himself, writing in two languages (even not proportionately so), and absorbing and distributing biographical and cultural information from and to each of them.
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Taking Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of minor literature as a starting point, this article moves from their opposition of “major/minor” literatures to their “tetralinguistic” model of vernacular, vehicular, referential, and mythic language. It presents the work of the polyglot poet and Hasidic scholar Jiří Langer to offer a multifaceted view of three distinct contexts: the theoretical discourse of minor literature, the literary milieu of interwar Prague, and the history of gay Czech and Jewish writing. Langer appears in Franz Kafka ’s diaries and letters over a period of several years as a source of information on Jewish culture, as well as a personal contact to prominent rabbis from the east. Two decades later, Langer produced his own remarkable work in Czech, Devĕt bran (Nine Gates, 1937), a popular-scholarly study of Hasidic traditions based on his experience in the Galician town of Belz. Much of what is known today about Jiří Langer’s unconventional life comes from the memoirs of his brother František, published as a foreword for the English translation of the book. However, it was only in recent years that Langer’s Hebrew poetry has also become available to English-speaking readers, revealing his linguistic strategies that draw on mystical traditions in the attempt to form a modern synthesis of Jewish homosexual identity. Jiří Langer’s literary activity shows Prague as a site of self-definition through multilingualism, rather than the more familiar image of Kafka ’s “deterritorialization”.
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This paper contains following book review: Trávníček, Jiří. Betty a my: o jednom českém kulturním fenoménu. První vydání. Brno: Host, 2022. 247 stran. ISBN 978-80-275-1075-7.
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Novelette Razija Šemsudin Sarajlić’s novelette Razija is one of the most significant works of Bosniak literature in the Austrian-Hungarian period. The narrative has had three different editions so far: 1906/07, 1908 and 1997. The texts analysis has shown different language tendencies concerning various orthographic solutions which are mainly conditioned by non-linguistic factors. The choice of ortographic solutions is the result of political circumstances of the time. In spite of that, certain Bosnian language characteristics have been preserved in the language of the text, which fit into the overall picture of the development of the Bosnian literary-linguistics expression in the period of AustrianHungarian rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This once again confirms the tendency to unify and stabilize literary-linguistics expression at the beginning of the 20th century in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
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Our article deals with the complexities of the process of reception of American fiction in the Arab world, viewed as cultural transfer, closely related with the circulation of knowledge between the Arab countries and the Western world, in which the A
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The article aims at the restitution of a book fund which, in the first half of the 19th century, was in the use of the Franciscan Monastery from Baia de Criș (Hunedoara County). The reconstitution of the library is based on an inventory list drafted on the occasion of the Canonical Visitation from 1830, in which 22 titles in 55 volumes are recorded.The library was scattered during the Revolution of 1848–1849, when the monastery burned down together with its archive and library. Therefore, the only certain document which preserves the image of the library of this abbey is the book inventory drafted in 1830.Although most of the books have not been identified in other collections, there is evidence that some of the volumes are kept even today in the library of the Franciscan Monastery in Deva. I have reached this conclusion following the research of the notes preserved on the books of the Franciscans in Deva.Based on the analysis of the titles of the books from Baia de Criș recorded in the inventory list of 1830, we observed that the universe of the books which were available for reading to the Franciscan monks from Baia de Criș comprised, for the most part, sermon volumes, canonical right books, monastic life regulations for the Franciscans, meditation and spiritual exercises books, as well as some geography, history and grammar copies. Religious books were mainly in German. Out of the total of 55 volumes, 30 of them were German sermon books, plus a Bible and a grammar in the same language. Polemical and moral theology books, as well as spiritual Christian books, were read in Latin, just like history books, Franciscan regulations and ecclesiastic legislation.
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The songs and chants collection from Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereinafter as the Collection) represents the most extensive and most significant collection of folk lyric songs, which was recorded on the ground of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1893 by the Czech musicologist Ludvik Kuba. Based on the lexical and semantic level, this collection is made distinctive by its Slavic-oriental lexical layer. That lexical layer is incorporated into the linguistic expression of the oral lyrics in the Ludvik Kuba’s collection, it strengthens it in a poetic, stylistic and aesthetic way, and thus becomes a kind of a linguistic manner. The paper discusses the use value of orientalisms in the language of the mentioned collection. Orientalisms are classified according to the method of linguistic affiliation types of folk lyric songs. The ways of functioning of the Oriental and Slavic lexicon, but also of the Balkan Pre-Slavenic one, are analyzed and possible conclusions are drawn.
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Transforming reality into traces of what once was, Barbey d’Aurevilly’s novels create a world of vestiges which entice the reader to pursue what always escapes his grasp. This article distinguishes, among these vestiges, the lost feeling of love in individuals’ lives, the loss of tradition through the turmoil of the French Revolution, and the neglected effects of sin according to the Christian narrative. It then attempts to show how these representations of the past, successively psychological, political and theological, are summoned by a layering of uncertain recollections. These take the form of bodily experience, as characters are faced with their own physical decay over time; of territorial symbols, as loss is woven into the landscape in which those characters evolve; and of mysterious utterances, as custodians of memory both suggest and veil by their words the meaning of events.
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This article proposes an exploration of the novels of the Goncourts from the perspective of the representations and writing of memory, a fundamental notion in their work and their lives, as evidenced both by the Journal and their passion for collecting. Paradoxically, the characters remember relatively little in their novels. However, although discreet, memory is deployed at strategic moments in the narrative. The aim here is to bring to light a veritable art of “revenez-y”, which unfolds in different variations as psychological, narrative and aesthetic explorations of memory. The article thus explores the sometimes pathological and sometimes reparative representations of memory through the nostalgia and melancholy of the characters, as well as the issue of interaction between memory, dream and oblivion in the Goncourts’ writing. Finally, the aim is to identify the corporalisation of memory at work in the Goncourts’ novels, notably through the intermediary of characters from the world of entertainment: actors and actresses, mimes and acrobats.
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As a fine observer of human psychology, Maupassant now goes even further. He plunges into the unconscious and the mystery of psyche. Maupassant’s inquiry is at work in the short story “Sauvée” narrating an episode of triggering involuntary sensory memory. The author leads us to an examination of the mechanics of forced sensual memory retrieval as a manoeuvre used in a manipulative seduction scheme. The amusing effect of the seemingly simple anecdotal storyline conceals the depth of meaning that surpasses the simplicity of the anecdote. This article discusses the way in which the provoked memory recollection scenes are depicted, by looking at how meaning is conveyed through a network of various psycho-sociocultural ‘factors’ at play: the sphere of senses involving sensory and sensual systems participation, impulsive behaviour, sociocultural context and the influence of relevant scientific theories known in 19th century France, while Maupassant’s writing style and technique give the text its complexity.
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This article aims to highlight the importance of memory in the poetic practice of Léopold Sédar Senghor. It intends to demonstrate that, by exploring the millennial memory of Africa, Senghor gives an ontological foundation to his race and debunks minimalist clichés forged by the colonial powers according to their respective transversal perspectives. However, it should also be emphasised that diving into memory is an expression of the aesthetic approach which allows the poet to give support to his panhumanist utopia. The mythical “Kingdom of Childhood”, discovered through the intercession of memory, is a place of communal warmth now lost which needs to be restored for the benefit of unitary ethics. It is, nonetheless, true that wandering in the realm of memory culminates in the creation of an original instant. In other words, if a poetic experience is transformed into a spiritual experience, it is because the ultimate challenge for a poet is to rediscover God.
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