AustLit
Latest Issues
AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'Literary studies are being transformed by the emerging disciplinary field of World Literature. Yet the world of literature is by no means self-evident. Issues of language and culture, national and global identity, originality and translation raise as many questions as they answer. What is the world in the new literary studies? And how does literary theory relate to this world? In Text, Translation, Transnationalism literary scholars from a broad array of languages and cultures explore the relationships between the nation and the world, world literature and transnational methodology, the individual literary voice and its global reception. As an English-speaking country which has come to fill a global role as a pivotal point between Europe, Asia and the Americas, Australia is well placed to provide original insights into the state of world literature. In his afterword, leading US critic Djelal Kadir reflects on the relevance of the concept of the “transnational” to the “self-troubling critical awareness” of Australian literary discourse as well as to wider global concerns. In this volume we aim to rethink world literature from local perspectives while reconsidering Australian literature from a world perspective.' (source: Publisher's website)
Notes
-
Contents indexed selectively.
Contents
- The Rough Edges of the Transnational : Australian Holocaust Literature, single work criticism (p. 71-90)
- Antipodean Modernism : The Retrodynamic Arts of Time Management, single work criticism (p. 115-136)
- Settlement Defiled : Ventriloquy, Pollution and Nature in Eliza Hamilton Dunlops' 'The Aboriginal Mother', single work criticism (p. 137-151)
- The Russian Poet's Visit : Yevtushenko in Australia, single work criticism (p. 152-172)
-
National Literatures, Scale and the Problem of the World,
single work
criticism
(p. 173-195)'One of the leading figures in world literature today is the Harvard scholar David Damrosch. His 2003 book What is World Literature? has been widely influential, and might be said to have established the new, US-centred field of study known as world literature. In a 2010 review of three later books edited or co-edited by Damrosch—How to Read World Literature (2009), Teaching World Literature (2009) and The Longman Anthology of World Literature (2009)—John M. Kopper describes them as Damrosch’s aleph. The reference, which I take to be ironic, is to the title story of Jorge Luis Borges’s collection, The Aleph (1949). The aleph is a mysterious gadget that apparently allows the narrator, who is also named ‘Borges,’ briefly to experience an all-encompassing vision of the universe. It is a parable about the madness of desiring a total or ‘encyclopedic vision’ (Echevarria 125). To describe world literature as Damrosch’s aleph is to imply that it is fundamentally misguided to seek a total vision of literature or to read books at the scale of the world. ‘If the aleph stands for the totality of literature,’ Kopper writes, then today’s rich and expanding bibliography of works about that immensity, along with the increasingly massive anthologies that seek to encircle it, show that we have lost our fear of the unbounded object that we study’ (408). ' (Author's introduction)Note:
as 'Australian Literature, Scale, and the Problem of the World'.
