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This article aims to outline the phenomenon of glocalization from the example of the "Ibero-American Collection" published by the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation from 1930 to 1939. Initially planned to appear in four languages, this collection was eventually published in French only. It is nonetheless an interesting laboratory from which to observe the consequences of the worldwide circulation of literature, through translation, on the uses and definitions of literature, as well as on the simultaneous production of the global and the local. In this, it is exemplary of a particular moment in the history of the idea of world literature.
Roland Robertson utilise le terme "glocalisation" en vue d'une critique systématique et historique de la "globalisation". Afin d'appliquer ses réflexions sur la littérature, il faut tenir compte de la différence fondamentale entre nombres (qui se prêtent facilement à la globalisation) et mots (qui s'y refusent ou demandent une traduction souvent difficile) - et par conséquent entre les disciplines se basant sur les nombres et celles se basant sur les mots. Pour Wilhelm von Humboldt, le problème de la traduction (le traduisible et l'intraduisible, compréhension et non-compréhension simultanées) se pose même dans la communication entre personnes parlant la même langue ou le même dialecte. Cette théorie de la langue s'oppose systématiquement à l'idée d'une langue universelle que beaucoup d'auteurs du 18e siècle et de la Révolution considéraient comme condition préalable du progrès des sciences et de la politique. La comparaison entre les théories linguistiques de Locke et de Rousseau permet d'approfondir et d'élargir cette opposition. L'oeuvre de Rousseau sert d'exemple d'une littérature qui s'ouvre sur le monde entier (en s'adressant aux hommes en général) et qui se voit en même temps forcée de se replier dans des mondes beaucoup plus petits et dans une théorie de la pluralité originaire des langues. Il revient à la Littérature comparée de mettre en doute l'idée d'une "littérature globale" en y opposant le fait de la globalité de la poésie: son existence, en langues et poétiques différentes, dans tous les pays et pour tous les individus, indépendamment de toute propagation globale.
La plupart des théories de la littérature mondiale ont émergé pendant les années de l'ascension de la mondialisation néolibérale et supposent que cette ascension se poursuivra. En conséquence, l'avenir du roman mondial suscite une grande inquiétude, compte tenu de l'hégémonie de l'anglais et de la mondialisation d'un modèle culturel particulier. Des événements plus récents, que ce soit le Brexit et l'élection de Donald Trump ou la pandémie de COVID-19, remettent en cause l'inéluctabilité de la mondialisation de diverses manières, même s'ils laissent présager des avenirs encore plus inquiétants. Cependant, ces défis propres à la mondialisation peuvent présenter de nouvelles opportunités pour le roman mondial: des opportunités de raconter des crises globales dans des contextes glocaux.
What are called 'natural languages' are artificial, often politically instituted and regulated, phenomena; a more accurate picture of speech practices around the globe is of a multidimensional continuum. This essay asks what the implications of this understanding of language are for translation, and focuses on the variety of Afrikaans known as Kaaps, which has traditionally been treated as a dialect rather than a language in its own right. An analysis of a poem in Kaaps by Nathan Trantraal reveals the challenges such a use of language constitutes for translation. A revised understanding of translation is proposed, relying less on the notion of transfer of meaning from one language to another and more on an active engagement with the experience of the reader.
What if one thinks not in terms of shared meanings or contents, but rather in terms of iterable gestures available for reenactment in different times and places in order to conceive of a cross-cultural world of literature? This essay sets out to explore, within the discursive mode of the lyric, whether the notion of gesture could be more helpful than meaning-based translation to account for the transferability of literary texts and for envisioning a form of community based on the shareability of certain gestures. To do so, it will look at how the act-event of reading described by Derek Attridge is processed in two cases in which poems are transferred from an earlier authoritative tradition into a new one.
The contentious discourse around world literature tends to stress the 'world' in the phrase. This volume, in contrast, asks what it means to approach world literature by inflecting the question of the literary. Debates for, against, and around 'world literature' have brought renewed attention to the worldly aspects of the literary enterprise. Literature is studied with regard to its sociopolitical and cultural references, contexts and conditions of production, circulation, distribution, and translation. But what becomes of the literary when one speaks of world literature? Responding to Derek Attridge's theory of how literature 'works', the contributions in this volume explore in diverse ways and with attention to a variety of literary practices what it might mean to speak of 'the work of world literature'. The volume shows how attention to literariness complicates the ethical and political conundrums at the centre of debates about world literature.
This essay examines extractivism as both a project and a process that is bolstering new forms of imperialism on a world scale. It argues that extractivism is as much grounded in material accumulation as it is in cultural extraction to create new forms of value. The writings of indigenous writers such as Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar offer an important key to understanding the work of the literary in making visible and resistant that which extractivism seeks to exploit for profit.
This paper reads 'The Detainee's Tale as told to Ali Smith' (2016) as an exemplary demonstration of the work of world literature. Smith's story articulates an ethics of reading that is grounded in the recipient's openness to the singular, unpredictable, and unverifiable text of the other. More specifically, Smith's account enables the very event that it painstakingly stages: the encounter with alterity and newness, which is both the theme of the narrative and the effect of the text on the reader. At the same time, however, the text urges to move from an ethics of literature understood as the responsible reception of the other by an individual reader to a more explicitly convivial and political ethics of commitment beyond the scene of reading.
Opponents of World Literature fear that its advent marks the end of the 'work of literature'. J. M. Coetzee's "The Childhood of Jesus" (2013) presents a world in which the work of literature has indeed been forgotten. Migrants arrive in a new life 'washed clean' of the burden of the European tradition. Simón, who dimly recalls the old life, feels that something is missing in the new. He longs for something altogether 'other'. Might Simón learn from the exceptional child David to perceive the 'likeness' in this world? Are we to read Coetzee's novel like Simón or like David - and with what consequence for our understanding of the work of literature in a time of World Literature?