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Resurrecting the Partisan Antifascist Struggle: Art, Politics and Memory from the Civil War to Contemporary Spain
No full textThe Case for Reduction
No full textOne of the most serious charges levelled against theories, analyses, and descriptions is that of being reductive. Conceptual frameworks are criticized for being impoverished and descriptions for being too sparse or flat. Conversely, to call something ‘irreducible’ seems to confer an immediate and indisputable dignity to it, pointing to a certain complexity that cannot be fully grasped or explained. Yet the history of knowledge cannot be told without acknowledging the importance of reductionist paradigms. Reduction is also necessary for achieving a clearer, and more complex grasp of ourselves and the world. This interdisciplinary ICI Fellow workshop will interrogate ‘reduction’ as a concept, as a method, as an experience, as a practice, and as an aesthetic, considering cases where it is taken to signify diminishment and devalorization as well as reduction’s generative potential. How can reduction give rise to openness and inclusion? What does it mean to perform reduction? How does it relate to our world? How can it be used as a lens for research? And what can it perform as a strategy
The Work of World Literature
Get PDFThe 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.The Work of World Literature: Introduction | FRANCESCO GIUSTI AND BENJAMIN LEWIS ROBINSON | 1-23Untranslatability and the Challenge of World Literature: A South African Example | DEREK ATTRIDGE | 25-56World Literature and the Problem of Postcolonialism: Aesthetics and Dissent | LORNA BURNS | 57-74Transcontextual Gestures: A Lyric Approach to the World of Literature | FRANCESCO GIUSTI | 75-103The World after Fiction: J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus | BENJAMIN LEWIS ROBINSON | 105-126Extracting Indigeneity: Revaluing the Work of World Literature in These Times | RASHMI VARMA | 127-147Being Taught Something World-Sized: ‘The Detainee’s Tale as told to Ali Smith’ and the Work of World Literature | DIRK WIEMANN | 149-172Working Conditions: World Literary Criticism and the Material of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra | JARAD ZIMBLER | 173-207Afterword: Towards a Theory of Reparative Translation | EMILY APTER | 209-228ReferencesNotes on the ContributorsInde
Untranslatability and the Challenge of World Literature:A South African Example
Get PDFWhat 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
Touche-touche
No full textJean-Luc Nancy has long considered touch to be central for an understanding of the relation between the self and the world, a crucial question of his philosophy he will also explore in his talk entitled ‘Touche –touche’. His rethinking of community and the political from phenomenological and deconstructive perspectives directs our attention to the body and its ‘naked existence’ beyond metaphysics. The impact of this philosophical project on contemporary modes of being together is also demonstrated in his most recent publication on the Corona crisis, Un trop human virus (2020). This lecture series takes queer theory’s conversation about intimacy as a starting point to discuss some of its cultural possibilities, mediated forms, and philosophical trajectories in the context of Corona