Foundational Texts of World Literature

Foundational Texts of World Literature PDF Author: Dominique Jullien
Publisher: Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures
ISBN: 9781433112690
Category : Comparative literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
What makes a world author? How did Homer become a «cosmopolitan» author? How does a Mayan creation narrative challenge our Western logocentric ideas of foundational texts? What might world literature look like to a fourth-century Roman reader? How do past and more recent translations of Dante's Commedia help us to rethink the changing definitions of world literature? How did the Alexander romance adapt to an Islamic context? How did Tasso's epic adapt to a later cultural context dominated by the «Turkish Fear»? What shaped the West's first impression of The Tale of Genji? How does the Ovidian myth of Arachne migrate from Japan to the Caribbean? What are the foundational metaphors at the root of Goethe's weltliteratur paradigm? What happens when cultures import canonical texts for lack of their own? By what process does an eccentric writer reconstruct a new foundational text from heterogeneous fragments of other cultures? How did literary criticism contribute to the canonization of the Thousand and One Nights in Western literature? What is left of the primacy of the national language when writers are published simultaneously in various translations? How do modern misreadings shape our understanding of national epics and ensure their survival? World literature, first intuited in Goethe's foundational idea of weltliteratur as literature that seeks to transcend national boundaries, is viewed here in its essential mobility and migratory capacity, which relies on the centrality of the reading act. This volume focuses on foundational texts as they are read across cultures, languages and historical contexts. Its goal is to reflect on canonical texts - from Homer's Odyssey to Murakami's Genji, from Cervantes to Mayan hieroglyphs, from Dante to Coetzee, from Goethe to Lezama Lima, from the Thousand and One Nights to Jorge Luis Borges - in a global perspective: how they are translated, appropriated, transformed, how they travel across different cultures and languages, their foundational status evolving accordingly in a post-European world. Foundational Texts of World Literature includes contributions by Gerardo Aldana, Sandra Bermann, Piero Boitani, Michael Emmerich, Azadeh Yamini Hamedani, Stefan Helgesson, Paulo Lemos Horta, Juan Pablo Lupi, Peter Madsen, Ulrich Marzolph, Suzanne Saïd, Evanghelia Stead, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, and Richard Van Leeuwen.

Foundational Texts of World Literature

Foundational Texts of World Literature PDF Author: Dominique Jullien
Publisher: Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures
ISBN: 9781433112690
Category : Comparative literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
What makes a world author? How did Homer become a «cosmopolitan» author? How does a Mayan creation narrative challenge our Western logocentric ideas of foundational texts? What might world literature look like to a fourth-century Roman reader? How do past and more recent translations of Dante's Commedia help us to rethink the changing definitions of world literature? How did the Alexander romance adapt to an Islamic context? How did Tasso's epic adapt to a later cultural context dominated by the «Turkish Fear»? What shaped the West's first impression of The Tale of Genji? How does the Ovidian myth of Arachne migrate from Japan to the Caribbean? What are the foundational metaphors at the root of Goethe's weltliteratur paradigm? What happens when cultures import canonical texts for lack of their own? By what process does an eccentric writer reconstruct a new foundational text from heterogeneous fragments of other cultures? How did literary criticism contribute to the canonization of the Thousand and One Nights in Western literature? What is left of the primacy of the national language when writers are published simultaneously in various translations? How do modern misreadings shape our understanding of national epics and ensure their survival? World literature, first intuited in Goethe's foundational idea of weltliteratur as literature that seeks to transcend national boundaries, is viewed here in its essential mobility and migratory capacity, which relies on the centrality of the reading act. This volume focuses on foundational texts as they are read across cultures, languages and historical contexts. Its goal is to reflect on canonical texts - from Homer's Odyssey to Murakami's Genji, from Cervantes to Mayan hieroglyphs, from Dante to Coetzee, from Goethe to Lezama Lima, from the Thousand and One Nights to Jorge Luis Borges - in a global perspective: how they are translated, appropriated, transformed, how they travel across different cultures and languages, their foundational status evolving accordingly in a post-European world. Foundational Texts of World Literature includes contributions by Gerardo Aldana, Sandra Bermann, Piero Boitani, Michael Emmerich, Azadeh Yamini Hamedani, Stefan Helgesson, Paulo Lemos Horta, Juan Pablo Lupi, Peter Madsen, Ulrich Marzolph, Suzanne Saïd, Evanghelia Stead, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, and Richard Van Leeuwen.

World Literature I

World Literature I PDF Author: Laura Getty
Publisher: University of North Georgia Press
ISBN: 9781940771328
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 1576

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Book Description
This peer-reviewed World Literature I anthology includes introductory text and images before each series of readings. Sections of the text are divided by time period in three parts: the Ancient World, Middle Ages and Renaissance, and then divided into chapters by location. World Literature I and the Compact Anthology of World Literature are similar in format and both intended for World Literature I courses, but these two texts are developed around different curricula.

Compact Anthology of World Literature

Compact Anthology of World Literature PDF Author: Laura Getty
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781940771229
Category : LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES
Languages : en
Pages : 608

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Book Description
"The introductions in this anthology are meant to be just that: a basic overview of what students need to know before they begin reading, with topics that students can research further. An open access literature textbook cannot be a history book at the same time, but history is the great companion of literature: The more history students know, the easier it is for them to interpret literature. In an electronic age, with this text available to anyone with computer access around the world, it has never been more necessary to recognize and understand differences among nationalities and cultures. The literature in this anthology is foundational, in the sense that these works influenced the authors who followed them. A word to the instructor: The texts have been chosen with the idea that they can be compared and contrasted, using common themes. Rather than numerous (and therefore often random) choices of texts from various periods, these selected works are meant to make both teaching and learning easier. While cultural expectations are not universal, many of the themes found in these works are."--Open Textbook Library.

The Written World

The Written World PDF Author: Martin Puchner
Publisher:
ISBN: 0812998936
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
"The story of literature in sixteen acts, from Alexander the Great and the Iliad to ebooks and Harry Potter, this engaging book brings together remarkable people and surprising events to show how writing shaped cultures, religions, and the history of the world"--

Reading World Literature

Reading World Literature PDF Author: Sarah Lawall
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292786379
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
As teachers and readers expand the canon of world literature to include writers whose voices traditionally have been silenced by the dominant culture, fundamental questions arise. What do we mean by "world"? What constitutes "literature"? Who should decide? Reading World Literature is a cumulative study of the concept and evolving practices of "world literature." Sarah Lawall opens the book with a substantial introduction to the overall topic. Twelve original essays by distinguished specialists run the gamut from close readings of specific texts to problems of translation theory and reader response. The sequence of essays develops from re-examinations of traditional canonical pieces through explorations of less familiar works to discussions of reading itself as a "literacy" dependent on worldview. Reading World Literature will open challenging new vistas for a wide audience in the humanities, from traditionalists to avant-garde specialists in literary theory, cultural studies, and area studies.

UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary

UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary PDF Author: Sarah Brouillette
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503610322
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
A case study of one of the most important global institutions of cultural policy formation, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary demonstrates the relationship between such policymaking and transformations in the economy. Focusing on UNESCO's use of books, Sarah Brouillette identifies three phases in the agency's history and explores the literary and cultural programming of each. In the immediate postwar period, healthy economies made possible the funding of an infrastructure in support of a liberal cosmopolitanism and the spread of capitalist democracy. In the decolonizing 1960s and '70s, illiteracy and lack of access to literature were lamented as a "book hunger" in the developing world, and reading was touted as a universal humanizing value to argue for a more balanced communications industry and copyright regime. Most recently, literature has become instrumental in city and nation branding that drive tourism and the heritage industry. Today, the agency largely treats high literature as a commercially self-sustaining product for wealthy aging publics, and fundamental policy reform to address the uneven relations that characterize global intellectual property creation is off the table. UNESCO's literary programming is in this way highly suggestive. A trajectory that might appear to be one of triumphant success—literary tourism and festival programming can be quite lucrative for some people—is also, under a different light, a story of decline.

What Is World Literature?

What Is World Literature? PDF Author: David Damrosch
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691188645
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
World literature was long defined in North America as an established canon of European masterpieces, but an emerging global perspective has challenged both this European focus and the very category of "the masterpiece." The first book to look broadly at the contemporary scope and purposes of world literature, What Is World Literature? probes the uses and abuses of world literature in a rapidly changing world. In case studies ranging from the Sumerians to the Aztecs and from medieval mysticism to postmodern metafiction, David Damrosch looks at the ways works change as they move from national to global contexts. Presenting world literature not as a canon of texts but as a mode of circulation and of reading, Damrosch argues that world literature is work that gains in translation. When it is effectively presented, a work of world literature moves into an elliptical space created between the source and receiving cultures, shaped by both but circumscribed by neither alone. Established classics and new discoveries alike participate in this mode of circulation, but they can be seriously mishandled in the process. From the rediscovered Epic of Gilgamesh in the nineteenth century to Rigoberta Menchú's writing today, foreign works have often been distorted by the immediate needs of their own editors and translators. Eloquently written, argued largely by example, and replete with insightful close readings, this book is both an essay in definition and a series of cautionary tales.

The Cambridge Companion to World Literature

The Cambridge Companion to World Literature PDF Author: Ben Etherington
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108471374
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This Companion presents lucid and exemplary critical essays, introducing readers to the major ideas and practices of world literary studies.

The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written

The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written PDF Author: Martin Seymour-Smith
Publisher: Citadel Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 532

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Book Description
The hundred books discussed here have radically altered the course of civilisation , whether they have embodied religions practised by millions, achieved the pinnacle of artistic expression, pointed the way to scientific discovery of enormous consequence, redirected beliefs about the nature of man, or forever altered the global political landscape. For each there is a historical overview, an analysis of the work's effect on our lives today and a lively discussion of the reasons for inclusion.

The Norton Anthology of Western Literature

The Norton Anthology of Western Literature PDF Author: Martin Puchner
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 9780393933642
Category : Anthologies
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A classic, reimagined.