Author：ZHANG Longxi

Abstract: In the last twenty-five years or so, the study of world literature has invigorated literary studies in general, and comparative literature in particular. World literature offers an excellent opportunity for non-Western and even “minor” European literary traditions to have their best works translated, introduced, and known beyond their cultures of origin to become part of world literature. The scope of literary studies has expanded to include more works from the world’s different literary traditions and bring them to theoretically sophisticated and insightful discussions. In this issue of the Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, we are happy to have...

Vol. 8 No. 1 June 2024      Time：2024-07-01 View Citation

Author：Theo D'haen

Abstract: Translation has been a major bone of contention in comparative literature studies. For the longest time it was looked down upon by bona fide comparatists, who insisted on studying literary works in the original. World literature scholars, on the contrary, have from the beginning acknowledged that, given the multiplicity of the world’s languages and their literatures, it was inevitable that one resort to translation to access all but a handful of literatures. The final decades of the 20th century saw the rise of translation studies. Adopting insights and methods from descriptive translation studies might help bridge any putative gap between comparative and world literature studies, also when it comes to transcultural studies.

Vol. 8 No. 1 June 2024      Time：2024-07-01 View Citation

Author：E. V. RAMAKRISHNAN

Abstract: The present essay examines two moments from the evolution of the modern Malayalam novel, in relation to the reception of two classics in world literature, namely Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables translated into Malayalam between 1925 and 1927 and García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude translated in 1984. The translation of Hugo’s novel energized the scene of Malayalam fiction by infusing new modes of representation and widening the intellectual horizons of writers in general, and novelists in particular. The echoes of Les Misérables could be heard in Malayalam fiction well into the 1950s. The struggles against colonial and feudal authorities in Kerala, provided a fertile ...

Vol. 8 No. 1 June 2024      Time：2024-07-01 View Citation

Author：Lucia BOLDRINI

Abstract: This article focuses on novels that, located on the boundary between biography, autobiography and fiction, between detailed archival historical research and imagination, between the documentary and the speculative, seek to reconstruct the life of an ancestor of the writer-narrator to reflect on the traumas, exploitation, hopes, and desires of generations who, in their diasporas, also helped create their modern nations, or whose story challenges the exclusions on which the concept of the nation has been built. The texts discussed are Melania Mazzucco’s Vita, Vona Groarke’s Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara, Wu Ming 2 and Antar Mohamed’s Timira: Romanzo Meticcio, and ...

Vol. 8 No. 1 June 2024      Time：2024-07-01 View Citation

Author：Helena BUESCU

Abstract: As one considers the concept of comparative world literature, one may ponder on how widening the perspective from an all-English area of studies to other languages promotes different worldviews and descriptions of the status quo. In this article, we take into consideration the perspective of literature written in Portuguese, be it European, Brazilian, African of even Asian, in order to demonstrate how rich such other points of view are for the discipline. We also engage the concept of defamiliarization (ostranenie), proposed by Russian Formalist, Viktor Shklovsky, as a central tool to consider cosmopolitanism and the dialogue between different literatures.

Vol. 8 No. 1 June 2024      Time：2024-07-01 View Citation

Author：Stefan HELGESSON

Abstract: With remarkable force, “decolonization” re-entered the academic agenda some ten years ago. Having been an ambivalent historical experience undergirding postcolonial studies in its emergence in the 1980s, “decolonization” today is wielded as a concept and a rallying call. One of its rhetorical purposes is to set up an opposition between morally objectionable and morally progressive ways of constructing and sharing knowledge, yet the content of the term is often vague. In this context, world literature has much to contribute, both methodologically and critically. If, on the one hand, there is a decolonizing potential in the very ambition to make the world’s literary cultures visible, the ...

Vol. 8 No. 1 June 2024      Time：2024-07-01 View Citation

Author：Wen JIN

Abstract: A large number of transcultural fictions appeared in the 18th century, providing us with an important entry into discussing the task of comparative literature today. The 18th-century Oriental tales, stories authored by European writers that adapted from or modeled themselves after loose translations of folk tales from the East, practiced a kind of mental shapeshifting, blurring the boundaries between East and West. The same kind of cross-cultural identification is visible in many other literary narratives from the same period, indicative of a fluid, universalist politics regarding Europe’s relations with the Orient that requires reevaluation. 18th-century transcultural fictions suggest a few tactics for ...

Vol. 8 No. 1 June 2024      Time：2024-07-01 View Citation

Author：Sandra Guardini VASCONCELOS

Abstract: This article discusses the impact of the Post-Impressionist Exhibition that Roger Fry organized in London in 1910 on Virginia Woolf’s ideas on the novel. Her dissatisfaction with the state of the genre finds expression in her diary and in her criticism of the work of the Edwardian novelists. Jacob’s Room (1922), her first truly experimental novel, deploys some of the painterly techniques that the post-impressionist painters and vanguard movements of the 1910s effected. It represents a decisive step in her search for a new form for a new novel.

Vol. 8 No. 1 June 2024      Time：2024-07-01 View Citation

Author：CHEN Zhongyi

Abstract: In retrospect of foreign literature studies in China from 1949 to 2019, we have to acknowledge two fundamental facts. Firstly, although in the initial 30 years of this period foreign literature studies in China largely followed the Soviet model, neglecting Western literary and cultural traditions to some extent—with over a decade under the influence of extreme “leftist” trends—it was during this time that the groundwork for the academic framework of foreign literature studies was painstakingly laid. Secondly, with the influx of Western ideas, foreign literature studies during the subsequent 40 years underwent a complete paradigm shift, providing the spiritual nourishment for and playing a pioneering role in liberating thought and rectifying disorders. However, this period saw a conspicuous adoption of Western paradigms in foreign literature studies, thereby ...

Vol. 8 No. 1 June 2024      Time：2024-07-01 View Citation

Author：MENG Fanhua

Abstract: The dawn of the 21st century saw images of intellectuals in novels change in a drastic way. Intellectuals, and those in the humanities in particular, are no longer portrayed as privileged Enlightenment thinkers or sages with Confucian ideas of salvation. In the novels that take intellectuals as their subject matters, such characters often end up involved in betrayal, self-exile, or spiritual/mortal death. This is not a historical process, nor an inevitable course for intellectuals to be sure, but it remains a legitimate question to ask why these fictional intellectuals are becoming, more often than not, new tragic heroes. Why are they becoming misfits in their society and ending up in exile, abandonment, and even death? The present paper examines different images of intellectuals and the makings of their destinies.

Vol. 8 No. 1 June 2024      Time：2024-07-01 View Citation