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D. Jullien (dir.), Foundational Texts of World Literature

D. Jullien (dir.), Foundational Texts of World Literature

Publié le par Matthieu Vernet (Source : Dominique Jullien)


Foundational Texts of World Literature (Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures)

Sous la direction de Dominique Jullien

Berne : Peter Lang, 2011. 

238 p.

EAN 9781433112690.

Présentation de l'éditeur : 

What makes a world author? How did Homer become a“cosmopolitan” author? How does a Mayan creation narrative challenge ourWestern logocentric ideas of foundational texts? What might world literaturelook like to a 4th century Roman reader? How do past and more recenttranslations of Dante's Commedia helpus to rethink the changing definitions of world literature? How did theAlexander romance adapt to an Islamic context? How did Tasso's epic adapt to alater cultural context dominated by the “Turkish Fear”? What shaped the West'sfirst impression of The Tale of Genji?How does the Ovidian myth of Arachne migrate from Japan to the Caribbean? Whatare the foundational metaphors at the root of Goethe's weltliteratur paradigm? What happens when cultures import canonicaltexts for lack of their own? By what process does an eccentric writerreconstruct a new foundational text from heterogeneous fragments of othercultures? How does literary criticism contribute to the canonization of the Thousand and One Nights in Westernliterature? What is left of the primacy of the national language when writersare published simultaneously in various translations? How do modern misreadingsshape our understanding of national epics and ensure their survival?

World literature, first intuited in Goethe'sfoundational idea of weltliteratur asliterature that seeks to transcend national boundaries, is viewed here in itsessential mobility and migratory capacity, which relies on the centrality ofthe reading act. This volume focuses on foundational texts as they are readacross cultures, languages and historical contexts. Its goal is to reflect oncanonical texts—from Homer's Odyssey toMurasaki's Genji, from Cervantes toMayan 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 aretranslated, appropriated, transformed, how they travel across differentcultures and languages, their foundational status evolving accordingly in apost-European world.

Foundational Texts of WorldLiteratureincludes 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. Edited and with an introduction by Dominique Jullien.