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Research on Global Literature
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Featured Resources
- Asymptote Journal "Winner of the 2015 London Book Fair's International Literary Translation Initiative Award, Asymptote is the premier site for world literature in translation. We take our name from the dotted line on a graph that a mathematical function may tend toward, but never reach. Similarly, a translated text may never fully replicate the effect of the original; it is its own creative act."
- Words without Borders Founded in 2003, Words Without Borders promotes cultural understanding through the translation, publication, and promotion of the finest contemporary international literature.
- The New Yorker magazineFull text coverage varies by database.
Online Books
Writing the Yugoslav Wars: Literature, Postmodernism, and the Ethics of Representation by
In Writing the Yugoslav Wars, Dragana Obradović analyses how the Yugoslav wars of secession helped shape the region’s literary culture. Obradović argues that the crisis of the country’s disintegration posed an ethical challenge to self-identified postmodernists. This book takes a transnational approach to literatures of the former Yugoslavia that have been, since the 1990s, studied separately, in line with geopolitical divisions. This post-socialist conflict was one of the moments that reshaped postmodernism for both local and international thinkers, much in the same way modernism was shaped by World War I and the advent of mechanized warfare.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2016
Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat by
Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat contains fifteen essays addressing how Edwidge Danticat's writing, anthologizing, and storytelling trace, (re)construct, and develop alternate histories, narratives of nation building, and conceptions of home and belonging. The prolific Danticat is renowned for novels, collections of short fiction, nonfiction, and editorial writing. As her experimentation in form expands, so does her force as a public intellectual. Danticat's literary representations, political commentary, and personal activism have proven vital to classroom and community work imagining radical futures. Among increasing anti-immigrant sentiment and containment and rampant ecological volatility, Danticat's contributions to public discourse, art, and culture deserve sustained critical attention. These essays offer essential perspectives to scholars, public intellectuals, and students interested in African diasporic, Haitian, Caribbean, and transnational American literary studies. This collection frames Danticat's work as an indictment of statelessness, racialized and gendered state violence, and the persistence of political and economic margins. The first section of this volume, "The Other Side of the Water," engages with Danticat's construction and negotiation of nation, both in Haiti and the United States; the broader dyaspora; and her own, her family's, and her fictional characters' places within them. The second section, "Welcoming Ghosts," delves into the ever-present specter of history and memory, prominent themes found throughout Danticat's work. From origin stories to broader Haitian histories, this section addresses the underlying traumas involved when remembering the past and its relationship to the present. The third section, "I Speak Out," explores the imperative to speak, paying particular attention to the narrative form with which such telling occurs. The fourth and final section, "Create Dangerously," contends with Haitians' activism, community building, and the political and ecological climate of Haiti and its dyaspora.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2022
Writing by Ear: Clarice Lispector and the Aural Novel by
Writing by Ear examines the explicit articulation of listening-in-writing found in the work of Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector. The terms "writing by ear," the "aural novel," and "echopoetics" rethink fiction as a poetics of listening to the world.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2018
The Existentialist Vision of Haruki Murakami by
Haruki Murakami has often been accused of being a feckless, merely popular writer, but in this study Michael Ackland demonstrates that this is not the case, arguing that Murakami has not only assimilated the existentialist heritage but innovatively changed and revitalized it, thereby placing exciting personal possibilities within the reach of his worldwide readership. Ackland's study begins by tracing the troubled introduction of such alien conceptions as individualism, democracy and citizens' rights, and self-interested autonomy into Japan. It argues that Haruki Murakami was seminally exposed to these ideas, and to their modern reconfiguration in French existentialism, during the student protests of the late 1960s, and that the dissent and radicalism of this period has been rechanneled into his fiction.The first two chapters introduce readers to this formative period and to major, recurring concerns in Murakami's fiction. Then modern existentialism itself is discussed in terms of its philosophical roots in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and of its fictional dramatization in the works of such authors as Fyodor Dostoevsky and Franz Kafka, and finally as it was received in Japan. Usually foreign conceptions undergo considerable recasting in Japan to heighten their relevance and innovative potential. This, too, is a hallmark of Murakami's adaptations, and part of his virulent critique of Japanese socialization and conformity, which is traced initially in such important short fiction as "The Elephant Vanishes" and "Sleep." The bulk of this monograph focuses on the place of existentialism in Murakami's major novels. It argues that much-maligned "Murakami man" actually represents a carefully calculated case of failed or partial socialization, which leaves him ripe for unconventional personal developments, and eventually to become an exemplary existentialist figure. In Japan, according to Murakami, the individual typically becomes a regimented, exhaustively worked foot-soldier of contemporary capitalism, or archetypal salaryman, with the potential for terrible excesses underscored by telling allusions to war atrocities and the holocaust. Or the individual can become a free-thinking agent and vibrant alternative to the Japanese consensual norm. Independent decision-making and action are all important, for as Sartre famously stated, "human freedom precedes essence." In other words, we make ourselves-how this is possible is explored in three chapters, which examine in succession Murakami's vision of childhood and formative years, his use of the supernatural and metaphor to disrupt social norms and to radically expand the challenges confronting individuals, and his evolving conception of what constitutes meaningful, accessible existentialist action. The Existentialist Vision of Haruki Murakami is an important resource not only for scholars and students of Japanese literature, comparative literature, and world literature but also for readers who would like to gain a deeper appreciation of Murakami's literary world.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2022
Translating Myself and Others by
Luminous essays on translation and self-translation by an award-winning writer and literary translator Translating Myself and Others is a collection of candid and disarmingly personal essays by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, who reflects on her emerging identity as a translator as well as a writer in two languages. With subtlety and emotional immediacy, Lahiri draws on Ovid's myth of Echo and Narcissus to explore the distinction between writing and translating, and provides a close reading of passages from Aristotle's Poetics to talk more broadly about writing, desire, and freedom. She traces the theme of translation in Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks and takes up the question of Italo Calvino's popularity as a translated author. Lahiri considers the unique challenge of translating her own work from Italian to English, the question "Why Italian?," and the singular pleasures of translating contemporary and ancient writers. Featuring essays originally written in Italian and published in English for the first time, as well as essays written in English, Translating Myself and Others brings together Lahiri's most lyrical and eloquently observed meditations on the translator's art as a sublime act of both linguistic and personal metamorphosis.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2022
Roberto Bolaño in Context by
From his first fifteen years in Chile, to his nine years in Mexico City from 1968 to 1977, to the quarter of a century he lived and worked in the Blanes-Barcelona area on the Costa Brava in Spain through his death in 2003, Roberto Bolaño developed into an astonishingly diverse, prolific writer. He is one of the most consequential and widely read of his generation in any language. Increasingly recognized not only in Latin America, but as a major figure in World Literature, Bolaño is an essential writer for the 21st century world. This volume provides a comprehensive mapping of the pivotal contexts, events, stages, and influences shaping Bolaño's writing. As the wide-ranging investigations of this volume's 30 distinguished scholars show, Bolaño's influence and impact will shape literary cultures worldwide for years to come.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2023
