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Translation and the Construction of Identity: Abstracts
Date: 12-14 August 2004
Venue: Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea
Aleka Lianeri The idea of world literature, envisaged by Goethe in
1827 as the synthesis of national/cultural particularity and universalism,
has lately resurfaced as a key concept in literary studies. An increasing
number of comparatists including Franco Moretti (2000), Pascale Casanova
(1999), Efraín Kristal (2002) and David Damrosch (2003) have sought to
challenge the confines of a Eurocentric literary canon by pointing out how
“the literature around us is now unmistakably a planetary system”, whose
breadth and complexity necessitates the revision of existing categories and
methods of study (Moretti 2000:54-55). The ensuing debate over new critical
concepts has not so much focused on enlarging the canon as on exploring
modes of circulation and reading that allow works, themes and forms to enter
the world stage. Casanova, Pascale, La
République mondiale des lettres, Seuil: Paris 1999.
Damrosch, David, What is World Literature? Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2003.
Kristal, Efraín, “Considering Coldly …,” In New Left
Review, 15, 2002, pp. 61-74.
Moretti, Franco, “Conjectures on World Literature,” In
New Left Review 1, 2000, pp. 54-68.
Panel 1: Disciplinary Identity: Redefining Translation in the
21st Century
Translation and World Literature
University of Cambridge, UK
By considering translations as the principal medium of a global literary
culture, this paper will explore how translation studies can offer crucial
insights into the concept of world literature. In particular, it will
investigate how this culture, far from challenging Western hegemony by
allowing works to move in several directions (Kristal 2002:74), acts to
promote new forms of domination, predicated on the very assertion of
‘inclusion’, ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘respect’ for the Other’s identity. The
inclusionary perspective of world literature, dependent as it is on
translation into dominant Western languages, becomes the very form of
stating the West’s superiority. By suppressing the mediating role of
translations, this perspective presents itself as an empty point of
universality, from which one judges not only who belongs to the ‘world’, but
also what counts as ‘literature’. Yet translation fits uneasily among
categories designed to delineate a global literary system, and can act to
demonstrate how this system has developed as a site of struggles for
symbolic hegemony, rather than a harmonious field of intercultural
communication and exchange.
References
© IATIS 2003