This elliptical, bifocal view of literature and culture reveals translation to be at the very centre of the construction of national cultures and literary canons. In a Europe in which new regional identities, new states and unions are emerging from the geographies of the old nation-states, translations of foreign literature may come to replace national or regional source texts as the core ingredients of new national and regional identities, as happened with the formation of a Belgian literary canon in the nineteenth century (see Karen Vandemeulebroucke).
The notion that world literature is writing that gains in translation is also useful when considering translation in its broadest sense. Translation is also at work, for example, when historical events are “translated” into personal witness accounts that employ specific narrative structures; such accounts may even function as a means of coping with the present through therapeutic rewritings of the past (see Michel De Dobbeleer). In the perspectives on world literature presented in this section, translation is seen fundamentally as the creative rewriting of past texts and events, rather than as an attempt to represent a given source transparently. Such is also the case in Jean-Luc Godard’s film Histoire(s) du Cinéma, where intertextual references and filmic montage recall the Holocaust without attempting to represent or rationalize it. Indeed, from a world literature perspective montage, as a particular strategy of translation, may be considered an ethical way of producing meaning, involving what Damrosch has called a “detached engagement” with the events and texts of the past (see Miriam Heywood).
MIGRATION
World literature is often defined as literature from around the world that also focuses and reflects on cultural differences. In recent years, however, attention has to some extent shifted away from the cultural embeddedness of literature and the arts towards the transcultural negotiations in which any work of literature or art is engaged. According to this line of thought, the literary work should be seen not only as expressing an extra-literary cultural identity, but as playing a transformative role through a variety of complex cultural interactions. The prevailing tendency, therefore, is to move away from explicating exotic cultural identity (whether monocultural or multicultural) in favour of examining the ways in which cultural identities are connected with the rest of the world. Migration is thus a key concept in understanding an important and unavoidable aspect of world literature and world culture: world literature is literature (and people) on the move. However, we need to reflect critically on the meaning of “world” in this context and especially on the relationships between world, aesthetics and identity. The “global” or “cosmopolitan” identities that have recently been the focus of discussion must be seen as distinct from both the socio-ethnical identity that postcolonial and cultural studies have focused on and the liberated individual identity that postmodernism tended to hypostasise. A new cosmopolitanism unites the local with the transnational and often the ethical perspective. In other words, there is no true cosmopolitanism without a grounding in local cultures, since these local cultures in themselves are what constitute the network of global circulation. This is what the concept of polycentrism means to Carlos Fuentes.
In the present negotiations between geography, culture and aesthetics, the old framework of the nation-state must be reconsidered. We have become accustomed to the constantly reiterated announcement of the death of the nation-state, but we should also acknowledge that nationality means different things to different people in different regions. For minority cultures, the nation-state may even be a place of shelter and a “positive burden” (see Dragana Obradović). The role of the city, too, needs to be reconsidered within this new paradigm. Historically, the city has been closely linked to modernity. Today, it also functions as a figure for the modern condition, not in the sense that it fosters the avant-garde of a specific culture, but in the sense that it reflects all the complexity of the globalised world. In the transnational urbanism of today’s capitals the local means just as much as the global. The local is both there, in the city, and thousands of miles away in the home country of the first, second, and third-generation emigrants who constitute the metropolises of the world (see Marie Lauritzen).
The island can seem the most isolated geographical places in the world. Yet some islands, for instance in the Caribbean, seem to function as a meeting-place for individuals from all over the globe, all of whom share hybrid cultural roots. This cultural and geographical meeting ground is at the centre of Derek Walcott’s epic poem Omeros. In the common space of the island there is a continuous negotiation of cultural and linguistic codes that at the same time reveals areas of untranslatability (see Eleonora Ravizza). Madeira and Cape Verde, both places of transit for migrant writers, can likewise be seen as cultural archipelagos: places in which different cultures meet and blend. World literature is an archive of migratory experiences, and may function as a kind of verbal refuge from the sense of exile (see Ana Salgueiro Rodrigues).
INSTITUTIONS
How do literary institutions deal with cultural diversity and the challenges of world literature, and how do they contribute to the construction of national and transnational literatures and cultures? In the last section of this anthology the roles of both national and international institutions are analysed specifically in relation to the formation of literary canons. How, for instance, is Flemish literature received and critically assessed on the other side of the national border, in the Netherlands? The work of Louis Paul Boon is a case in point, being both central to the canon of Dutch literature and an important element of its closely related Other (see Floor van Renssen).
Central to the formation of national and international canons, and consequently to educational institutions and their curricula, is the institution of literary criticism. Like so many other literary institutions, and in common with what Casanova calls our “literary unconscious”, modern literary criticism is largely national; “almost everywhere in the world”, Casanova writes, “the study of literature is organized along national lines” (xi). This institutional and unconscious nationalism has made us blind to certain transnational and cosmopolitan phenomena within the literary world, and criticism has contributed much to this blindness, but perhaps also suffered its consequences. This is surely the case with the Practical Critics whose influence on curricula and education in Britain has been vast, promoting a very limited canon of white, male national literature. Though these in reality very diverse critics have tended to be lumped together under the accusation of provincialism and nationalism, a new world literature perspective on their work reveals a liberal humanism that comes very close to the cosmopolitan outlook defined recently by Beck, which focuses on differences, contrasts and boundaries, and shows “an awareness of the principle of sameness in the principle of others” (see Gesche Ipsen).
This combination of liberal humanism, cosmopolitanism and a thoroughly nationally-defined perspective is, in fact, central to the approach implicit in one of Damrosch’s definitions of world literature, in which he sees it as “an elliptical refraction of national literatures” (282). In other words, a work of world literature is one that has traversed cultural borders and as such exists simultaneously in the two focal points of the ellipsis: the culture in which the work was produced and the culture into which it is received. The literary work, then, is as much about the “host” culture as it is about the “source” culture. This emphasis on both the national and the transnational perspective recalls Beck’s definitions of the cosmopolitan vision: “cosmopolitanism without provincialism is empty, provincialism without cosmopolitanism is blind” (7).
The figure of the ellipsis is central to world literature. It is also a key figure of thought in the postmodern or neo-baroque renegotiation of modernity that we find in Fuentes’s celebration of the polyphony and poly-centricity of the transatlantic novel (see Reindert Dhondt). Similarly, the figure of the ellipsis can be seen in Thomas Pynchon’s latest attempt to re-inscribe (ironically) the commodity culture of the market – the driving force behind global capitalism – in the parodic and constantly border-crossing form of his novel. As such Pynchon’s Against the Day may be seen as offering a critical strategy with which to confront the crisis in value systems and national cultures engendered by globalisation. Art is not autonomous, as the modernists claimed;