Writing-between-Worlds: TransArea Studies and the Literatures-without-a-fixed-Abode

Description

This book proposes that there is no better, no more complex way to access a community, a society, an era and its cultures than through literature. For millennia, literature from a wide variety of geocultural areas has gathered knowledge about life, about survival, and about living together, without either falling into discursive or disciplinary specializations or functioning as a regulatory mechanism for cultural knowledge. Literature is able to offer its readers knowledge through direct participation in the form of step-by-step intellectual and affective experiences. Through this ability, it can reach and affect audiences across great spatial and temporal distances. Literature – what different times and cultures have been able to understand as such in a broad sense – has always been characterized by its transareal and transcultural origins and effects. It is the product of many logics, and it teaches us to think polylogically rather than monologically. Literature is an experiment in living, and living in a state of experimentation. About the author Ottmar Ette has been Chair of Romance Literature at the University of Potsdam, Germany, since 1995. He is Honorary Member of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) (elected in 2014), member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (elected in 2013), and regular member of the Academia Europaea (since 2010). Contents Translator’s Introduction Preface: What does literature know? 1. Transit. Mobile InterWorlds: toward TransAreal (Literary) Scholarship 2. Figurations. Odysseus and the Angel of History: The Vectoral Imagination of Shoa Literature 3. Relations. Caribbean IslandWorlds: about the fractal geometry of the literary island 4. Incubations. A National Literature without a fixed Abode? Fictions and Frictions in Twentieth-Century Cuban Literature 5. Translations. In Others’ Words: Literary translation as Writing-between-Worlds 6. Oscillations. Writing-Other(wise) between Worlds: About translingual writing in contemporary German-speaking Literature 7. Confrontations. The Transareal Worlds of the ArabAmericas: Chronicle of a Clash Foretold 8. In(tro)spections. Voyages into the realm of the dead: Border experiences of a literature ‘after’ migration 9. Configurations. Literature as Knowledge-for-Living, Literary Scholarship as Science-for-Living Note on the Text and Acknowledgments Bibliography Name Index