Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability
@inproceedings{Apter2013AgainstWL, title={Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability}, author={Emily S Apter}, year={2013} }
The book engages in a polemical critique of recent efforts to revive World Literature models of literary studies (Moretti, Casanova, etc) on the grounds that they construct their curricula on an assumption of translatability. As a result, incommensurability and what Apter calls the "untranslatable" are insufficiently built into the literary heuristic. Drawing on philosophies of translation developed by de Man, Derrida, Sam Weber, Barbara Johnson, Abdelfattah Kilito and Edouard Glissant, as well…
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