Author：ZHANG Longxi

Abstract: In the last twenty-five years or so, the study of world literature has invigorated literary studies in general, and comparative literature in particular. World literature offers an excellent opportunity for non-Western and even “minor” European literary traditions to have their best works translated, introduced, and known beyond their cultures of origin to become part of world literature. The scope of literary studies has expanded to include more works from the world’s different literary traditions and bring them to theoretically sophisticated and insightful discussions. In this issue of the Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, we are happy to have...

Vol. 8 No. 1 June 2024      Time：2024-07-01

Author：Theo D'haen

Abstract: Translation has been a major bone of contention in comparative literature studies. For the longest time it was looked down upon by bona fide comparatists, who insisted on studying literary works in the original. World literature scholars, on the contrary, have from the beginning acknowledged that, given the multiplicity of the world’s languages and their literatures, it was inevitable that one resort to translation to access all but a handful of literatures. The final decades of the 20th century saw the rise of translation studies. Adopting insights and methods from descriptive translation studies might help bridge any putative gap between comparative and world literature studies, also when it comes to transcultural studies.

Vol. 8 No. 1 June 2024      Time：2024-07-01

Author：E. V. RAMAKRISHNAN

Abstract: The present essay examines two moments from the evolution of the modern Malayalam novel, in relation to the reception of two classics in world literature, namely Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables translated into Malayalam between 1925 and 1927 and García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude translated in 1984. The translation of Hugo’s novel energized the scene of Malayalam fiction by infusing new modes of representation and widening the intellectual horizons of writers in general, and novelists in particular. The echoes of Les Misérables could be heard in Malayalam fiction well into the 1950s. The struggles against colonial and feudal authorities in Kerala, provided a fertile ...

Vol. 8 No. 1 June 2024      Time：2024-07-01

Author：Lucia BOLDRINI

Abstract: This article focuses on novels that, located on the boundary between biography, autobiography and fiction, between detailed archival historical research and imagination, between the documentary and the speculative, seek to reconstruct the life of an ancestor of the writer-narrator to reflect on the traumas, exploitation, hopes, and desires of generations who, in their diasporas, also helped create their modern nations, or whose story challenges the exclusions on which the concept of the nation has been built. The texts discussed are Melania Mazzucco’s Vita, Vona Groarke’s Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara, Wu Ming 2 and Antar Mohamed’s Timira: Romanzo Meticcio, and ...

Vol. 8 No. 1 June 2024      Time：2024-07-01