What Counts as World Literature?

Levine, Caroline; Mani, Bakirathi

doi:10.1215/00267929-2073043

Cited by 19 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Taken together, these modes of reading offer us a tangled web of new interpretations of Bhagat Singh’s revolutionary thought, which was rooted in contagious affect, aesthetic pleasure, and political assuredness, rather than simply the final option. By highlighting the “bibliomigrant” world of the early twentieth century (Levine & Mani, 2013; Mani, 2016) and therefore the proliferation of texts available to revolutionary thinkers, this article shifts the focus away from the postcolonial hagiographic concerns that Bhagat Singh read only “properly political” texts. 35 On the contrary, he read fiction (Elam, 2016; Yadav, 2007) and went to the movies with and without regard for their “convertability to politics.” The global circulation of texts and the proliferation of their interpretations and viewing experiences produced an altogether different canon of “revolutionary thought” available to cosmopolitan anticolonial thinkers.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Martyr, the Moviegoer: Bhagat Singh at the Cinema

Elam¹

2017

BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies

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This article attempts to rethink Indian anticolonial agitator Bhagat Singh within four alternative lineages, rooted in his often undiscussed love of early Hindi and American cinema. To date, Bhagat Singh has often been confined within the rubrics of a properly political form of revolution, whereby revolution is recognizable to the colonial state. To rethink revolution requires scholars to question the repetition of these colonial logics by moving away from the “recognizably political” to other forms of anti-authorial, anticolonial practices. This article focuses on Bhagat Singh’s viewing and response to the 1927 American iteration of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the 1927 Hindi film Wildcat of Bombay. The article considers the ways in which Bhagat Singh moved beyond “properly political” forms of agitation in favor of affective, aesthetic, and experiential models of movie-going in the early twentieth century. By doing so, it reorganizes the categories of “world literature” away from the nation-state in favor of worldwide circulation, distribution, and interpretation.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Martyr, the Moviegoer: Bhagat Singh at the Cinema

Elam¹

2017

BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies

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“…Goethe’s speculations on Weltliteratur were made possible by new translations of texts from imperial contact zones in the East (such as China, Persia, and India). B. Venkat Mani and Caroline Levine locate the ‘second flashpoint’ for world literature in the circulation of ‘great books’ in cheap print formats before the First World War (Levine and Mani, 2013: 143). In cultural and aesthetic terms, it was modernism, in its global formations and dispersed sites, that promoted a new curiosity about world art and literature from the beginning of the century to the interwar years and beyond.…”

Section: World Literature and The Global Modernmentioning

confidence: 99%

Which world, whose literature?

Chaudhuri

2021

Thesis Eleven

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This essay argues that the ‘thought figure’ of world literature has been under incalculable strain from its inception, given the diversity of linguistic and cultural contexts within which it must be understood. After a brief introductory discussion of Rabindranath Tagore’s talk on world literature (1907), the essay goes on to connect world literature debates with those in global modernism, especially modernism in the colony. Looking at the networks of modernism, and the role of little magazines in India, particularly Bengal, in creating a sense of world literature through reviews and translations, it stresses the importance of location, language, and perspective in the wake of decolonization. However, in the present time of ecological and planetary crisis, with a global upsurge of xenophobia, insularity, and ethnic, racist, or communal violence, the notion of a world, or of a world literature, is hard to sustain.

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“…If "world literature" is conceived as an "interactive space" that involves the contribution of both authors and readers [95], Wattpad is the ideal context where to carry out an analysis of the most recent evolution of world literature. While globalization is gradually disrupting the closed canons of traditional literary criticism [96], recent studies have demonstrated how, in wide collaborative projects such as Wikipedia, the conception of world literature has already changed significantly [97].…”

Section: Storiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wattpad as a resource for literary studies. Quantitative and qualitative examples of the importance of digital social reading and readers’ comments in the margins

2020

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The end of deep reading is a commonplace in public debates, whenever societies talk about youth, books, and the digital age. In contrast to this, we show for the first time and in detail, how intensively young readers write and comment literary texts at an unprecedented scale. We present several analyses of how fiction is transmitted through the social reading platform Wattpad, one of the largest platforms for user-generated stories, including novels, fanfiction, humour, classics, and poetry. By mixed quantitative and qualitative methods and scalable reading we scrutinise texts and comments on Wattpad, what themes are preferred in 13 languages, what role does genre play for readers behaviour, and what kind of emotional engagement is prevalent when young readers share stories. Our results point out the rise of a global reading culture in youth reading besides national preferences for certain topics and genres, patterns of reading engagement, aesthetic values and social interaction. When reading Teen Fiction social-bonding (affective interaction) is prevalent, when reading Classics social-cognitive interaction (collective intelligence) is prevalent. An educational outcome suggests that readers who engage in Teen Fiction learn to read Classics and to judge books not only in direct emotional response to character's behaviour, but focusing more on contextualised interpretation of the text.

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What Counts as World Literature?

Cited by 19 publications

References 7 publications

The Martyr, the Moviegoer: Bhagat Singh at the Cinema

The Martyr, the Moviegoer: Bhagat Singh at the Cinema

Which world, whose literature?

Wattpad as a resource for literary studies. Quantitative and qualitative examples of the importance of digital social reading and readers’ comments in the margins

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