Premises and Problems

Description

World literature, many have stressed, is a systematic category. Both literary scholars and social scientists have argued that the prestige of the major literary languages is key to establishing the shape of the overall system. In order to critically interrogate world literature and cinema, Premises and Problems approaches this system from the perspective of languages and film traditions that do not hold a hegemonic position. This perspective raises new questions about the nature of literary hegemony and the structure of world literature: How is hegemony established? What are the costs of losing it? What does hegemony mask? How is it masked? The contributors focus predominantly on literatures outside the small circle of prestigious modern European languages and on films and film criticism produced outside the best-known centers. The inclusion of this unfamiliar material calls attention to some areas of obscurity that make key features of the system indistinct, or that make it difficult to trace relationships between texts that hold different levels of prestige, such as those of the Global North and the Global South. The book argues that the study of world literature and cinema will profit from a sustained and informed engagement with the body of work produced by historical social scientists committed to the perspective of the world-system.
List of Illustrations

Introduction
Luiza Franco Moreira

1. In Search of Universal Laws: Averroes' Interpretation of Aristotle's Poetics
Tarek Shamma

2. Lost in Transliteration: Morisco Travel Writing and the Coplas del hijante de Puey Monçón
Benjamin Liu

3. Modern Hebrew Literature as "World Literature": The Political Theology of Dov Sadan
Hannan Hever

4. Islam in the Theory and Practice of World Literature: Translating Adab in the Middle Eastern Novel
Karim Mattar

5. Selective Invisibility: Elizabeth Bishop, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and World Literature
Luiza Franco Moreira

6. Latin America and the World: Borges, Bolaño, and the Inconceivable Universal
Patrick Dove

7. Analysis of the Socio-Culture in the Study of the Modern World-System
Richard E. Lee

8. Ethics of Skepticism: A Case Study in Contemporary World Cinema
Jeroen Gerrits

9. Polycentrism, Periphery, and the Place of Brazilian Cinema in World Cinema
Cecília Mello

Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Film
• Visual culture
• Sociology
• Película fotográfica

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438482484
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Premises and Problems
FERNAND BRAUDEL CENTER STUDIES IN HISTORICAL SOCIAL SCIENCE
Series Editor: Richard E. Lee
The Fernand Braudel Center Studies in Historical Social Science publishes works that address theoretical and empirical questions produced by scholars in or through the Fernand Braudel Center or who share its approach and concerns. It specifically promotes works that contribute to the development of the world-systems perspective engaging a holistic and relational vision of the world—the modern world-system—implicit in historical social science, which at once takes into consideration structures (long-term regularities) and change (history). With the intellectual boundaries within the sciences/social sciences/humanities structure collapsing in the work scholars actually do, this series offers a venue for a wide range of research that confronts the dilemmas of producing relevant accounts of historical processes in the context of the rapidly changing structures of both the social and academic world. The series includes monographs, colloquia, and collections of essays organized around specific themes.
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Premises and Problems: Essays on World Literature and Cinema
Louiza Franco Moreira
Premises and Problems
Essays on World Literature and Cinema
Edited and with an Introduction by
Luiza Franco Moreira

FERNAND BRAUDEL CENTER STUDIES IN HISTORICAL SOCIAL SCIENCE
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Moreira, Luiza Franco, editor.
Title: Premises and problems : essays on world literature and cinema / Luiza Franco Moreira.
Description: Albany : State University of New York, 2021. | Series: SUNY series, Fernand Braudel center studies in historical social science | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020048816 (print) | LCCN 2020048817 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438482477 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438482484 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Literature—History and criticism. | Motion pictures—History.
Classification: LCC PN86 P74 2021 (print) | LCC PN86 (ebook) | DDC 801/.9509—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048816
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048817
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CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Luiza Franco Moreira
1 In Search of Universal Laws: Averroes’ Interpretation of Aristotle’s Poetics
Tarek Shamma
2 Lost in Transliteration: Morisco Travel Writing and the Coplas del hijante de Puey Monçón
Benjamin Liu
3 Modern Hebrew Literature as “World Literature”: The Political Theology of Dov Sadan
Hannan Hever
4 Islam in the Theory and Practice of World Literature: Translating Adab in the Middle Eastern Novel
Karim Mattar
5 Selective Invisibility: Elizabeth Bishop, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and World Literature
Luiza Franco Moreira
6 Latin America and the World: Borges, Bolaño, and the Inconceivable Universal
Patrick Dove
7 Analysis of the Socio-Culture in the Study of the Modern World-System
Richard E. Lee
8 Ethics of Skepticism: A Case Study in Contemporary World Cinema
Jeroen Gerrits
9 Polycentrism, Periphery, and the Place of Brazilian Cinema in World Cinema
Cecília Mello
Contributors
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS Figures 8.1 The scene leading up to the accident in The Headless Woman. Figures 8.2, 8.3 The immediate aftermath of the accident in The Headless Woman. Figures 8.4, 8.5 The scene leading to the accident in Three Monkeys . Figures 8.6 The immediate aftermath of the accident in Three Monkeys. Figure 8.7 and close up Virtual point of view . Figures 8.8–8.10 Virtual point of view in Three Monkeys .
Introduction
Luiza Franco Moreira
A persistent problem for discussions of world literature in the United States lies at the starting point of this collection. World literature is generally understood as a systematic category, as Walter Cohen has stressed (Cohen 2017, 2). Like several other scholars in the field, Cohen stresses the role of prestigious literary languages in effectively shaping the system. In his view, a sequence of major languages has served varying functions historically in establishing a structure for world literature. In an analogous way, Pascale Casanova, in a pioneering work, has focused on the prestige of the French language and on Paris as a center of literary institutions to develop an argument about the modern world literary system. Alexander Beecroft, for his part, has stressed the role of literary languages in organizing complex systems of literary circulation. 1 However illuminating or accurate these accounts are, they inevitably move the focus away from the literary languages that do not hold a sufficiently high level of prestige. 2 As Beecroft has pointed out, the system inevitably reduces noise. The problem that motivates this collection is that of holding in mind at once the structure of world literature and the diversity of literary languages that systematic arguments cannot help but disregard.
A parenthetical remark by Franco Moretti in the influential essay “Conjectures on World Literature” suggests a productive way to work through this difficulty: a study of world literature, Moretti stresses, is inevitably “a study of the struggle for symbolic hegemony across the world” (Moretti 2013, 56). In the light of this observation, Casanova, Beecroft, and Cohen appear to converge in calling attention to the power of hegemonic languages to shape the system of world literature. Moretti’s remark is all the more interesting for advancing a dynamic understanding of hegemony. In his view, hegemony is asserted in the process of a broad, worldwide, continuing struggle. The approach sketched in his essay opens the way for considering literary languages that are less than hegemonic, not simply in order to explore their role in the uneven and unequal field of world literature but also, more interestingly, in order to examine the overall system from their perspective.
The essays collected here focus on specific historical moments that afford dynamic and not quite central perspectives on hegemony and, more generally, into the conflicts between diverse literary and linguistic traditions. Rather than reproduce the point of view of the current hegemonic literatures, this collection is concerned with grasping the ways that hegemony is established and the costs of losing it; what hegemony masks and the ways that it is masked. Very often, as a result, these essays discuss literatures that fall beyond the small circle of prestigious modern European languages. Such comparatively unfamiliar traditions are helpful in directing our attention to the areas of obscurity that make it a considerable challenge to trace relationships between literatures that hold different levels of prestige, or that render key features of the system indistinct.
However, it seems necessary to stress the ways in which the approach of this collection diverges from Moretti’s. The collection is informed by a concern with historical, linguistic, and textual specificity that stands in contrast to this critic’s project of a sociological formalism. Moretti’s approach is articulated in part through a dialogue with Roberto Schwarz, and especially this critic’s understanding of literary forms as abstracts of social relations. 3 All too often, sociologically inspired literary analysis proceeds by deriving general hypotheses to be tested later, usually though not always, through reading. One of the difficulties embedded in this method is that the initial hypothesis may establish the direction of discussion so fully that readings will serve mainly to confirm an initial insight: Sociological formalism runs the risk of asking only questions that contain their own answers. Moretti’s call for distant reading heightens the abstraction