Learning from Literature
From Rome to New Orleans - Translating the City: The Jesuit Missionaries and Their Participation in the Construction of Urban Fabrics
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Frederic Conrod
When the Society of Jesus was founded in 1540 by Ignatius of Loyola and his fellow students outside of Paris, the expedition of De Soto was on its way to discover the site of the future city of New Orleans, Louisiana, two years later. This research analyzes the Jesuit presence and participation in the construction of the southern metropolis, between French and Spanish rules, and takes a particular look at the correspondence travelling between the Eternal City and the Crescent City.
What Kind of a Migrant Are You?: Disruption of Fixed Categories of Displacement in Nazlı Koca's The Applicant (2023)
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Neriman Kuyucu
This paper aims to show how Turkish writer Nazlı Koca's novel (2023) challenges the fixed categories of displacement, underlining instead migration as a non-linear process marked by the systemic barriers and the power dynamics involved in the mobility of people across borders. Unlike many contemporary migration novels, The Applicant demonstrates the inadequacies of the labels and terminologies –“refugee,” “migrant,” high-skilled,” and “low-skilled,” etc. that have come to define the discourse on migration in the 21st century. By offering a close reading of some of the key passages from this timely text, I anchor my analysis in migration theory and demonstrate how the novel works to uncover multiple layers of social and political structures that shape migration experience through its protagonist, Leyla’s experiences and reflections as a Turkish writer in her twenties who is stuck in bureaucratic limbo waiting for an extension on her student visa in Berlin.
Travel Literature and the Question of Hospitality: Spectrum of World Literature
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mustapha Ait Kharouach
Historically, literatures that circulated and travelled along the different silk roads east and west made it possible for remote nations to gain access, in addition to commercial goods and products, literatures and books of the world enabled wisdom to be transferred through translation and adaptation. Literary studies and area studies have formed a fruitful collaboration within the parameters of comparative literature. In this conjuncture, literary theory has developed new critical insights by building on the notions of geography, migration, crossing and circulation of texts in different areas. Such collaborations of literary translation and circulation of texts between geographies means mainly the same thing insofar as the theorization of world literature pursued in this thesis as being founded through both literary translation and its circulation in different spaces and geographies. Henceforth, translation of literary texts is a meta-linguistic process that starts with the perception of the new text and concludes with its adaptation to new socio-linguistic and geographical landscapes. The exploration of theories of migration, diaspora and border crossing in our study of world literatures in the making will assume, as Susan Friedman has remarked, ‘different nodal centers of aesthetic production and agency around the globe and examines the effects of transnational contact zones, traveling ideas and forms, reciprocally constitutive formations, and hybrid processes of transplantation and indigenization’. It challenges the nationalistic and relativist thoughts that favor one typically literary genre over another, assuming its aesthetic avant-gardist claims.
