Learning from Literature
Contrafactum in Literature: Exploring Intertextuality and Cultural Transformations
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Diana Sisakyan
This research scrutinizes contrafactum, i.e. a medieval musical practice where an existing melody is paired with new lyrics, leading to the convergence of sacred and secular elements, in literature with a special focus on its intertextual nature. There exists a noticeable gap in scholarly discussions concerning contrafactum in literature as the phenomenon has been predominantly explored by Deeming, Hagen, Berger, Saltzstein and Rose-Steel within the realm of music. A limited number of studies have examined its literary implications, with only two scholars, Breuer and Ángeles-Ruiz, addressing a contrafactum in the literary context. This gap highlights the need for a comprehensive exploration of contrafactum within the domain of literature. Applying contrafactum as an analytical method for intertextual relations, the specific aim is to explore literary and cultural transformations in the contemporary era marked by secularization. Besides the musical scholars’ definitions, this research draws on intertextuality theories, prominently influenced by the works of Borges, Kristeva, Bakhtin, and Barthes. Employing a comparative method, the texts and media under scrutiny encompass a diverse array, spanning from literary texts to archetypes, world building, and beyond. The results show that contrafactum goes beyond the limits of music and has numerous manifestations in other texts and media. As a result of investigating this dynamic interplay, we gain a stronger appreciation for how texts, cultures evolve.
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.
Translating Literature in Wartime: Analysis of Rebellion in the Backlands (1944) and, Backlands: The Canudos Campaign (2010)
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eloa Carvalho Pires
Os Sertões (1902) is a literary and historical work written by the journalist Euclides da Cunha about the War of Canudos, the massacre promoted by the Brazilian Government against its most impoverished and vulnerable population in a geographical region extremely devastated by drought. This conflict was reported internationally, supporting the Brazilian government's attitudes. In the meantime, Os Sertões became a Brazilian masterpiece as the result of the author's journalistic coverage of the events plus his critical vision after the end of the war. The main objective is to analyze literary practices in the English language versions of Os Sertões. For that purpose, we discuss the possibilities and challenges of translating this Brazilian literature emblematic work about war times based on the reflections of translators Berthold Zilly, Samuel Putnam, and Elizabeth Lowe. We focus on the historical moment of the translations Rebellion in the Backlands (1944) and Backlands: The Canudos Campaign (2010) and the implications of these contexts for the translation of Brazilian literature. Through the investigation of the sociohistorical contingencies at the time of each translation, we seek to examine changes over time, identity, and differences in the translation of literary works produced in wartime. This study is important and of great relevance to our current times in which governments and the press become vehicles of information and support for massacres carried out against vulnerable people.
