Twenty-second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

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.