Lil’ throwback to our volume ‘The Work of World Literature’, ed. by Francesco Giusti (@muzzledsphinx ) and Benjamin Lewis Robinson
The contentious discourse around world literature tends to stress the ‘world’ in the phrase. This volume, in contrast, asks what it means to approach world literature by inflecting the question of the literary. Debates for, against, and around ‘world literature’ have brought renewed attention to the worldly aspects of the literary enterprise. Literature is studied with regard to its sociopolitical and cultural references, contexts and conditions of production, circulation, distribution, and translation. But what becomes of the literary when one speaks of world literature? Responding to Derek Attridge’s theory of how literature ‘works’, the contributions in this volume explore in diverse ways and with attention to a variety of literary practices what it might mean to speak of ‘the work of world literature’. The volume shows how attention to literariness complicates the ethical and political conundrums at the centre of debates about world literature.
We published the book in 2021. It’s available via our website for 14.50 € (paperback) and 31.50 € (hardcover; ; and also available for free via Open Access at our website.
Cover design by Studio Bens with a work by Claudia Peppel @cepeppel .
#theworkofworldliterature #openaccesspublishing #iciberlinpress #2021 #literature
New publication of the "Rethinking Lyric Communities" project, featuring contributions on Arabic, Occitan, Italian, English, French, Hebrew and Persian poetry! Take a look here: https://read.dukeupress.edu/jmems/issue/56/1
@dukeuniversitypress #lyricpoetry #poetryandpolitics #poetryandsociety #medievalstudies #earlymodernstudies
The special issue "Invention, Re-enactment, Exchange: Lyric Communities in Medieval and Early Modern Italy", edited by Laura Banella and myself, is finally out — take a look! /toc/yits20/current
#poetryandcommunity #poetry #poetryandsociety #poetrycriticism #poetryandpolitics #poetryandpoetics #lyricpoetry #lyrictheory #lyriccommunity #italianliterature #medievalitalianliterature #earlymodernliterature
“Community formation is generally associated to the processes of mutual identification among individuals as members of an imaginary group with common goals, interests, and maybe even shared affects. It is thought to rely on communal systems of knowledge, values, and beliefs and to make use of and create shared interpretive strategies and responses to culturally selected objects.
Most recently, however, theories on community have moved away from what could be perceived as rigid and constraining categories, such as stable identities and temporalities, to explore instead more spontaneous or ephemeral practises.
The contributors of the book look at the works of poets and the circulation of poetry from different epochs and areas of the world, works which rethink lyric communities through practises involving translation, retranslation, even transmediation, multilingualism, sociability and appropriation. And it is poetry that thrives on the creative power of transnational discourses, and forces us not only to reconsider some of the very basic features of poetry and the language of poetry, such as identification, individuation, and indexicality, but also to account for the renewed and extremely creative political potential of the lyric. And indeed, a beautiful and extremely refined example of these poetic and aesthetic practises is the work of the poet Anthony Vahni Capildeo, with whom we editors have had the privilege of conversing and whose thoughts on contemporary lyric communities and translation conclude our volume.”
Laura Scuriatti is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Bard College Berlin.
‘Rethinking Lyric Communities’ is available in paperback for 17€, hardback for 33.50€, or for free via Open Access at ICI Berlin Press’s website (/10.37050/ci-30).
#iciberlinpress #openaccess #rethinkinglyriccommunities #lyricpoetry #lyrictheory #literarygenre #community #communityformation #poetry #collectiveaction #protest #socialresistance #exclusion #colonialism #decolonialism #indexicality #translation
The fourth and (probably) final conference of the "Rethinking Lyric Communities" project is coming soon, and will feature a fabulous poetry reading!
#lyricpoetry #lyriccommunity #poetryandcommunity #poetryandsociety #poetryandpoetics #poetryandpolitics #poetry #lyrictheory #communitybuilding #community
