Branding World Literature: The Global Circulation of Authors in Translation.

Abstract

How do forces in the academy and marketplace decide which minority literature texts will be translated and circulated as world literature? This dissertation shows how authors from the French Caribbean (Dany Laferrière), Africa (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o), and Eastern Europe (Milan Kundera and contemporary women writers like Alexandra Berková) act as agents provocateurs, adopting controversial or contrarian stances to draw attention and capitalize on opportunities in the global marketplace. The initial provocation serves as branding and generates cultural currency subsequently used by the author, editors, scholars, and translators to form a franchise of the author’s work. This dissertation argues that the status afforded these writers, however, allows them to refine their brand into more complicated positions beyond the role of agent provocateur. In this circulation model of world literature, translation comes to the fore as a process that facilitates the cultural and linguistic border-crossing of texts as well as a means of constituting the literary as a category in the academy and global marketplace. While it is important to take into account the differing function of literature in various cultures, of particular relevance in world literature is the way a text from a source culture is branded as literature in a foreign culture. This dissertation elucidates how translators and editors work as cultural brokers, negotiating between ideas in the source and foreign cultures about what is worth reading, teaching, and purchasing. Examples comment on current trends whereby postmodernism, postcolonial studies, and gender studies prevail in Western literary discourse, and reflect on the way foreign texts dealing in hybridity, migrancy, and cosmopolitanism possess cultural currency, attracting scholarly attention and book sales. However, this dissertation warns against an unreflective application of these approaches to texts from other cultures and demonstrates how the processes of editing and translation may actually embed these discourses in the translated text. Consequently, authors from minor literatures must always translate themselves and are forced to speak in the languag of the West, even if that speech might be subversive. This dissertation challenges the underlying assumption that the West, being always already understandable and universal, need not translate itself.