When Susan Bassnett proclaimed in 1993 that “comparative literature is in one sense dead,” she was right—and wrong.1 She suggested, according to a recent book, Introducing Comparative Literature by a trio of scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, César Dominguez, Haun Saussy and Darío Villanueva, that this was due to “English literature’s replacement of literary theory in American universities, the impact of cultural studies” and other institutional reasons.2 These scholars also note that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who surely must be one of the major literary theorists of the period, reinforced this idea in her The Death of a Discipline, which, however, is actually a kind of manifesto for a new comparative literature. The title reminds one, perhaps a little ironically, of “the king is dead, long live the king.”
Why mention comparative literature in a paper dedicated to translation, world and national literature? The question is rhetorical as all these concepts are intrinsic to the discipline of comparative literature, both when it was alive and in its current afterlife, or should I call it a revival? All the theory certainly did change the face of literary studies extensively, and one should not forget, before one bursts the theoretical “bubble” (to borrow an analogy from economics), what was going on in literary studies before. One can say it involved a lot of solidly empirical philology and close reading, based on a decades-old methodology which had survived several changes of direction, as it were, and focused on either the author and his work, or the work and its author, both in that order. Perhaps it was so solid that it petrified, and in one sense theory, then, came to the rescue, not as a replacement. And as a new breath of life in literary studies, it also ushered in many changes, which may have ruffled some institutional feathers here and there.
One surfer on the theoretical wave was surely the discipline known as translation studies, which has blossomed in our current era after the pioneering work accomplished in the latter part of the last century. We can see this in the number of translation studies programs that have mushroomed in Europe and all over the world during the last few decades, and the fact that translation is emerging from a quiet peripheral existence, or almost non-existence, in thefield of literary studies. Previously, translation was invisible to a large extent in comparative literature and almost completely in national literary philology. Ástráður Eysteinsson once referred to this as “translation blindness,” a condition that has been improving year by year, albeit slowly.3 Perhaps we should imagine translation studies not as surfing muscle men, but rather as a group of tortoises returning to their island to reproduce, and when conditions are good, they produce many hatchlings that return to the ocean.
The chapter on comparative literature and translation in Introducing Comparative Literature is a disappointment, however, as a book written after the “post-modern crisis” that the authors themselves asserted.4 In a sub-chapter entitled “The (in)visibility of translation” they begin with an enlightened passage by noting that “many of the most influential works in any tradition are translations, not ‘native’ compositions.”5 They mention the King James Bible and other canonical works, ending interestingly with Fitzgerald’s rendition of Khayyam’s Rubáiyát. They discuss Venuti’s invisibility theory briefly and then they begin sinking into a kind of neophilological angst. Phrases like “translators are not invisible by nature, but we expect them to create for us the illusion that we are in contact with the author: Who would not prefer Leo Tolstoy’s company to Constance Garnett’s?”6 My answer to this rhetorical question would be that most of us interested in translation, at least, would like to talk with her.
This is followed by assertions such as “despite dreams of a “definitive” translation, translations have to be redone every generation or two.”7 That this happens, most often with Bible translations and classical drama, is usually the result of changing perspectives and function of the translated text. Bibles are used in daily life at religious ceremonies and classical drama is staged and directors are so afraid of their audiences that they do not trust them with anything but modern usage. They rarely do that with authors of “originals,” however, because they have the “authority.” And such older texts are sometimes “translated” intralingually, as it were, with the aid of paratexts. The school system in English-speaking countries usually teaches pupils to understand Shakespeare, as one can verify by opening a volume of the Methuen series in which, almost invariably, half of every page or more is covered by explanatory footnotes.
When Saussy et al remind us of Schleiermacher’s dictum on the author vs. the reader, one might read with incredulity: “The reader can now no longer overlook the fact that he or she is reading a mediated, second hand text.”8
Why did they not simply write traduttore, traditore and drop the rest?
The neo-philological angst, or rather neo-theoretical angst, is, however, even greater in a recent work, in which one would also not expect to see such things, and this is perhaps proof positive that the humanities are in some sort of a relevance crisis, or perhaps an institutional one. Emily Apter’s Against World Literature is written by someone very well versed in theory, and her objective is very clear: “A primary argument of the book is that many recent efforts to revive World Literature rely on atranslatability assumption. As a result, incommensurability and what has been called the Untranslatable are insufficiently built into the literary heuristic.”9 In essence, this is Derrida’s argument against Jakobson in “Des Tours de Babel,” where he juxtaposes the post-structuralist notion of linguistic ambiguity with the structuralist assumption of translatability, translation proper. Jakobson certainly proclaims translatability in the famous essay, “On the Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” where he talks without blushing about “difference in equivalence” and insists that “no lack of grammatical devices in the language translated into makes impossible a literal translation of the entire conceptual information contained in the original.”10 In a sense, these two essays on translation define the difference between structuralism and post-structuralism. Jakobson backtracks a little at the end of his essay, admitting that “poetry by definition is untranslatable,”11 but Derrida, on the other hand, also claims when discussing the untranslatability of Babel, that “translation then becomes necessary and impossible.”12
Derrida’s preoccupation with translation and untranslatability was partly due to his interest in Walter Benjamin and his well-known essay “The Task of the Translator,” which his friend Maurice Gandillac translated into French. Homi Bhabha has also discussed Benjamin’s notion of untranslat-ability in his The Location of Culture, where he notes that “the subject of cultural difference becomes a problem that Walter Benjamin has described as the irresolution, or liminality, of ‘translation,’ the element of resistance in the process of transformation, ‘that element in a translation which does not lend itself to translation.’”13 Bhabha is discussing the migrant culture as an “in-between,” resisting assimilation. This may well be true, but I would argue too that the element, which does not lend itself to translation, is translated in the sense that it is moved with what is translatable, and that is the resolution; with time the receiving culture or language will accept the untranslatable element and make it “native” in its foreign form. World history is full of such transitions without translation. The untranslatable certainly exists, but it acquires meaning with time and custom.
My problem with Apter’s theses is not primarily with her interpretation of Derrida and other post-modern thinkers; there are many good arguments there too, but I find problematic the way in which she puts world literature and translation into one pot and stokes the fire. She first concedes that
Translation studies’ particular appeal derived from its ability to respond to a planetary remit without sacrificing engagement with the world’s languages. The number of publications, books, book series, articles in journals about, and journals devoted to the practices and theory of translation spiked from 2000–2012, attesting to the combination of excitement and disaggregation characteristic of the emerging discipline.14
This is absolutely correct, but why should or how could a discipline like translation studies sacrifice its “engagement with the world’s languages”?On the other hand, did comparative literature always engage itself with the world’s languages? Although some schools propagated a comparative literature which rejected translation and demanded that students read the works in originals only, as might be assumed from the sections of Introducing Comparative Literature discussed above, in practice this was of course impossible, beginning with Homer and the Bible.
This was not the only reason why the discipline was important in Apter’s opinion, however:
Translation studies gained traction in the humanities because it was interdisciplinary without diluting a disciplinary formation in comparative literature. It drew on the tradition of translatio studii in Renaissance humanism (so important to comparative literature’s foundation as a discipline), reworking it for a contemporary global education.15
This observation is undoubtedly correct and reflects both the welcome of translation studies in the humanities in recent decades, and an ideal that is music to my ears, I am also an avid supporter of humanistic diversity and alterity with foundations in translation, since I believe translation—and not only literary translation—can be instrumental in the communication between individuals and cultures while they are given the opportunity, at the same time, to retain their identity. It is a simple ideal, I admit, and I have practiced it personally for the better part of my life, both as a translator and an educator, and indeed as a father and a husband. Perhaps Apter’s critique piques me for that reason, because she is attacking something that has become untranslatable in myself. As she says:
Both translation studies and World Literature extended the promise of worldly criticism, politicized cosmopolitanism, comparability aesthetics galvanized by deprovincialized Europe, an academically redistributed area studies and a redrawn map of language geopolitics. Partnered, they could deliver still more: translation theory as Weltliteratur would challenge flaccid globalisms that paid lip service to alterity while doing little more than buttress neoliberal “big tent” syllabi taught in English.16
This statement refers more to the current, mostly sociological debate, spiked with its critique of capitalist globalisation, than the original notion of Weltliteratur, which is more complex than we are allowed to know in even the most recent works on the subject.
Although she speaks of Europe, it sounds more like an American promise: correct me if I’m wrong. It is also quite a demand from two, in a way, emerging disciplines. The grim result according to her is indeed heartbreaking:
Unfortunately though, translation studies and World Literature, even in their renewed and best-intentioned guises, inevitably fall short of suchobjectives. Their institutional forms could not escape being too plural-istic, too ecumenical, insufficiently hard-line in the face of the appropriation by universities seeking to justify the downsizing of national literature departments or the cutting of “foreign” language instruction.17
This seems to me to be something other than a problem of “untranslatability” and would rather qualify as “institutional angst.” It is difficult to see the role of a university discipline, let alone concepts of literature, taking on the “defence” of other, albeit strongly related, disciplines. Of course solidarity is called for when the inane wield their spreadsheets, but this has very little to do with translation theory. Indeed, her dystopian analogy at the end, the “thanotropic projections of how a planet dies”18 also goes beyond the subject in my view, although one could try to interpret that as the logical conclusion of Marx and Engels’ oft quoted words from the Communist Manifesto.
In a sense, the opening of Apter´s Against World Literature reminds me of Immanuel Kant’s essay Streit der Fakultäten (1796), the title of which has been translated as “The Conflict of the Faculties” (and the last word indeed refers to university faculties, not the faculties of understanding and imagination, which, in itself, could lead to an interesting debate about (un)translatability), whereby translation studies appears to have been put in (lower) place vis-à-vis comparative literature, in the terms that Kant presented the faculty of philosophy vis-à-vis the faculties of theology, medicine and law. The wide arc from the “conflict of the faculties” to the “thanotropic projections of planetary death” can perhaps be seen as a kind of Kantian transcendental synthesis, or, conversely, a simple “intellectual connection.”19 But
there are problems en route, contradictory problems in some way reflecting the conception of world literature from the beginning but, at the same time, a different perspective from the periphery upon which the author of this piece stands with one leg while, with the other, in the western (Euro)center.
Apter’s stance has recently been criticized in a book whose title— Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets—might at first sound a little bit like the “establishment” fighting back, or at least responding to “provocation.” Indeed, it takes up the banner for translation studies in response. The editors, Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen, note in the introduction that while
Apter’s criticism of celebratory accounts of frictionless global circulation is well taken, her emphasis on the singularity and ineffability of the untranslatable underestimates the achievements of literary translation studies, as it has been instituted since the 1970s, in tracking the complex dynamics of translation processes; indeed, we can observe that the acknowledgement of the vital role of translation by prominent scholars such as Apter, but also, for instance, Rebecca Walkowitz, Lydia Liu, and Gayatri Spivak, all too rarely leads to a sustained engagement with actually existing translation studies.20
This criticism is justified in my view, having seen the same kind of margin-alisation of translation studies on various levels, in the discourse on literature (outside translation studies), both in academia and the public sphere. And although many universities have risen up and established programs in translation studies, I know for a fact that this is not always frictionless, at least when the programs in question aspire to a certain autonomy vis-à-vis programs in comparative literature or foreign languages. So, in some ways, “translation blindness” is still alive in those places, or, when they see the rise of translation studies, apparently it leads to friction in the face of the external threat the humanities are experiencing currently. In some ways, when Apter and other scholars call for a “new” comparative literature, they seem to be attempting to reassert the position of comparative literature in the humanities as criticism of latter-day capitalism. This complex undertaking, in the end, appears to contradict itself.
An irreverent and unashamedly Marxist companion piece to Apter’s book could be the editorial “World-Lite” in an issue of n+1 appropriately titled “The Evil Issue.” The editors are not preoccupied with the “conflict of the faculties,” except in the sense that they lambast exiled postcolonial authors who have found safe havens in American universities to produce what they refer to as “Global Literature” in preference to World Literature:
Today’s World Literature might better be called Global Literature. World calls up aspirations to true universality—“We are the world!”— while global, through no fault of its own, evokes phenomena like global capitalism and global warming the good and bad effects of which are by no means universally felt. Global, in other words, implies worldwide processes that polarize the conditions of the world’s people (including, presumably, their literary condition).21
Neatly put, this overlap of the current literary industry and global capitalism is indeed convincing and reminds us that whatever high ideals scholars at elite universities in Europe and America have, they may just be at the service of the global publishing industry and indeed fulfilling Marx and Engels’ prophecy in The Communist Manifesto:
Global Literature can’t help but reflect global capitalism, in its triumph, inequalities, and deformations. In the English language, World Literature has its signature writers: Rushdie and Coetzee at the lead, and Kiran Desai, Mohsin Hamid, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie among the younger charges. It has its own economy, consisting of international publishing networks, scouts, and book fairs. It has its prizes: the Nobel, of course, but more powerful and snazzier is the Man Booker, and theMan Booker International. Its political arm is PEN. And it has a social calendar full of literary festivals, which bring global elites into contact with the glittering stars of World Lit.22
This modern version of Marx and Engels with names and everything added is certainly an honest critique that has no other agenda than its Marxism, and it was discussed by Sarah Brouillette in her “World Literature and Market Dynamics” in conjunction with Apter’s theses, whereby Brouillette takes a much wider angle and suggests “that the very story of world literature’s market incorporation is actually itself symptomatic of a broader set of tendencies that have become characteristic of cultural and intellectual work today.”23 None of us engaged in this game is innocent; she says of the “likely authors” she names in her essay that they “are not marginal to the industry. They and their anti-market—even anti-capitalist—views are central to a key niche within it.”24 Still, their solution is good old Marxism, if not simply Communism, and their idea of “International Literature” is firmly embedded in the nineteenth-century “International”:
There is another path. The historic rival to a World Literature made up of individual national authors was the programmatically internationalist literature of the revolutionary left: journalism, treatises, and speeches, novels, poetry, plays, and memoirs necessarily written in a given vernacular but always aimed at a borderless audience of radicals.25
In order to take this path the “borderless audience of radicals” would surely need translation: they needed it in the nineteenth century, needed it in the twentieth and would also need it in the twenty-first. And it would indeed have its similarities with World Literature as they are describing it:
A developed internationalist literature would superficially resemble the globalized World Lit of today in being read by and written for people in different countries, and in its emphasis on translation (and, better yet, on reading foreign languages). But there would be a few crucial differences. The internationalist answer to the riddle of World Lit— of its unsatisfactoriness— lies in words never associated with it. These include project, opposition, and, most embarrassingly, truth.26
It is a novum that “Truth” is embarrassing; claims of it may have been scrutinized quite intently in the previous era of poststructuralism and deconstruction, when perhaps it became both impossible and necessary, as Derrida claimed of translation. But this is of course one of the problems of translation, almost a commonplace one: the demands made of translations by the learned and unlearned boil down to Truth. The reason translations are not trusted (cf. above “second hand text”) is this demand, that nothing may be “lost in translation”; despite the poststructuralist deconstructionof absolute truths as expressed in language, translation has to deliver it. If it does not, according to the common presumption, it has either failed or stumbled across the firing lines of the “untranslatable.” Still, the editors of “World-Lite” admit they have to rely on translation for their “International Literature,” even if they do not trust it fully.
Apter, on the other hand, sees the Untranslatable, rather than revolution, as the solution to disturb the “interlocking machines of language and capital” as Pieter Vermeulen interprets it, as a “spanner […] thrown not by world literature, which all too readily greases these machines, but instead by a new comparative literature inhabiting the translation zone […].”27
Indeed, Apter proposes a “translational model of comparative literature” that can “afford a planetary approach to literary history that responds to geopolitics without shying away from fractious border wars.”28 She adds: “This translational transnationalism corresponds to a critical praxis capable of adjusting literary technics—interlinear translation, exegesis, gloss, close reading—to the exigencies of a contemporary language politics […].”29
This praxis is then “marked by” eight points, most of which are absolutely sensible (perhaps the one about “internationalization of (North) American literary studies with multilingualism from within” is a little utopian), but they all lead to a grand conclusion:
Comparative literature’s longstanding commitment to investigating zones of cultural and literary expression that go unnamed or that are walled off into untranslatability is mobilized, then, for curricular ventures that aim for geographical specificity and theoretical reach against the fine grain of philological comparison.30
Apart from looking a little like a “hostile takeover”—to use the capitalist term vis-à-vis translation studies—how are the walled off zones of “untranslatability” to become “curricular ventures” without translation, indeed, without translation studies? Or is this the “longstanding” demand that all comparatists should be able to read essentially national literatures in the original languages? And what would it add up to for the “walled off” peripheral cultures, languages of which are hardly or not taught at American universities, or, for that matter, anywhere else? Without translation, the walls would simply be moved into small university departments depriving the peripheral literatures of a chance of getting recognition, except among the small elite of scholars rewriting for themselves and their colleagues something like “inter-linear translation, exegesis, gloss, close reading.” Perhaps it would not be “sacrificing engagement with the world’s languages,” but at the same time, the periphery would remain there, in the periphery.
Coming from the periphery myself, a literature and literary language that is simultaneously completely and (almost) untranslatably peripheral, I know that both this peripheral literature and indeed the same literary language can only survive via translation, in both directions. It is almost the onlymode this culture has to defend itself from the capitalist and hegemonic juggernaut of English and American culture. (And here I am, writing this in English). Such a statement of “defense” can be interpreted as either a parochial or even jingoistic “national literary” attitude, or a post-colonial justification of the oppressed people of Iceland (which arguably went from the political colonization by Denmark to cultural colonization by the USA).
But the resistance towards oppression in Iceland has always been literary. With the means of translation and autochthonous creation, from the introduction of writing almost a thousand years ago, across the Reformation and centuries of poverty and peripheral, insular existence, the only concrete tool of unity was the literature which has, until now, survived and even “gained” in translation, to use Damrosch’s term, to the extent that it has sometimes been swallowed by the capitalist beast, which has spewn out Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, not to mention the ideological use by many Northern European nations when they were creating the mythology of their “northern classical” past, as I have argued elsewhere.31
Perhaps peripherality can be demonstrated with an “untranslatable,” namely the word “saga,” an untranslated borrowing in English and several other languages. Yet at the same time, I would assume that for most English speakers, not least literary scholars, the word is perfectly understandable. After all it can be found in even the most basic dictionaries in several languages. This “untranslatable” has retained its meaning in many of them (I looked it up in the English and German dictionaries on my shelf): it is a medieval prose story; sometimes the sagas have been viewed as historical, some of them are definitely fictional, and it is a considerable corpus that has been mined by Borges and many European authors for a few centuries. An example is the inventor of the “historical novel,” Walter Scott, as I (and others) have argued elsewhere.32 Yet the sagas find not a footnote in the gargantuan two-volume work The Novel edited by Franco Moretti. Perhaps it is a sign of their untranslatably colonial position.33
Without an enemy you are a nobody, metaphorically speaking, of course, but the two deliberately provocative interventions discussed above mark for me that translation studies and world literature are forces to be reckoned with, at least in academia. Both Apter’s book and the editorial from n+1 provide insights and arguments that I can concur with in many cases, but, in the end, both bear hallmarks of what I presume is not exactly the intention in the first place. They fall into the trap of elitism, in the sense that they propose that a select group or course of studies is best fit to criticize and analyze the literatures of the earth while pointing at the same time to other groups or courses of studies which have not been up to the task, in their opinion.
This very much follows some of Goethe’s own ideas about Weltliteratur (he had many and confusing ones), one of which denied that Weltliteraturmeant that “different nations should get to know each other and their respective works; this has been going on for long, will continue and renew itself more or less. No! this means much more that the living and striving men of letters get to know each other and learn through inclination and public spirit to act socially.”34 On another occasion, he claimed in the same context that “the serious ones must, therefore, gather in a quiet, almost hidden church, since it has no purpose to fight against the broad, daily flood; but you must defend your position steadfastly until the current has gone by.”35,36
What makes Apter’s and the n+1 texts reactionary, in my view, is the fact that both harken back to a former state of the art, so to speak, even if they try to represent a progressive view when criticizing the current situation. “World-Lite” obviously has its Marxist agenda and is in many ways only a twenty-first-century update on Marx and Engels, whereas Apter’s thesis of untranslatability and “oneworldedness” boils down to a top-down reassertion of comparative literature in the humanities in the face of the growing interest in translation studies and world literature. Maybe our task now is to lead these discussions down newly productive paths of inquiry.
1. Susan Bassnett, Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (Oxford:Blackwell, 1993), 47.
2. César Domínguez, Haun Saussy and Dario Villanueva, Introducing Comparative Literature: New Trends and Applications (New York: Routledge, 2015), 11.
3. Ástráður Eysteinsson, Tvímæli: Þýðingar og bókmenntir (Reykjavík: Háskólaútgáfan, 1996), 14.
4. Domínguez, Saussy and Villanueva, Introducing Comparative Literature, 10. The “crisis” appears to have deeper roots; René Wellek was worrying already in 1960 in an essay entitled “The Crisis of Comparative Literature.”
5. Ibid., 79.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 80.
9. Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability(New York: Verso, 2013), 3.
10. Roman Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” in On Translation, ed. Reuben E. Brower (New York: Galaxy, 1966), 233 & 235.
11. Ibid., 238.
12. Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” in Difference in Translation, ed. and trans. Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 170.
13. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 224.
14. Apter, Against World Literature, 4.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 7–8.
17. Ibid., 8.
18. Ibid., 342.
19. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Ingeborg Heidmann (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1996), 192.
20.Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen, “Introduction: World Literature in the Making,” in Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets, eds. Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen (Routledge: New York, 2016), 8.
21. The Editors, “World-Lite,” n+1, accessed Jan. 6, 2017, https://nplusonemag.com/issue-17/the-intellectual-situation/world-lite/
22. Ibid.
23. Sarah Brouillette, “World Literature and Market Dynamics,” in Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets, eds. Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen (New York: Routledge, 2016), 93–106, 97.
24. Ibid., 97.
25. The Editors, “World-Lite”
26. Ibid.
27. Pieter Vermeulen, “On World Literary Reading: Literature, the Market and the Antinomies of Mobility,” in Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets, eds. Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen (New York: Rout-ledge, 2016), 79–92, 80.
28. Apter, Against World Literature, 42–43.
29. Ibid., 43.
30. Ibid., 44.
31. Gauti Kristmannsson, Literary Diplomacy I: The Role of Translation in the Construction of National Literatures in Britain and Germany 1750–1830 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Verlag, 2005), 122–232.
32. Gauti Kristmannsson, “Gathering Grapes from Thistles: Walter Scott’s Trajectory from Translator and Editor to Author: The Symbiosis of Translation, Rewriting and Original Work.”
33. Apparently this is originally a five volume work in Italian.
34. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, Vol. I 12, ed. Erich Trunz (Munich: Deutsche TAschenbuch Verlag, 1998), 263.
35. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, Vol. I 22, ed. Hendrik Birus (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1999), 866.
36. Gauti Kristmannsson, “Die Entdeckung der Weltliteratur,” in Übersetzer als Entdecker. Ihr Leben als Gegenstand translationswissenschaftlicher und liter-aturwissenschaftlicher Forschung, eds. Andreas F. Kelletat and Aleksey Tashinskiy (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2014), 345–366. This article has more detail on the conaige of Weltliteratur prior to Goethe.
Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. NewYork: Verso, 2013.
Bassnett, Susan. Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Brouillette, Sarah. “World Literature and Market Dynamics,” in Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets, edited by Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen, 93–106.New York: Routledge, 2016.
Derrida, Jacques. “Des Tours de Babel,” in Difference in Translation, edited and translated by Joseph F. Graham, 165–207.Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.
Domínguez, César, Haun Saussy and Darío Villanueva. Introducing Comparative Literature: New Trends and Applications. New York: Routledge, 2015.
The Editors. “World-Lite,” in n+1, accessed Jan. 6, 2017, https://nplusonemag.com/issue-17/the-intellectual-situation/world-lite/
Eysteinsson, Ástráður. Tvímæli: Þýðingar og bókmenntir. Reykjavík: Háskólaútgáfan, 1996.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche,Vol. I 22, edited by Hendrik Birus. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1999.
———. Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, Vol. I 12, edited by Erich Trunz. Munich:Deutsche TAschenbuch Verlag, 1998.
Helgesson, Stefan and Pieter Vermeulen. “Introduction: World Literature in the Making,” in Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets, edited by Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen, 1–20.New York: Routledge, 2016.
Jakobson, Roman. “On the Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” in On Translation, edited by Reuben E. Brower, 232–239.New York: Galaxy, 1966.
Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, edited by Ingeborg Heidemann. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1966.
Kristmannsson, Gauti. “Die Entdeckung der Weltliteratur,” in Übersetzer als Ent-decker. Ihr Leben als Gegenstand translationswissenschaftlicher und literaturwissenschaftlicher Forschung, edited by Andreas F. Kelletat and Aleksey Tashinskiy, 345–366.Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2014.
———. “Gathering Grapes from Thistles: Walter Scott’s Trajectory from Translator and Editor to Author: The Symbiosis of Translation, Rewriting and Original Work.”
———. Literary Diplomacy I: The Role of Translation in the Construction of National Literatures in Britain and Germany 1750–1830. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Verlag, 2005.
Moretti, Franco, ed. The Novel 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Vermeulen, Pieter. “On World Literary Reading: Literature, the Market and the Antinomies of Mobility,” in Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets, edited by Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen, 79–92.New York: Routledge, 2016.
Wellek, René. “The Crisis of Comparative Literature,” in Concepts of Criticism, edited by Stephen G. Nichols, Jr., 282–295.New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963.