Original scientific paper

Big Nations' Literature and Small Nations' Sociology

Andrea Pisac ; Goldsmiths

Abstract

This paper explores literary authors as cultural brokers in
the context of world literature. Vignettes from literary events illustrate that what is today understood as world literature is fiction from Third World countries translated into English, written largely
by migrant writers for the consumption of metropolitan readers who sample them as ethnographies of unknown places. Authors feature on the stage of world literature as representatives of their “culture
as a whole”. The only way for them to be consecrated through
translation into English is to write a sociology of their “culture”, sustaining that culture’s fixed, backward, and romanticised images through thick descriptions of its ethnos.

Keywords

world literature, translation; cultural broker; nation; exotic; foreign; literary value; chronopolitics; politics of representation; authentic; Third World, ethnography; commodification

Hrčak ID:

94123

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/94123

Publication date:

14.12.2012.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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