Birgit Neumann

Vor gut 25 Jahren beklagte Lawrence Venuti die Unsichtbarkeit des Übersetzers, und Beispiele für solche Unsichtbarkeiten gibt es in der Tat zuhauf. Es gibt aber auch eine andere Geschichte der Übersetzung, eine Geschichte der Sichtbarkeit und Agentialität – und diese Geschichte, eingeschlossen ihrer verschiedenen Theorien und Praktiken, stellt der geplante Sammelband mit Blick auf die Zielsprache Deutsch ins Zentrum. Das Interesse gilt dabei dem verändernden Potential der Übersetzung sowohl zwischen als auch innerhalb von Sprachen. Der Band versammelt Beiträge von Wissenschaftler:innen und Übersetzer:innen.

Zielsprache Deutsch

Die Sichtbarkeit der Übersetzung

Engaging with recent research in literary multilingualism studies, the global anglophone and comparative studies, this book theorizes the so-called post-monolingual anglophone novels. Inspired by Yasemin Yildiz’s Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (2012), post-monolingual anglophone novels are understood as literary texts that activate multi- and translingual strategies to mount a challenge to the “monolingual norm” and the homogenizing aspirations of English. Post-monolingual anglophone novels employ literary configurations of multi- and translingualism without ignoring the ongoing validity of the monolingual norm in the international book market and the power differentials inherent in English. This corpus of texts is therefore highly self-conscious about the use of language. As post-monolingual novels stage exchange and movement between languages, they also model, in the realm of fiction, new concepts of language. In several case studies of contemporary anglophone post-monolingual novels from different parts of the world, the book demonstrates how the post-monolingual in literature operates within different cultural and political contexts. The readings of Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Yvonne A. Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea, Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings, J.M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous propose theoretically and methodologically innovative ways of engaging with literary multi- and translingualism. While the analyses focus on the post-monolingual poetics, they also direct attention to the novels’ modes of production and circulation in the anglosphere.

Writing Beyond English

Post-Monolingual Anglophone Novels

Ansgar Nünning

Vera Nünning

Taking as its point of departure Nelson Goodman’s theory of symbol systems as delineated in his seminal book “Ways of Worldmaking”, this volume gauges the possibilities and perspectives offered by the worldmaking approach as a model for the study of culture. Its main objectives are to explore the usefulness and scope of the approach for the study of culture and to supplement Goodman’s philosophy of worldmaking with a number of complementary disciplinary perspectives, literary and cultural approaches, and new questions and applications. It focuses on three key issues or concepts which illuminate ways of worldmaking and their interdisciplinary relevance and ramifications, viz. (1) theoretical approaches to ways of worldmaking, (2) the impact of media on ways of worldmaking, and (3) narratives as ways of worldmaking. The volume serves to demonstrate how specific media and narratives affect the worlds that are created, and shows how these worlds are established as socially relevant. It also illustrates the extent to which ways of worldmaking are imbued with cultural values, and thus inevitably implicated in power relations.

Media and Narratives

Cultural Ways of Worldmaking

Gabriele Rippl

Examining a range of contemporary Anglophone texts, this book opens up postcolonial and transcultural studies for discussions of visuality and vision. It argues that the preoccupation with visual practices in Anglophone literatures addresses the power of images, vision and visual aesthetics to regulate cultural visibility and modes of identification in an unevenly structured world. The representation of visual practices in the imaginative realm of fiction opens up a zone in which established orders of the sayable and visible may be revised and transformed. In 12 chapters, the book examines narrative fiction by writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, David Dabydeen and NoViolet Bulawayo, who employ word-image relations to explore the historically fraught links between visual practices and the experience of modernity in a transcultural context. Against this conceptual background, the examination of verbal-visual relations will illustrate how Anglophone fiction models alternative modes of re-presentation that reflect critically on hegemonic visual regimes and reach out for new, more pluralized forms of exchange.

Intermedial Aesthetics

Verbal-Visual Configurations in Postcolonial Literature

Taking as its point of departure Nelson Goodman s theory of symbol systems as delineated in his seminal book Ways of Worldmaking, this volume gauges the possibilities and perspectives offered by the worldmaking approach as a model for the study of culture. The volume serves to demonstrate how specific media and narratives affect the worlds that are created, and shows how these worlds are established as socially relevant. It also illustrates the extent to which ways of worldmaking are imbued with cultural values, and thus inevitably implicated in power relations."

Wolfgang Hallet

Raum ist in literarischen Texten nicht nur Ort der Handlung, sondern auch kultureller Bedeutungsträger. Die Raumdarstellung bildet eine der grundlegenden Komponenten der (fiktionalen) Wirklichkeitserschließung. Kulturelle Normen und Wertehierarchien finden im literarischen Raum eine konkret anschauliche Form; umgekehrt haben literarische Räume maßgeblichen Anteil an der Aushandlung kultureller Raumordnungen. In diesem Band werden literaturwissenschaftliche Raumkonzepte systematisch erfasst und unter theoretischen, methodischen und gattungsspezifischen Gesichtspunkten vorgestellt. Der Band leistet damit einen genuin disziplinären Beitrag zu der disziplinübergreifend geführten Diskussion um den Spatial Turn und rückt Literatur als konstitutiven Bestandteil kultureller Raumkonstruktionen in den Blick.

Die Literaturwissenschaften und der Spatial Turn

Raum und Bewegung in der Literatur

Im Kontext der kulturwissenschaftlichen Gedächtnisforschung widmet sich diese interdisziplinär ausgerichtete Reihe dem Verhältnis von Medien und kultureller Erinnerung. Die hier vorgestellten Studien behandeln die ganze Bandbreite der durch Medien konstruierten, tradierten und verbreiteten Erinnerung. Schrift und Bild, das Kino und die 'neuen' digitalen Medien, Intermedialität, Transmedialität und Remediation sowie die sozialen, zunehmend transnationalen und transkulturellen, Kontexte der mediatisierten Erinnerung gehören zu den Forschungsinteressen der Reihe. Ziel ist es, eine internationale Plattform für die interdisziplinäre Medien- und Gedächtnisforschung zu schaffen. Eingereichte Manuskripte werden im peer review Verfahren durch externe Experten begutachtet.

Gattungstypologie und Funktionen kanadischer "Fictions of Memory"

Erinnerung - Identität - Narration

Stefan Helgesson

The Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures is the first globally comprehensive attempt to chart the rich field of world literatures in English. Part I navigates different usages of the term ‘world literature’ from an historical point of view. Part II discusses a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to world literature. This is also where the handbook’s conceptualisation of ‘Anglophone world literatures’ – in the plural – is developed and interrogated in juxtaposition with proximate fields of inquiry such as postcolonialism, translation studies, memory studies and environmental humanities. Part III charts sociological approaches to Anglophone world literatures, considering their commodification, distribution, translation and canonisation on the international book market. Part IV, finally, is dedicated to the geographies of Anglophone world literatures and provides sample interpretations of literary texts written in English.

Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures

Using an innovative amalgam of theories of memory, narratology and functional history, this literary and cultural study demonstrates the manifold interactions between memory, identity and narration. The author presents the first account of the fundamentals of a 'cultural memory narratology' and draws up a genre typology of the fictions of memory which opens the way to a description of the functions of literary constructions of memory.

Erinnerung – Identität – Narration

Sibylle Baumbach

This book discusses the complex ways in which the novel offers a vibrant arena for critically engaging with our contemporary world and scrutinises the genre's political, ethical, and aesthetic value. Far-reaching cultural, political, and technological changes during the past two decades have created new contexts for the novel, which have yet to be accounted for in literary studies. Addressing the need for fresh transdisciplinary approaches that explore these developments, the book focuses on the multifaceted responses of the novel to key global challenges, including migration and cosmopolitanism, posthumanism and ecosickness, human and animal rights, affect and biopolitics, human cognition and anxieties of inattention, and the transculturality of terror. By doing so, it testifies to the ongoing cultural relevance of the genre. Lastly, it examines a range of 21st-century Anglophone novels to encourage new critical discourses in literary studies.

Birgit Neumann

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