Persistent and futile are the theories of translation. But so are as those of the fantastic or the acts of public piety. From the posturing of a judgmental above or an insidious aside, little of substance has been said about the swarming, sharp work of translation. As if there were a general of translation, not having to whom to delegate the work of difference across the clouds, the sun gets bored upon seeing than everything underneath is the same. To be sure, there is no interesting theory of translation as...   ⇨ Read more

The present introduction aims to outline the major theoretical approaches of spatial studies, together with their most relevant inquiries and pursuing their many methodological ramifications. Our main goal is to deliver a panoramic study engaging both traditional geocritical perspectives and contemporary transnational, quantitative, or digital studies that shaped the way in which we understand the notion of space and its literary functions. The present introduction targets national, transnational, and global...   ⇨ Read more

In the following interview, Bertrand Westphal, professor of comparative literature at the University of Limoges, discusses some of the prevailing issues surrounding contemporary forays into spatial studies and the function of the humanities in current academia. The dialogue also touches on subjects pertaining to World Literature studies, such as Immanuel Wallerstein’s “world systems analysis” or Franco Moretti’s “distant reading” method, in an attempt to propose an applied and pragmatic approach through which...   ⇨ Read more

The paper is a conceptual proposal in favour of employing the metanational, a term and concept born in the economy theories on the multinational, as a descriptor and a theoretical tool in the humanities, here represented by comparative studies. Namely, addressing the lack of target and purpose of transnationalist descriptions, as well as the Romanticization of the uneven character of cultural peripheralities and of scholarship on marginality, the metanational has a useful vectorial definition pointing to a...   ⇨ Read more

Starting with the 1990s a myriad of literary texts that tackle the Yugoslav wars have been published worldwide. Despite the wide variety of texts, scholars (Obradović, Pisac, Vervaet, Wachtel) have focused mainly on those written by ex-Yugoslav writers and on the representation of the former country in these books. This paper focuses on the aforementioned literary phenomenon – the representation of ex-Yugoslavia – from a broader perspective. My selection includes texts that originate in different geo-cultural...   ⇨ Read more

The following paper intends to investigate the main junctures and disjunctures of Romanian prose written by women in the first half of the twentieth century from a quantitative perspective. The paper will employ a macroanalysis of both the novels written in this period and the prose written by female writers, in order to establish a pattern in the modernisation and institutionalisation of Romanian literature in the inter-war period, more specifically in the 1930s, the decade that saw the emergence of the main...   ⇨ Read more

What would a dystopian version of London look like? How would the architecture of the near future engage with personal and collective memories in order to define, or even transform the identities of the inhabitants? In an attempt to answer these questions, British New Wave science fiction turns its attention to the exploration of urban dwellers in relation to their dystopian surroundings. This article explores the extent to which the novel High-Rise by J.G Ballard highlights the erasure of memories and ultimate...   ⇨ Read more

This paper explores Romanian literary histories in the light of the theoretical acknowledgements of “World Literature”. Its foremost representatives define the international literary space as a competition for universal acknowledgment among nations. The complex dynamic between culture and socio-economic power is responsible for the hierarchical distinction between (semi)peripheral and core literatures. The case of Romanian literature is significant for the East-European struggle to overcome the socio-political...   ⇨ Read more

Mircea MARTIN, Christian MORARU, Andrei TERIAN, Romanian Literature as World Literature, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, ISBN 978-1- 5013-2791-9, 357 p.

The aim of this paper is to describe and interpret some of the challenges that digital humanities pose to Romanian culture and Romanian studies. Apart from technical difficulties such as the lack of digitized archives, further problems arise when it comes to the interpretation of existing archives, to public perception of digitization in terms of free access to information but also, more often than not, in terms of exposing a “national identity” and national values to what are perceived as malicious...   ⇨ Read more

This paper attempts to undertake a geo-literary analysis of contemporary Scandinavian literature, departing from the pastoral nature representations of 19th century literary awakening and lingering on recent Scandinavian crime fiction, as this subgenre represents the Scandinavian peninsula’s latest contribution to World Literature and a “temporary sub-centre” (Mads Rosendahl Thomsen) of provisional international interest. Transcending both the idyllical natural setting of romanticism and the estrangement of...   ⇨ Read more

The literary domain has suffered several delineations throughout the centuries. No matter if it is perceived from a chronological, theoretical or constitutive perspective, there is a ceaseless readjustment regarding the perception of literature, with its afferent notions, such as the literary canon, translations or its own dynamics. This article outlines one of the major approaches for the literary space, due to David Damrosch, who has made visible the concept of “world literature”. Moreover, this article is an...   ⇨ Read more

The author’s intention is to analyse the themes of madness and imagination as means of world-making and mediators between them in Cervantes’ novel, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. The premise of the central argument is that each of Cervantes’ characters relate to the world through their own imagination. The first conclusion generated by this hypothesis is that Don Quixote himself deliberately makes up his world and defines himself as an archetype. This paper proposes a classification of three...   ⇨ Read more

Cătălin GHIȚĂ, and Robert BESHARA, eds. Fear and Anxiety in the 21st Century: The European Context. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2015. Print. ISBN: 978-1-84888-346-8, 153 p.