Kyle Wanberg
Published: 2012
Total Pages: 205
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My dissertation explores the pedagogy of global literature through questions about its translation. Rather than encountering diversity in global literature as unambiguous and automatically intelligible, I try to revise recalcitrant ideas of the world as site of transparent difference. Jettisoning the project of "world" literature as imbricated in enlightenment discourses about great civilizations, I reset this focus on the "global" in all of its complexity, being intertwined with flows of circulation and geopolitical interests. This not only requires a sharp attention attuned to translation, but also involves reimagining the content of diverse literatures from across the globe. Even the great advances that postcolonial scholarship has allowed in this area still tend to occlude oral literary traditions within the colonized world. My dissertation brings the endangered Native American tradition of Pima orature into dialogue with literatures indigenous to Africa and the Middle East. Exploring their diverse engagements with folklore and orality, as well as their flirtation with modernisms, I argue for their inclusion within a new pedagogy of global literature. Stressing the need for this pedagogy to be process-oriented, I consider questions of translation not simply around the transference of material from one language to another, but also extending to the way information is transferred between individuals, or between texts and individuals. In particular, I analyze the influence of oral traditions, practices of cultural and literary reception, the transmission of authority, transformations of subjectivity, and responses to historical forms of cultural representation as falling under this broader trope of translation. In this sense, translation becomes a way to open up questions that critically explore diversity within the study of global literature. Emphasizing the challenges of interpretation across different languages and cultures, I closely read literary texts in their original languages, while attending to the difficulties that arise in their translations. Working to transform the discipline of global literature pedagogy to allow for greater diversity, my dissertation raises critical questions about how orality, interpretation, and translation transform the works we read.