Guest post by Jack Dann I think that most professional writers are well acquainted with the idea of synchronicity…of meaningful coincidences. I certainly am! In fact, I experienced a bit of it when the good folks at Bloomsbury asked me to write something for the Literary Studies blog about my new book, The Fiction Writer’s… Read More »
Guest post by Dimitar Kambourov I embarked on the project of compiling and editing Bulgarian Literature as World Literature for various reasons. Some of them – like increasing the visibility of Bulgarian literature and provoking curiosity about it worldwide – were uninspiringly important. Others happened to be a continuation of my life-long endeavor to read… Read More »
Guest post by Georgina Binnie-Wright Mentioning ‘Bloomsday’ to those unfamiliar with the work of James Joyce may provoke a quizzical reaction. Yet the date of Ulysses’ setting, on 16 June 1904, marks an opportunity to celebrate a text that has been heralded as signalling the birth of literary modernism. Celebrations will be heightened this year… Read More »
Guest post by Emily Ennis.
“Apps like Instagram tap into a centuries’ old tradition of using photographs to tell stories. Yes, taking photos often provides a window directly into how we live our lives on a day-to-day basis. But we also edit those photos – apply filters, crop, resize – and our choices of captions – or no captions – as well as our very selection of the images we use says something about how we choose to present ourselves to the world.”
Guest post by Elizabeth Losh When Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged the citizens of the world to “come to your squares” and “make yourselves visible and heard” to support his besieged country, he invoked powerful memories of the 2013-2014 “Maidan Revolution,” a mass protest against Russian influence, which brought tens of thousands of people out… Read More »
Translation, interpretation, metaphor, word choice, feeling. Judgement. Justice. Responsibility. There’s a lot going on in Rivky Mondal’s chapter on Roger Fry’s translations of Mallarmé. A paper that appears to be focussed on the niceties of Fry’s translational choices and the various reactions to them raises myriad large-scale issues, perhaps because translation itself is such a powerful trope as well as activity. Think about it: translation is a mug’s game. An original text sits before a reader who wishes to commute it into different language and yet retain the essence of the original.
The first thing to note about Sonita Sarker’s essay is that it offers a necessary challenge to and reorientation of the various definitions of responsible reading that appear throughout this volume. Responsible reading can and should take on any number of meanings, even contradictory meanings, in the chapters that appear here. But what responsible reading should never suggest is a “mandatory curriculum” that becomes a burden that the reader “does not ask to carry but becomes hers to bear.”
This week, in a series of blog takeovers, we’re looking at Modernism, Theory, and Responsible Reading with posts from the collection’s contributors. Guest post by Kathryn Carney In “Absolutely Small: Anarchism and the Aesthetics of Affirmation,” Roger Rothman draws on Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic thought and Gustav Landauer’s Weimar vein of utopian anarchism to argue for importing anarchist politics… Read More »