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Literature for the Planet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Wai Chee Dimock
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Abstract

What happens when a text is read in different centuries, different countries? The fate of the Divine Comedy in the Soviet Union suggests one answer. Focusing on Osip Mandelstam's intense attachment to Dante and thinking generally about the consequences of a globalizing readership, this essay argues for literature as a peculiar form of “life,” a planetary life. Not biological like an organism and not territorial like a nation, this form of life extends across linguistic borders and across the borders of chronology. This form of life comprises a population of temporal hybrids: “translations” that disrupt the territorial sovereignty of the state, even as they disrupt its regime of simultaneity.

Type
Talks from the Convention
Information
PMLA , Volume 116 , Issue 1: Special Topic: Globalizing Literary Studies , January 2001 , pp. 173 - 188
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2001

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