Book Section
What if one thinks not in terms of shared meanings or contents, but rather in terms of iterable gestures available for re-enactment in different times and places in order to conceive of a cross-cultural world of literature? This essay sets out to explore, within the discursive mode of the lyric, whether the notion of gesture could be more helpful than meaning-based translation to account for the transferability of literary texts and for envisioning a form of community based on the shareability of certain gestures. To do so, it will look at how the act-event of reading described by Derek Attridge is processed in two cases in which poems are transferred from an earlier authoritative tradition into a new one.
Keywords: gesture; lyric; transferability; world literature; community; transcontextual; translation; re-enactment
Rights: © by the author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Part of The Work of World Literature Containing:
The Work of World Literature / Francesco Giusti, Benjamin Lewis Robinson
Untranslatability and the Challenge of World Literature / Derek Attridge
World Literature and the Problem of Postcolonialism / Lorna Burns
Transcontextual Gestures
The World after Fiction / Benjamin Lewis Robinson
Extracting Indigeneity / Rashmi Varma
Being Taught Something World-Sized / Dirk Wiemann
Working Conditions / Jarad Zimbler
Afterword / Emily Apter
Title
Transcontextual Gestures
Subtitle
A Lyric Approach to the World of Literature
Author(s)
Francesco Giusti
Identifier
https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-19_04
Description
What if one thinks not in terms of shared meanings or contents, but rather in terms of iterable gestures available for re-enactment in different times and places in order to conceive of a cross-cultural world of literature? This essay sets out to explore, within the discursive mode of the lyric, whether the notion of gesture could be more helpful than meaning-based translation to account for the transferability of literary texts and for envisioning a form of community based on the shareability of certain gestures. To do so, it will look at how the act-event of reading described by Derek Attridge is processed in two cases in which poems are transferred from an earlier authoritative tradition into a new one.
Is Part Of
The Work of World Literature
Place
Berlin
Publisher
ICI Berlin Press
Date
27 April 2021
Subject
gesture
lyric
transferability
world literature
community
transcontextual
translation
re-enactment
Rights
© by the author(s)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Language
en-GB
page start
75
page end
103
Source
The Work of World Literature, ed. by Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Lewis Robinson, Cultural Inquiry, 19 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021-04-27), pp. 75–103

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Cite as: Francesco Giusti, ‘Transcontextual Gestures: A Lyric Approach to the World of Literature’, in The Work of World Literature, ed. by Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Lewis Robinson, Cultural Inquiry, 19 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021), pp. 75-103 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-19_04>