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To what extent does cultural distance interfere with or limit literary experience? What kind of intimacy is needed to make a text into a work? This essay seeks to answer these questions by focusing on the writings of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. In doing so, it suggests that the challenges of cultural distance may be most acute when dealing with texts from homo-linguistic literary environments, and that we might overcome these challenges by undertaking a world literary criticism that attends to localized fields and materials without forgetting the charge of particular works.
Keywords: the Beats; Kabir; literary material; literary field; print culture; literary experience; Theodor Adorno
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: Introduction / Francesco Giusti, Benjamin Lewis Robinson
Untranslatability and the Challenge of World Literature: A South African Example / Derek Attridge
World Literature and the Problem of Postcolonialism: Aesthetics and Dissent / Lorna Burns
Transcontextual Gestures: A Lyric Approach to the World of Literature / Francesco Giusti
The World after Fiction: J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus / Benjamin Lewis Robinson
Extracting Indigeneity: Revaluing the Work of World Literature in These Times / Rashmi Varma
Being Taught Something World-Sized: ‘The Detainee’s Tale as told to Ali Smith’ and the Work of World Literature / Dirk Wiemann
Working Conditions: World Literary Criticism and the Material of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Afterword: Towards a Theory of Reparative Translation / Emily Apter
Title
Working Conditions
Subtitle
World Literary Criticism and the Material of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Author(s)
Jarad Zimbler
Identifier
https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-19_08
Description
To what extent does cultural distance interfere with or limit literary experience? What kind of intimacy is needed to make a text into a work? This essay seeks to answer these questions by focusing on the writings of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. In doing so, it suggests that the challenges of cultural distance may be most acute when dealing with texts from homo-linguistic literary environments, and that we might overcome these challenges by undertaking a world literary criticism that attends to localized fields and materials without forgetting the charge of particular works.
Is Part Of
The Work of World Literature
Place
Berlin
Publisher
ICI Berlin Press
Date
27 April 2021
Subject
the Beats
Kabir
literary material
literary field
print culture
literary experience
Theodor Adorno
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
173
page end
207
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. 173–207

References

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Cite as: Jarad Zimbler, ‘Working Conditions: World Literary Criticism and the Material of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’, in The Work of World Literature, ed. by Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Lewis Robinson, Cultural Inquiry, 19 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021), pp. 173-207 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-19_08>