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0:01
all right everybody welcome back to introduction to us multicultural literatures this will be the second to last lecture in the class today we will be beginning well we'll be doing a couple things as i mentioned in the last lecture we're coming toward the present or considering the present in light of the topics of this course and so um the last couple lectures will be a bit of a a mix of different things but the basic idea of today's lecture will be to introduce our final
0:31
novel it's a very short novel called faces in the crowd by valeria louiselli and i want to introduce sort of all of the topics that i think are relevant to this book and the issues it raises that we've maybe touched on in the course before but haven't quite discussed explicitly and those are issues of language translation and world literature the way in which a multicultural ideal disrupts the idea of a national literature calls into question the
1:04
idea of a national literature i also want to talk about the idea that perhaps we're moving into a neo-modernist form of culture in the early 21st century that i think a lot of the developments of 21st century literature have been attempts to go beyond post-modernism and to go beyond as well post modern ideas of multiculturalism and to try to arrive at newer ideas that in some ways while
1:34
they are new like all things that are new uh it draws upon the past and i think what's being drawn upon is modernism is some of the ideals of modernism that post-modernism critiqued um and yet i think never fully dispelled and there's a i think an idea in the early 21st century particularly in literature that some of the ideals of modernism could stand to be recovered and that some of the ideals of postmodernism have perhaps run their course have become um
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have become attenuated have become uh not as not as sharp as they once were because i think that's what happens in in culture and the arts there's there are cycles that some ideas they come up they're very new they're very transgressive they're very subversive but then as they become more and more accepted especially accepted by academic institutions political institutions they come to see to seem like they're just part of some establishment they become they they once were
2:40
subversive but now they're hegemonic now they're the norm and thus what arises uh to displace them are ideas that seem freshly subversive and yet ironically the freshly subversive usually draws upon something that preceded the new hegemony it's critiquing i hope that makes sense it's their cultural cycles i think if you look at anything look at fashion look at popular music you can see these cycles happening and they happen in literature i would even argue
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they happen in politics and i think that we're in a moment where subverting the formerly subversive postmodern gesture is is of interest to younger artists younger writers uh younger intellectuals people on the scene and so that i never discussed my image i usually introduce our our units our chapters with an image drawn from the visual arts whether architecture or painting and in this case
3:38
it's photography and i found this image i think when i first started teaching this class a couple years ago i think is when i found this image i don't remember what i googled to find this image it might have been neo-modernism uh itself which is a term that i i just sort of amusing i don't know if it's a very established term but i found this picture and i found it on the website of a photographer named dylan hollingsworth and i thought it was really interesting because i
4:05
went to the photographer's website and he does two forms of photography mainly one form of photography he practices is kind of a straight journalistic form of photography he just goes photographs you know events as they're happening and i think they you know sell he sells them to newspapers or magazines or websites as well as exhibiting them as an artist and the his main interest over the last decade has been photographing the political movements such as
4:35
occupy wall street from the first part of the last decade and then black lives matter more recently and i think that's interesting because i think of occupy wall street and black lives matter as in certain ways um neo-neo-modern political movements and what i mean by that is
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if post-modernism tended to be about what one theorist of post-modernism michelle foucault called a micro-politics a politics that was kind of radically dispersed radically localized radically interested in defending certain forms of of life and ways of life that were from the point of view of vast administrative power structures rather niche i think that occupy wall street and black lives matter draw on more uh modern forms of protests they make more universal
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claims uh universal claims to challenge to challenge capitalism in the case of occupy wall street capitalism as a global form of government as a global form of economics and in the case of black lives matter the idea of black lives as also a global uh diasporic political formation and a challenge to white supremacy as a global formation and so you don't have so much the post-modern micro politics the the micro movements in various locales defending a local way of life
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but you have movements making much broader more universal more progressive in the sense of you know picking a side within history that you want to move with uh political claims and so i think that that that is neo-modernism i think at the level of the uh at the level of the political so that's one aspect of dylan hollingsworth's artistic practice is photographing these mass
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movements but he also does art photography that is photography that is not journalistic that is not trying to record something that's really happening but he uses photography to create sometimes quite fantastical images and that's one of his art photographs is what i chose here and what i why i think it indicates neo-modernism uh if i if it's not ridiculous that i'm trying to force this term that i'm i'm one of the only people who uses it but whatever uh you know you signed up for
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the class so you have to listen to what i say you don't have to you could turn this off right now but anyway i might even recommend it but anyway um the the neo-modernist thing about this photograph that interests me is what's in the photograph is you have a person who's chained chained down and yet this person is trying to reach this ladder that ascends straight up to the sky it doesn't even that the top of the ladder isn't shown it could be going all the way up to outer
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space or to heaven or whatever and what interests me about this image is i feel like postmodernism
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posited that we as human beings are completely caught up in and not only caught up in almost entirely constructed by the discourses we live in we live in a world of signs of language of images and that world makes us who we are and you can maybe uh alert yourself and your fellow human beings to that through gestures like meta fiction to say hey remember everything's a fiction but you can't do much beside that you you can't do much other than to just sort of
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recognize whether whether with a laugh or with a kind of sigh that you are constrained radically by the images the discourses the language the culture that surrounds you um that's your you that's your only real freedom is to recognize your unfreedom in post-modernism and modernism by contrast in the arts you'll remember whether it was picasso whether it was nella larson modernists thought they were getting to some truth about desire as in gertrude stein
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about the progressive history of people of color as in langston hughes or maybe more more subjectively about human psychology as in the incredibly incisive portrayal of psychology you get in nella larsen uh they you know the modernists i think understood some of what the post-modernists were saying about how we are sort of trapped within culture but they also thought that art and i think that politics could transcend that could rise above that and get to a truth
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some point of truth whereas postmodernism cautions against that idea of a transcendent truth the only truth it countenances is that there's no transcendence and so this image to me is neo-modernist because it shows a person chained down caught trapped as postmodernism says we are and yet striving to ascend striving to reach this ladder that would carry us upward from the things in which we're caught and i think that liberationist view uh whether you take that in
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a more direct political way as say langston hughes might or maybe just in a um you know what's being liberated is simply some truth about humanity as we might see in mela larsen
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i think that's that's a kind of modernist impulse this striving for some point of transcendence and striving even in the by the the things that bind us so that's why i chose this image that's why i think this is an interesting image from a photographer who i think is immersed in what i would think of as a neo-modern form of politics so uh just as a brief review we also looked in our last lecture at some artistic and political attempts to break out of post-modernism
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with things like the new sincerity and meta-modernism literary and artistic attempts to try to cut through a little bit of the of the tangle of language that post-modernism suggests we are trapped in and try to make more direct appeals to emotions or to uh or to uh truth so that happens in the arts we talked about some of the debates that have been happening on the left in the last 20 years especially the last 10 years about multiculturalism and we saw
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writers and theorists and thinkers who were broadly sympathetic of course to the idea of diversity of plurality of overcoming oppression of uh of of marginalized and oppressed groups overcoming that oppression and yet saying that the multiculturalist especially in its post-modernist guys ideal wasn't that good at doing that because it was too kind of relativist it was too easily captured by prevailing forces in society that just put a kind of diverse face on what
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we're still highly inequitable and not just in terms of class but indeed still in terms of race highly inequitable uh economic practices and political practices and we saw um the claim that it's a bit it could be a bit um excessively constraining to the artist and we've seen that as far back as you know the novel of our post-modernist unit was the ghost writer by philip roth which was a novel that was already worrying about that idea that if you sort of level out um
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you know human society into different groups that are seen as equal but um equally you know equally how can i put it equally they're equally valid but the validity is just that everybody's claims are valid and there's no real truth claims and then the artist is just the spokesperson for each of those groups uh and not a truth teller uh so there's a worry that there's a constraint upon the artist so we talked about these debates that have been happening
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um within you know groups that are sympathetic to the broadest ideals of multiculturalism but worry about the the practice and these of course are controversial ideas i i leave it to you i don't make political claims in this class this isn't a class but in my opinion i'm just trying to introduce you to the arguments so that's where we were and then we looked at marilyn chen's uh excellent poem how i got that name as a kind of summa a summation of where we've been with poetry
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and a poem that in its capaciousness in its its multitudenousness i think is so aware of these issues and the pitfalls on on all sides of them so that's where we were now i want to talk about what i mean by neo-modernism in terms of literature and so i want to talk about that then i want to talk about world literature because i think ideas about world literature and translation are very important to understanding valeria lewis selly's novel and then i just want
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to introduce the novel a little bit more by talking about louis sully herself and then in my next lecture i will talk about the text of the novel i think it's a difficult novel to discuss if you haven't read the whole thing you sort of have to have the whole thing in your head just to sort of apprehend its whole structure to to really see what she's doing in every moment so i'm not going to talk about the text in this lecture i'm just going to approach the text
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so um i just have my little uh slide from our first lecture a slide section you might say uh i have my modernism characteristics over on the right so we have a rejection of uh formal literary traditions like plot and fiction meter and rhyme and poetry we have a rejection of the idea that the artist is a moral teacher who is sort of giving you some moral lesson the artist instead just kind of presents life and leads you to interpret it there's a deep interest
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in psychology particularly the irrational and we saw that in stream of consciousness narration which nella larson sometimes practiced and now larson was highly interested in the irrational psychology of uh of helga crane the way that helga crane would would act and respond to things in an unconscious way and we also saw an interest in for instance the the unconscious the pre-rational movements of sexual desire in gertrude stein we also saw a belief in the importance of uh
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a multiplicity of human perspectives incorporated into one work of art i think that we probably saw that more in the visual art more than in any one work of literature we read in picasso's cubism the way he incorporates into the work multiple literally multiple visual perspectives so that you'll see a body and you're looking at part of the body straight on another part of the body and profile and we have an interest in non-western cultures uh a belief that so modernism was
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interesting because it's pre it's not relativist it doesn't so much say that all cultures are equal
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in the way that i think the post-modern gesture says that all cultures are equal but none have access to a transcendent truth they're sort of truths relative to each culture i think modernism more took the view that there are truths that we can access but um you have to get rid of this you know 19th century european imperialist white supremacist idea that only europe has the truth that there are there is uh truth to be found in non-western cultures in capital t truth um so it's
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not a relativist idea it's an idea that different cultures have uh have given access to to the truth and then similarly we have that belief in culture as the best that has been thought and said
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that so modernism kind of reforms that idea to make it more uh plural to say that other cultures have the best that has been thought and said as well though actually the guy that originally came up with that matthew arnold uh i think also believed that um but uh he's sometimes stereotyped as more uh stodgy than he was but the you know the the best that has been thought and said is an id is an idea that can encompass all of world cultures um so those are the
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characteristics of modernism when i say that we're entering i think a neo-modernist period what i mean is i think 21st century american and world literature has seen a return first of all just at the level of genre and and i'm talking really about fiction here to modernist genres and themes such as the psychological novel the autobiographical novel the plotless novel of alienation and surreal motifs and i think you see that i think the most prevalent trend in
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21st century fiction so far or particularly of the last decade has been something called auto fiction and auto fiction it's just what it sounds like it's a new form of autobiographical fiction usually highly plotless where it's just the author kind of writing about their life and i think that's very much a throwback to um genres that were dominant in modernism looking again at quicksand as our example that was a very autobiographical novel i didn't really
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dwell on that aspect of it but it was i mean most of what happened in that book except the end i think happened in some ways to helga crane and or to nella larson that is but you know confusing the author and the the character is is what autobiographical fiction is um and that was a fairly plotless novel there wasn't like a very well i don't mean well i'm not insulting it it's not that it's not well constructed it's just
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that it's not constructed to be a plot that is based on some like suspenseful revelation of mystery or something uh it's constructed to be a plot that sort of follows this person's life and it doesn't always feel like it's it's heavily plotted because the course of a life is somewhat random and it's more organized by theme and by motif than by an overbearing plot structure and i think we see a return to these psychological autobiographical relatively plotless novels
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in particularly the last decade whereas i think what predominated at the end of the 20th century were novels like antelope women which was i think heavily plotted we have this family saga uh unfolding and you have to very much keep track of the plot of the genealogy of the family and it's not autobiographical i mean autobiography is in a way the apex of realism because if realism treats everyday common life autobiographical fiction treats a real person's
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everyday common life whereas what was dominant i think at the end of the 20th century and writers like louise erdrich or some writers we didn't read in this course like tony morrison or leslie marmon soko was magical realism not only wasn't it autobiographical but it had heavy infusions of the fantastical so i think this neo-modernism is a throwback to modernist genres and fiction i also think and we talked about this in our last lecture a renewed interest in the possibility
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of transcending language or culture in the relativistic sense to reach something universal i think in fiction that's often been the body there's been a big interest in the body in fiction and theory and non-fiction over the last 10 20 years that the one thing we all share is this kind of physical substrate and so that can be a universal force the body but also um emotion affect um and what i was talking about as a more universalist form of politics there's been a
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much renewed interest for instance in marxism in socialism which the postmodernists often heavily criticized uh think about jean-francois leotard and other french theorists who were sometimes in america called marxists but really they were heavy critics of it they said this is a terribly uh oppressively universalist ideology it says there's one way to human equality and so postmodernists again said let's focus on micro politics on what each particular group
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needs and wants and can achieve in a very particular setting and i think there's been a return to a more universal form of politics in that sense
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and then still though what makes it neo-modernism and not just a kind of totally uh total revival of modernism is that you can't abandon the lessons of post-modernism especially about the lessons of trying to avoid the imposition of a single culture that the imposition of a single culture on the world is i think still considered something you'd very much want to avoid you have to recognize the
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plurality of cultures even if you think that there can be some ways of saying this or that in any one culture is true or good and this or that is false or bad you still want to recognize the legitimacy of the plurality of cultures so that's what i mean by neo-modernism and i hope that made sense
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so i think that louiselli's faces in the crowd is very much a neo-modernist novel much of it well precisely half of it is a plotless psychological autobiographical novel the other half is uh is neo-modernist in a very literal way it's about a modernist poet in new york meeting modernists meeting writers that we've met in this course as characters as repound william carlos williams nella larson are all in the work one of the reasons i chose it as our
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last work is it takes its title from the first poem we discussed in this class which was ezra pounds in a station of the metro faces in the crowd as a phrase from the stations of a metro of the metro ezra pound briefly kind of appears in the novel as a character and someone else who appears in the novel as a character is nella larson author of the first novel we read on the course quicksand so faces in the crowd brings us back full circle it's the early 21st century
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in many ways mirrors the early 20th century however to discuss faces in the crowd we also have to discuss some new topics some topics we have not yet really fully broached in this class maybe we've alluded to them especially when we talked about the martyrs we talked about um
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is this a you know how do we talk about national literature in relation to this novel is this a korean novel is it an american novel well in many ways you'd have to say it was both i think that faces in the crowd raises exactly the same question is this an american novel is this a mexican novel i think in many ways you'd have to say both but i would also ask you to remember that almost every novel we've read in this course
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every novel actually we've read in this course has had an international dimension
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helga crane was african-american but also danish american she spends part of the novel in denmark so part of the novel is set in europe obviously in the martyrd we have a novel written in english by a writer who becomes an american citizen but he he was born in korea his first language is korean the entire novel is set in korea so we have a novel that sort of straddles the united states and korea
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in the ghost writer that's written in english by a writer who's uh you know an american and yet the literary allegiance in that novel is to the global jewish diaspora and so we have many references to writers who wrote in german or in dutch or in or in hebrew who are who are examples of a jewish tradition that spans the globe that encompasses europe that encompasses israel and so that novel
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has an international dimension in antelope woman we have a novel that also was multilingual that was you know we've got a large quantity of ojibwe and i would say that novel was international in a sense in which it was concerning native american sovereignty it was concerning the limitations of the sovereignty of the us government over native american territory uh it was a novel that lamented
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the liquidation of the tribal land titles of the of the different native american nations during the end of the 19th century with the dawes act it was a novel i think whose utopian horizon and in many ways is a is a north american continent that would be international in which there would be the united states maybe but there would also be a united states that did not have sovereignty over ojibwe territory or over other native american territories it sort of saw native
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american territory as nations in their own right and finally we come to faces in the crowd which as i'll explain has a as an international dimension between europe or between the united states and mexico with also some european elements as well so that means i think now we have to confront this idea of world literature i know this is a class on u.s literature on american literature but i think i've demonstrated sufficiently that multiculturalism makes the idea of a
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single national literature hard to fully endorse so we have to discuss world literature and we have to discuss translation because if you're going between national literatures you're go if you're going between cultures you're often going between languages so let's talk now about world literature so every discussion about world literature begins the same way it begins with two quotations every
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discussion of world literature begins with two quotations so i'm going to share with you those two quotations and interpret them a little bit and tell you what i think world literature means uh as the basis of these two quotations because there were two uses of this term and both of these quotations were originally in german which i think is interesting in itself because germany in the 18th and 19th century would have been considered a fairly peripheral european power you know
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a country that had nothing like the centrality of britain or france and so this idea of a literature that was international and in ways that would benefit countries and cultures that were not considered central i think it's fitting that that comes from a peripheral european country at the time so the phrase was about literature world literature so there said that quotations are from two people there are two people who we've already heard of in this course uh very influential
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uh german 19th century writers gerta we heard of gerta johan wolfgang von guerta we heard of him in anthony hecht's ironic citation of his last words more light more light as uh hecht saying that the ideal of world culture from for which goethe stood was destroyed in the holocaust and the second quotation is from karl marx we have to again confront marxism in this course as we have because whether you're for it or against it and as we've seen whether you were for
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or against marxism was in many ways the central dividing line in the 20th century
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you you have to acknowledge that it's uh its way of thinking about things was very uh was very uh crucial to defining to defining world politics in the 20th century and perhaps again um so let's begin let's begin with these two quotes so gerta i take my quotation from a book uh from 2003 by david damroch called what is world literature very beginning of the book he begins with the quote from goethe and then i think he
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does the quote remarks just a couple pages later so what's the quote from goethe i am more and more convinced goethe remarked that poetry is the universal possession of mankind revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of men i therefore like to look about me in foreign nations and advise everyone to do the same national literature is now a rather unmeaning term the epoch of world literature is at hand and
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everyone must strive to hasten its approach and he says this in 1827. so in 1827 we have a german author goethe saying that national literatures are basically over poetry is the universal possession of everyone he says mankind and men but i i don't think he actually meant that in a gender exclusive way uh he says it's the po the property of everyone everyone can write great poetry everyone can write great literature and so if you want to know what great literature is you must read
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the literature of foreign nations and um this isn't evident in the quote but i can tell you that when he said that he didn't just mean england and france he meant he was reading works in translation from the persian from the chinese from the hindi he was reading
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chinese novels uh he was reading persian poets like hafez he was reading um uh you know indian uh dramas like sacantala he gerta meant this in a way that went beyond europe in 1827. so he meant this in a way that i i would say was genuinely incipiently multiculturalist so he says that the era of uh national literature is at an end poetry is the universal possession of mankind so it's a universalist idea and but for him it's an aesthetic idea you know for him we've
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now understood that the ability to create great art is universal so if you want to experience great art you must experience the art of multiple nations now the next big quote again is from marx well marxande engels his writing buddy and the guy that paid his bills uh look into the biography it's very interesting um so karl marx and friedrich engels the founders of marxism they write the communist manifesto about 20 years after goethe says this and they they i think knew he
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said this they were familiar with his idea there of the literature of world literature so they also
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make a famous statement in the communist manifesto about world literature and this is always the second quotation that is brought up when talking about world literature now the communist manifesto it's a short little document uh that is like all manifestos it gives their uh their program their political ideas it's the uh the the work that lays out their main principles as communists and the interesting thing about the communist manifesto i don't know how many people have read it
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but what might surprise you what surprised me when i first read it when i was in college is that you probably if you haven't read it you still know that marx and engels opposed capitalism and that communism is an anti-capitalist ideology so what's very surprising when you take up the communist manifesto to read it and it's like a 30 page document you could read it in an afternoon is the first five pages or so it might be slightly exaggerating for a fact but the beginning of the
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communist manifesto says everything nice anybody might ever have had to say about capitalism because it's important to understand that for marx history was progressive and so capitalism was an improvement on the thing that went before broadly speaking feudalism and feudalism it was largely an agrarian society and you know the dominant uh economic people there is a very small layer of an aristocracy that controlled all the land and everybody else had to work the land
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and so capitalism genuinely liberated a lot of people by moving from an agrarian to an industrial and from a rural to an urban society and thus capitalism could really be praised for for its progressive tendencies for all of the stultifying aspects of medieval culture that it swept away
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so marx you know it's very important to marx that we don't go back we have to go forward and he thinks that the next advance will be communism but that capitalism was a genuine advance on what went before and so that's when he raises this he him and angles i don't know why i keep giving all the credit to marx um i think marx was more the more the uh the more sophisticated theorist of the two
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but anyway um marx says in his uh recitation of the good things done by capitalism this is when he brings up world literature so let's read through this quotation the bourgeoisie so the bourgeoisie is the the ruling class of capitalism they're the people who own the means of industrial production the the people who own the factories the people who own the uh the the industrial world the bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character
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to production and consumption in every country to the great chagrin of reactionists that just means conservatives it is drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood all old established national industries have been destroyed or our daily being destroyed they are dislodged by new industries whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material but raw material
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drawn from the remotest zones industries whose whose products are consumed not only at home but in every corner of the globe in place of the old wants satisfied by the production of the country we find new wants requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes in place of the old local and national seclusion self-sufficiency we have intercourse in every direction universal interdependence of nations and as in material so also an intellectual production
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the intellectual creations of individual nations become common property national one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature so marx is paying a heavy compliment to capitalism here he's saying here's what it does in the old days you would eat what was grown in your own country and you would wear clothes made from material grown in your own country and you would
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read literature from authors writing in your own language in your own country what happens under capitalism is we have the beginning of global not only global trade because there was always global trade actually i i exaggerated what i just said there was always global trade but there was global production so a a a guy and it would have been a guy back then in england owned a company that took material from india and brought it to england and made clothes out of it and sold them
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somebody owned a company that got coffee from the middle east and sold it in england and somebody owned a company that was a publishing company that was publishing works written in china and translating them into english and you could read them in england and so capitalism introduces global production and consumption it's no longer no longer is it true that most of what you eat wear read watch drink comes entirely from your own country capitalism destroyed that
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it melted that away and so now we have global trade global production global consumption and that introduces world literature it's now very common and he's writing in the middle of the 19th century it's very common in the 19th century for a german person like goethe to read poems originally written in persian novels originally written in chinese as he's drinking coffee you know uh that
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were beans originally grown in some other in some other country so that's what marx means however as marx would have been the first to tell us with this comes certain inequalities so the owners are mostly in europe and they're exploiting the world market that is mostly outside of europe they're exploiting art often through direct imperialism so you know you have the british controlling india as english companies are exploiting india as a source of raw material a source of labor
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and then the uh the the better off people in india as a also a consumer market for goods that they sell back to them but still there's an unequal relation this is the era of imperialism and of the european empires so what can sound appealingly universal oh everybody's reading and drinking and eating and wearing stuff from everywhere else conceals what's actually much more of a one-way
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exploitative relationship and the legacy of that imperialism even though the european empires don't exist in the same way there's no more direct control of england over india or ireland or france over algeria or vietnam you nevertheless have the legacy of this imperialism which has led to a continued national inequality that tends to privilege um the the global north europe and the united states over latin america asia africa and that was a big issue as we saw
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in the middle of the 20th century when we're reading the martyr and this also has structured concerns about world literature and this brings me to a final quotation i want to introduce so
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in the late 20th century or the second half of the 20th century with the development of academic theories focused on postcolonialism or anti-colonialism or decolonialism of how to remove these vestiges of material and cultural inequality that stemmed from european imperialism there was a lot of concern about inequalities in world literature how do these inequalities work well the main global publishing companies are controlled from europe and the united states
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and so what gets translated from let's say um from chinese or from arabic or from urdu what gets translated into european languages like french or english depends on what those european and american publishers think they can sell to their own audience and so you take the diversity of publishing that might exist in china or nigeria or india and those companies translate into english or even if it's originally written in english as you know
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as you know countries and uh you know there's plenty of countries in africa or in asia that have english language markets but they their works aren't they're published in a local context you translate or you publish in europe in the united states only part of that diversity and only the part that you think an american audience will understand or be interested in and this has led some critics argued to a kind of homogenization of world literature that what makes it to the world
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market from local markets is is a very distorted image of the world shaped by the perceived tastes and values of european and american consumers so that leads to a link that leads to a cultural homogenization so let's say a work is published in another country let's just again say china for the sake of argument and it depends heavily on local references it depends heavily on references to chinese culture chinese history and european and american publishers think ah well
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our readers won't understand that we're not going to publish that work we're going to publish a work that that seems more universal quote unquote and why does it seem more universal because it depends less on these local cultural references and so doesn't the universal just become a a synonym for what americans and europeans already care about similarly and we saw this very uh decisively with richard kim's career there's a political homogenization
44:50
america and europe um is generally particularly at the mid-century were very wary for instance of leftism and so they would publish works they would be more concerned to publish world works by writers who were anti-communists to the point where there was cia funding for initiatives to have anti-communist latin american asian african writers published in the united states so these are the concerns about the inequalities of world literature that it creates in my
45:22
quotation look at the words in italics cultural homogenization and political homogenization now i choose this quotation i'm not actually going to read it to you you could read it yourself but it's from an article that i take to be very exemplary of some more recent trends the article is by rebecca and wolkowitz and it's about a british writer of japanese descent named casual ishiguro who's one of the big world writers right now he won the nobel prize
45:50
in 2017 i highly recommend his novels particularly never let me go which is a kind of strange depressing depressing in a good way science fiction novel um he's wonderful casual ishiguro but she writes this article about ishiguro and one of the notable things about him is that he says and he's coming from a multicultural and bilingual background his parents came to japan or he came to japan when he was five years old or they they sorry he his family came to england
46:21
from japan so he was raised in a japanese and japanese space speaking household in england and so he comes from a bilingual and multicultural background and some of his works are set in japan and are about japanese culture others of his works are set in england and are about english culture
46:37
and he has said that he very self-consciously writes knowing that his work will be translated so he says he doesn't depend on very local references and he writes in a style that is easily translated so he doesn't use a lot of word play he doesn't use a lot of poetic devices he doesn't use a lot of idioms he tries to write in a style that's almost pre-translatable and this leads rebecca and wolkowitz to say that well yes we could worry about
47:10
political and cultural homogenization isn't it also a good thing to try to be universal isn't it shouldn't we praise ishiguru for writing already for a global audience and i think this essay is really interesting it's published in 2007 i think it's a good example of what i was talking about earlier about sort of saying yeah all that stuff that postmodernism told us about how we're embedded radically within cultures and the biggest thing we have to fear is cultural homogenization
47:44
all that's understandable but actually isn't moving toward a greater form of universalism good that's not what i'm saying this is what i'm saying i see critics and artists and writers saying over the last 20 years her praising ishiguro for doing something that i think a post-modernist might consider homogenizing his own work making a book that can be easily read in english in japanese in french and german and chinese in arabic isn't that homogenizing your own work and he's saying
48:17
no i'm trying to be universal isn't that what we should strive to be in this globalized world and so and i think it's also it's interesting that uh um you know one of the strangest things over the last 20 years i think is that you know when i was a teenager um anti-globalization was the left-wing position and pro-globalization was the right-wing one and now it's flipped now it's uh uh you know just so in the 90s the anti-globalization protesters were leftists
48:46
they were anarchists uh they look up the battle of seattle google that uh if you want to know and now anti-globalization is the right-wing position that's the the banner of donald trump's movement for instance and so and i think this essay though it seems to be about something very far from these big picture political arguments uh is i think an interesting moment in 2007 where you have a writer
49:10
who i can only assume is somewhere politically on the left saying uh cultural homogenization i guess that's something to worry about but actually universalism is a good thing and it's something we should strive for and globalization is a good thing and something we can strive for so that's just interesting maybe this is too much of a digression i don't know uh it's hard to say there's nobody here i'm alone in the room there's nobody here to tell me
49:36
if we were in person you could tell me to shut up but you're not so you can always hit dislike on the video i guess but no don't do that smash that like button as they say anyway digression over valeria louiselli's book i think will be interesting in the way that it deals with this issue i think louiselli's book is very worried in some ways about cultural homogenization and is is very clear about the inequalities in global translation but also i think it's
50:06
a book that has a universalist aspiration it's a book that for instance as we'll see
50:12
tries to argue i think that um that united states literature and mexican literature maybe more broadly north american literature and latin american literature should really be thought of as one literature so i think louiselli is i think she's neo-modernist i think she's meta-modernist i think she wants to achieve a kind of universal literary republic if you will but i think she's also deeply aware of the homogenizing forces that would leave the republic of letters so-called
50:48
simply in the hands of the dominant european and american powers so that's why i think we need to understand this issue of world literature before we can understand the things her book is worried about when it talks about the travails because you probably haven't read it yet the main character is a translator and she's a translator from mexico living in the united states trying to convince her american publisher that a certain mexican poet is worth translating
51:17
and she's running into these issues about you know homogenization pluralism versus universalism so i think just like the image we saw on the first slide of the person chained but trying to reach the ladder and go into the sky louiselli is aware of the constraints under which she's operating even as she aspires toward universalism and that's neo-modernist that's metamodernist as opposed to the post-modernist position which just says the aspiration is ultimately too dangerous
51:52
you're just going to create a new and exclusive form of universalism so we must just rest within cultural relativism and cultural plurality all right so that's my discussion of world literature
52:04
now i think we need to say a few words about translation itself because while we have been reading works from the very beginning of the semester that i think have been somehow international as i explained we've mostly we've entirely been read works uh written originally in english what the actually the exception of ezra pound who i think was well ezra powder wasn't translating he was adapting what he thought chinese and
52:35
japanese poetry was like but all the works we've read so far were originally written in english with louis sally we are reading a work originally written in another language spanish and translated into english so we're reading a translated work and louiselli has written two novels in spanish and one novel in english so she writes originally both in spanish and english she i'll get into her biography in a minute but she
53:04
has been an international person throughout her life she's lived in multiple countries she's born in mexico her parents are mexican but she's lived most of her adult life it seems in the us so uh so we have a multilingual bilingual text so we need to and not only that but the it's an autobiographical novel so the narrator is a translator so we need to think about what translation is so i have a slide here that's about theories of translation um i actually borrowed
53:37
this slide from one time i taught this class and one of the tas did a guest lecture on this topic her name is kate ferraro i don't think she she works at the university of minnesota anymore but i did i just borrowed this excellent slide from her and put it into my own slide where she laid out three different there's three different ways you can take a text in one language and render it into another language the first one is a one-to-one translation or literal translation
54:09
this treats language like a code and assumes that each word has an exact match in another language and this is how google translate broadly works now the problem with one to one or literal translation is that each word in some sense might have an equivalent in another language that this is not actually true we've seen we talked about the german word bildung there's no one english word that captures all the shades of meaning of buildum so it's not actually true
54:40
that every word has an exact equivalence you know between two languages but also
54:47
um words are not always the basic building block of meaning sometimes whole phrases are the building blocks of meaning and so if you translate a text word for word you might get a word for word translation that misses the meaning because you've misunderstood that one phrase is an idiom that is a kind of metaphor that doesn't mean what it literally means so just think of a
55:18
let's just try to think of an english idiom i should have prepared for this that you you couldn't translate word for word um let me think i'm trying to think of one um hold on
55:31
um see now that i'm trying to think of one it's not coming to me but i'm sure you can think of a phrase that doesn't mean what it literally means um oh here's a grotesque one i don't know people don't say this anymore but i feel like people said this when i was a kid there's more than one way to skin a cat that's a horrible thing to say why would you want to skin a cat but if you translated that word for word you would just get a gruesome phrase in another language you would
56:01
just get there's more than one way to skin a cat in another language but a terrible thing to say
56:07
but what it means is there's more than one way to do something to do anything and so you
56:14
you would translate word for word but you wouldn't get the real metaphorical meaning of the phrase so that's one extreme a literal word for word translation the next extreme is adaptation where you say the content of the text is more important than the actual words so you translate the meaning without translating word for word and this is what ezra pound would do in his chinese and japanese and his european provencal etc translations he would take the basic
56:49
meaning and make his own poem out of it so that's adaptation it's not really trying to be a faithful translation at all it's trying to be a new rendition of the meaning and then finally you have traditional translation which tries to find a middle ground between preserving the basic idea and capturing the original language most translations most literary translations are traditional so christine mcsweeney's translation of louis cellie's novel
57:20
faces in the crowd is a traditional translation she doesn't go word for word she knows she has to capture the meaning more than the individual words but she also doesn't just create kind of a free adaptation um the last poem i want to look at in this class is an example of a free adaptation it's called love of my flesh living death and i use it to show you kind of how extreme adaptation can be so lorna d cervantes is a contemporary american poet
57:53
she was born in 1954 she's a chicana poet and activist born in san francisco and educated at san jose state university in uc santa cruz and she's of mexican and native american ancestry and this poem of hers is an adaptation of a poem by a spanish poet named federico garcia lorca he lived from 1898 to 1936 he appears by the way also in faces in the crowd by valeria louiselli she doesn't miss anything um he was a spanish poet and playwright who spent a lot of time in the
58:28
united states he wrote one of his most famous books is called poet in new york and he was a member of the generation of 27 group of writers who brought modernism to spanish literature he was unfortunately murdered by fascists during the spanish civil war because he was a he was a leftist he was also gay and the fascists were anti-leftists they were very culturally conservative and so he was murdered as a kind of enemy to their movement during the war between the
59:02
the fascist movement of general francisco franco and the republican forces um uh supporting the the left in the spanish civil war so he unfortunately had a terrible fate as a kind of political martyr and he was translated into english he was first translated by a lot of modernist poets particularly langston hughes and william carlos williams were very interested in in his poetry and in translating it and he was most associated with a kind of theory of poetry called duende
59:34
d-u-e-n-d-e duende and this is a this is a word that does not have an exact english equivalent it means a kind of spontaneous intensity uh a kind of spontaneous vitality often drawn from popular or folk sources that he celebrated in his poetry and so his poetry is often sort of committed to achieving this intensity and so he writes a poem called the poet begs his love for a letter i'm just going to read it love is this living death and loves the knife that twists my innards
1:00:16
i wait for one word and wonder if this bloom can last the drought if losing you would gain me back my life the air is everlasting and the stone knows neither light nor shade nor where it's thrown the heart at home has no hunger nor need for the frozen honey which the moon pours out but i feed my heart to a double beast raked by a tiger and pecked by a dove a duel between the cactus and the
1:00:40
lily send me a word then to fill up that wound or let me live in peace and without love and find an orbit in dark space alone now needless to say this isn't his original his original was written in spanish but i pulled from a website a traditional translation this is a a translation that tries to capture his basic meaning in much of his language and as you can see i'm not gonna we don't have
1:01:05
time so i'm not gonna go go on and on about the meaning of the poem you can see he uses a lot of rich and somewhat suggestive rather than literally clear imagery the air is like never lasting the stone and neither light nor shade the duel between the cactus and the lily so he uses a lot of this i think what a later poet called deep imagery this attempt to use imagery out of the unconscious
1:01:34
to suggest this emotional experience and lorna d cervantes writes a contemporary english language poem which he describes as being after lorca so not a translation from lorca but a kind of
1:01:51
successor poem that borrows his imagery borrows his intensity but doesn't give you a word for word translation and her poem is even more i would say interestingly inexplicable in its imagery so she writes once i wasn't always so plain i was strewn feathers on a cross of dune an expansive ocean at my feet garlands of gulls sirens and galls they couldn't tame you you know as well as they to be a dove is to bear the falcon at your breast your nights your seas my fear is simple
1:02:28
heart-faced above a flare of etchings a lineage in letters my sudden stare it's you it's you sang the heart upon its mantle pelvis blush of my breath catch up my sea beautiful bird it's you so what that all means i i'm not quite sure it would be you should write a paper about it it would be interesting but the important thing is she takes some of his uh basic themes of love and death and she takes his interest in this kind of pregnant deep imagery and writes her own poem
1:03:04
so this is an adaptation this is not a translation but adaptation is on a continuum of different ways you can carry one text from one language into another you can go word for word but you'll miss some of the meaning you can try to capture the overall meaning which is what most translators try to do or you could create your own freestanding work of art based on themes motifs and significance from the prior work but not wedded to its language and while we're reading a translation
1:03:38
of a novel originally written in spanish that i think tries to be a traditional translation these different ideas of how translation should be come up in the novel and are part of its themes
1:03:50
all right just a few more things i'd like to say just briefly the biography of our author valeria louiselli she was born in 1983 which makes her the only author in the course younger than me she's only younger by a year but i still find a little bit depressing but she was born 1983 in mexico city and her father was a diplomat so she grew up all over the world she grew up in costa rica south korea south africa and elsewhere and she currently lives
1:04:19
in new york city i say with her husband though based on her last autobiographical novel that it should be her ex-husband uh another mexican writer who's pretty famous called alvaro enrique and she writes and teaches in new york i think she still does live in new york even if it's not with alvaro but she so that's her that's valeria louiselli um she's a younger author so we don't you know
1:04:45
there's not been a biography written about or anything so that's what we know about her but the interesting thing is the international background and the inter or the the multilingual background i think she as i said she wrote uh so faces in the crowd is her first novel it was written in spanish and first published in mexico and then quickly translated into english and published in the united states by a small press because she was kind of an unknown experimental author however
1:05:15
that book and some of her other early works became famous enough that her most recent novel lost children archive was published by a major american publisher and first written in english and that's an excellent novel by the way lost children archive it's big though it's about four or five hundred pages it's a so if if if faces in the crowd was her modest first novel um last children archive is her ambitious attempt to write a a magnum opus and it's
1:05:45
it's excellent um but it's too too long for this class so we'll stick with the the more modest first novel unfortunately or not unfortunately faces in the crowd is great uh but last children archive is on a much grander scale as a work of fiction so i recommend checking it out um but that's valeria louiselli i do uh i'm not trying to be give you a bad example but the character in the book smokes a lot and so valeria luiselli uh also seems to smoke a lot so i thought
1:06:13
it would just be characteristic but don't smoke it's not good it's not cool it's not good for you um so that's valeria louiselli and then the last thing i want to say i'm going to come back to this slide this will be the first slide of the next lecture i want to say one more thing before uh ending this lecture which is there's one more concept from our modernism unit that we need to remember in reading faces in the crowd which is an idea i introduced
1:06:42
to you in discussing quicksand that of the flanur or the female variant the flannus and you'll remember the flanuraflinus was one who strolls in the modern city amid the diverse crowd observing as a detached and disinterested spectator and again this was originally conceived as a male archetype by the french poet charles baudelaire and his essay the painter of modern life but from modernism forward there's been a lot of interest in the female example the flannus and
1:07:16
we said that helga crane was kind of an attempted flanuze but the inequalities in her time of race and gender meant that she had a lot of trouble being a flood news that this still seemed to be an ideal reserve for white men and i put the big quotation from baudelaire defining what the flanner is here just if you in case you're interested i'm not going to read through it but there's been a lot of renewed interest in the flanner and the flanus along with
1:07:42
the neo-modernist novels i was talking about autobiographical plotless novels and how do you structure an autobiographical plotless novel you structure it according to your wanderings through the modern world and so there's been a lot of novels of neo flannery of neo you know people floozing flanuring about the city and i think that faces in the crowd does this faces in the crowd has uh two characters really who make it their business to wander the city
1:08:14
so we need to return to this idea of the flanur the flanuz and its possibilities in our century even as it was born in the 19th century and sort of canonized in modernism so with all that with all those things i said many things i've said uh i think you're now ready to read faces in the crowd so i would say please do read faces in the crowd read the whole thing and uh and then i my next lecture will be about the text as a whole i will talk about passages from the text
1:08:49
i will talk about the overall structure and uh it is an experimental novel maybe the most experimental novel i've asked you to read this semester but it's also very short i think even if you don't like it you'll be finished reading it before you're before you're even tired of it so uh so that's that please read faces in the crowd the next and final lecture on course content will be my lecture on faces in the crowd in the meantime thanks for your attention and have a great day
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