Editore: Liguori Editore srl
Anno: 2004
Pagine: 248
ISBN: 9788820734435
Prezzo: € 14,00
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"Contact zones"  those areas where different languages and cultures interact and overlap, decentering traditional points of view and creating new phenomena of code switching, mutual translation, and hybridization  are a key concept in contemporary culture, marked by economic globalization and increasing cultural flows. While opening up new creative possibilities for literature and culture, these new developments also threaten to bring about phenomena of worldwide westernization and homogenization, reflected in the dominance of English on a global scale. In literary studies, this creates the need for a transnational approach capable of resisting both the still powerful pull of national models of literary history and the appeal of totalizing world literature systems. This volume tries to eschew the twin risks of a narrow focus on the national literary tradition and an overly enlarged, undifferentiated one on literature as ongoing worldwide hybridization by adopting a critical "inter-literary" approach. Dealing with texts where English and/or American engages and is engaged by a wide array of different traditions  from Finnish epic poems to Hindi mythology, from Japanese fairy-tales to Chinese classics, from Japanese postmodernism to Asian American theater  these essays display an ability to perceive literary and cultural practices simultaneously from different vantage points, firmly rooted in a knowledge of different representational systems, and a heightened awareness of the tensions and frictions but also of the unprecedented opportunities inherent in the linguistic and cultural "contact zones" opened up by modernity.