World Literature

This paper is a study of the influence and reception of the mythological tropes of descent and return as seen in Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel, The Magic Mountain and, more broadly, within the context of the early twentieth-century modernity. Making reference to Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Strauss, and Modris Eksteins, it draws connections between Castorp’s desire-driven journey of descent and Germany’s own inwards turn. Moreover, by analyzing the traces of the Orphic myth noticeable in the novel and examining the importance of Orpheus myth to modernist sensibilities, this paper argues that despite the promise of unity the novel appears to signal, Castorp’s inability to retain his vision reveals Mann’s novel as a satirical commentary not only on the individual’s fragmentation but, significantly, on the cultural atomization of early twentieth century Germany.

An individual’s self-presentation can leverage their place in the economy of social power: so suggest the patronage letters of Elizabeth Jane Weston (1582-1612), a young Neo-Latin poet in the court of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. This paper examines how Weston adopted the persona of “Virgo Angla” (“The British Maiden”) and used conventionalized rhetorical techniques to navigate the power dynamics of patronage in the Neo-Latin Republic of Letters. Close readings of Weston’s letters explore how her self portrayal was a critical ingredient in her appeals to patronage: Weston portrayed herself in terms that emphasized her youth and gender, which she deployed in strategic modesty tropes and doubled discourses throughout her oeuvre. Ultimately, these close readings examine how Weston used her literary self-presentation to successfully play the patronage game, underscoring the notion that personal branding has currency in social power dynamics.

This essay examines the traces of indigenous Moroccan oral storytelling in various collections of translated work. By focusing on the variations of form across these collections, and highlighting the commonalities between these stories, this essay argues that traces of the oral tradition found in translations from Morocco are evidence to the survival of its storytelling roots, and that these adaptations create an opportunity for the growth of new spaces in the tradition. A key example is Paul Bowles’ Five Eyes, a 1979 text adapted from the oral stories of illiterate Moroccans. Being both a set of performances adapted into writing, as well as a set of collaborative translations, Five Eyes moves between genres. This essay considers such movement through a background of cultural mediation, utilizing Homi Bhabha’s concept of “third space”. It also offers the analysis of a consistent literary style across texts originating in orality as well as in written form, by using Joseph Frank’s now-classic framework of spatiality and temporality in narrative structure. Using Five Eyes to build a perspective towards the process of literary adaptations from oral traditions, this essay enters more recent Moroccan collections. Such narratives include Mohamed Said Raihani’s “The Moroccan Dream” – a collection of contemporary written translations by Moroccan authors. This essay then enters the discussion of the halqa storytelling tradition in Morocco through Richard Hamilton’s The Last Storytellers, to provide a comparison in style between legitimated and illiterate indigenous storytellers. These stories, though having diverged from a common heritage, show similar styles, structures and grammatical cues that originate in oral performance. Betsy Bolton’s website, Maghrebi Voices, provides a contemporary endpoint, juxtaposing components that occur in each previous example, including recorded oral stories, written narratives, commentary and translated works, on an online platform.

If we consider that the very basic element of a children’s story is its appeal to world literature, then a text like Pinocchio exists for and in translation. However, how the extra linguistic material functions and how it is dealt with in translation is the concern of this paper. Because Pinocchio has become an item of world literature by way of its translations, the allegory created by Carlo Collodi about the reality of the Italian situation post-Unification has been lost in English translation and replaced in the target culture by a pedagogical set of moral codes in order to replenish the story’s meaning. Consequently, the value of reading texts comparatively manifests in reconciling what is lost with what is gained. Reading the English translations in light of the original Italian story reveals respective intricacies of both cultures and validates the process of translation as a privileged mediator.