Posts filed under 'literary criticism'

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

January 23, 2026  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Bethlehem Attfield and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest from China and Nigeria.

This week, our editors bring news of what China’s recently announced five-year plan has in store for its writers and readers, and a(nother) reported death of Nigerian literature.

Xiao Yue Shan, reporting from China

I’m sure there are many who would agree with W. H. Auden’s assertion that: ‘In so far as poetry, or any other of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate.’ But the good members of the China Writers Association are not among them. 2026 marks the first year of the ‘Fifteenth Five-Year Plan’, which sets out China’s resolutions for social and economic development; within this ambitious blueprint (which interestingly highlights the state’s role in market management as well as the predictable emphasis on sustainability, innovation, and digital technology), there are distinct cultural goals, adherent to national ideology and inextricable from its constructions of power. Certainly, China has always held its literature in great esteem, exercising its political potentials more fervently than arguably any other nation, but even in our long parade of book-loving leaders, Xi Jinping has shown himself to be amongst the most ardent advocates for a symbiotic relationship between the arts and the state, following in the footsteps of Lu Xun in defining literature as first and foremost a form of guidance. As he stated in a speech at the 2014 Forum on Literature and Art: ‘Our contemporary writers and artists should take patriotism as the main theme in creation, guide the people to establish and adhere to correct views on history, the nation, the country, and culture. . .’

The ‘Fifteen-Five’, as the Plan is called, iterates the necessity of developing culture ‘in line with core socialist values’, mentioning seemingly innocuous intentions like ‘promoting the construction of a book-loving society’, as well as more zealous motives like ‘improving the ability to guide mainstream opinion’. Overall, it continues the lineage of CCP policies to unify, optimise, and regulate, with a lot of ‘expanding’ and ‘enhancing’ (toe-curling words for those of us who fear the hyperactive thrust of our moment). In following these mandates, some of the Association’s strategies are standard—such as the “全民阅读促进条例 Regulations on Advancing Reading for All’, which includes increasing publicly funded literary events, as well as a plan to send writers and literati to rural areas (sound familiar?) to encourage engagement and to ‘beautify’. Others are combating newly urgent issues such as AI, looking to fortify copyright laws and educate literature workers as to the available protections. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 6, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Linnea Gradin, Sofija Popovska, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest from China, North Macedonia, and Sweden!

In this week’s round-up, our editors discuss the continual relevance and essentiality of literary criticism, new projects to promote literature in translation, and a memoir that reneges on skepticism to embrace interconnectivity. 

Xiao Yue Shan, reporting for China

Last week, the ceremony of the fourteenth Tang Tao Youth Literary Research Awards took place in Shanghai, honouring five young scholars and their articles in the field of criticism, with subjects ranging from the re-interpretation of classics to the analysis of contemporary intersections between textual practice and artificial intelligence. The list of awardees included Li Jing on academic systems and knowledge transformation in the digital age; Wang Xuesong on visual forms and the construction of new poetic genres; Han Songgong on the works of novelist Bi Feiyu and their analysis of human nature; Wang Bingzhong on Lu Xun’s The True Story of Ah Q and the procession of character development through spiritual awakening; and Li Zhuang on Cai Chongda’s “Hometown Trilogy” and the potentiality of literature being a point of stability amidst a fractured era.

The award, established by the National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature and given annually to scholars under the age of forty-five, has done much to nurture emerging critics and academics since its inauguration. Named after the great twentieth-century essayist, historian, and Lu Xun expert Tang Tao, the prize aims to promote innovation and passionate diligence in the field of literary studies—qualities that awardee Wang Xuesong saw as emblematic of youth itself, commenting that scholars should continually aim for the same persistence, enthusiasm, and warmth with which they began their careers (presumably before they’re crushed by the relentless pressures and depressions of academic bureaucracy).

Literary criticism can seem elitist at best and masturbatory at worst, but anyone who’s a fan will likely understand that the hermeneutics and analysis of texts are in fact interpretations and inquisitions into our most basic interests: life, reality, and the human desire for creation. To see how we continually re-engage with classical works and their sociohistorical context with the illumination of contemporary understanding, or to gauge how our faculties of intelligence and critical thinking may be altered or recalibrated with technological developments—these are pivotal questions that move beyond the page to address themes of social conflict, societal evolution, and the ever-changing modes and methodologies of expression. In substantiating the importance of these practices, judge and professor Chen Sihe noted: ‘AI has created a greater expectation for the humanities, and only when our studies prove themselves to be irreplaceable, can they have an independent and individual existence.’ It calls into question what would qualify literary criticism to be seen as irreplaceable in the greater scope of things; anyone reading this, or anyone present for Chen’s speech that evening, would certainly agree that these studies already are irreplaceable—after all, what’s more worth studying that our most integral art of communication?—but as the underfunding of the humanities continues the legacy of scholars working in uncertainty and abject poverty, and the monstrous figure of AI continues to encroach, the growing smallness of our minority cannot be denied. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 25, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, MARGENTO, and Rubén López

The latest in world literature from Sweden, Guatemala, and Ireland!

This week, Asymptote‘s Editors-at-Large take us around the global literary scene, featuring book fairs and the highlights of Women in Translation Month! From the multimedia cultural event Bokmässan by Night in Sweden to the Taiwan/Ireland Poetry Translation Competition, read on to learn more!

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

A month from today, it will be time for Scandinavia’s largest literary event, the Göteborg Book Fair—an event spanning four days with around eight hundred exhibitors and the same amount of seminar speakers. Started in 1985, it now attracts eighty-five thousand writers, publishers, librarians, teachers, and book lovers every year. This year’s themes are Jewish Culture, The City, and Audio. The club concept Bokmässan by Night was introduced last year, which combines bar hopping with various cultural experiences. The fair has now announced that Bokmässan by Night will return on September 29 with four stages, five bars, multiple DJs, and stage performances. The evening includes Swedish writers and dramatists Jonas Hassen Khemiri—known to Asymptote readers through pieces like I Call My Brothers and Only in New York—and Agneta Pleijel, whose novel A Fortune Foretold was published in Marlaine Delargy’s English translation by Other Press in 2017. Bokmässan by Night will also offer live literary criticism with critics Mikaela Blomqvist, Jesper Högström and Valerie Kyeyune Backström, as well as live podcasts, including Flora Wiström’s Röda rummet—a literary podcast which borrows its name from the Swedish Modernist writer and playwright August Strindberg’s 1879 debut novel The Red Room. While Bokmässan by Night is an in-person experience, many other events during the fair are available online through Book Fair Play. 

READ MORE…

A Pointed Atemporality: Mui Poopoksakul on Translating Saneh Sangsuk’s Venom

June 22, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Barbara Halla

He's very aware of the rhythm and musicality of this text . . . he said it should take something like an hour and thirty-seven minutes to read.

In our May Book Club selection, a young boy struggles with a snake in the fictional village of Praeknamdang, in a tense battle between beauty and cruelty. In poetic language that is nostalgic for the world it describes without romanticizing it, Saneh Sangsuk creates a complex and captivating world. In this fable-like story there are no simple morals, in keeping with Sangsuk’s resistance to efforts to depict a sanitized view of Thailand and to the idea that the purpose of literature is to create a path to social change. In this interview with translator Mui Poopoksakul, we discuss the role of nature in the text, translating meticulous prose, and the politics of literary criticism.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.   

Barbara Halla (BH): How did you get into translation, especially given your law background?

Mui Poopoksakul (MP): I actually studied comparative literature as an undergrad, and then in my early twenties, like a lot of people who study the humanities, I felt a little bit like, “Oh, I need to get a ‘real job.’” I went to law school, and I worked at a law firm for about five years, and I liked that job just fine, but it just wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. 

So, I started thinking, What should I be doing? What do I want to do with myself? I had always wanted to do something in the literary field but didn’t quite have the courage, and I realized that not a lot of Thai literature been translated. I thought, If I can just get one book out, that would be really amazing. So, I went back to grad school. I did an MA in Cultural Translation at the American University of Paris, and The Sad Part Was was my thesis from that program. Because I had done it as my thesis, I felt like I was translating it for something. I wasn’t just producing a sample that might go nowhere.

The whole field was all new to me, so I didn’t know how anything worked. I didn’t even know how many pages a translation sample should be. But then I ended up not having to worry about that because I did the book as my thesis.

BH: You mentioned even just one book, but did you have any authors in mind? Was Saneh Sangsuk one of those authors in your ideal roster?

MP: I wouldn’t say I had a roster, but I did have one author in mind and that was Prabda Yoon, and that really helped me get started, because I wasn’t getting into the field thinking, “I want to translate.” My thought was, “I want to translate this book.” I think that helped me a lot, having a more concrete goal. 

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Poetry Beyond Words: An Interview with Patrícia Lino

February 8, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa

. . .the traditional academic essay will never be able to say so clearly what the “infraleitura” does not say.

In this whirlwind and evocative interview, Asymptote contributor Alan Mendoza Sosa sits down with poet and professor Patrícia Lino to discuss just one of her many innovative approaches to poetry critique and response, the “infraleitura.” Based in expanded poetry, in which the word is not the ultimate form of expression, the “infraleitura” bypasses text to reach a visual, sonic, and tactile dialogue between poetic works as well as between poets. The “infraleitura” is ultimately a work of community; here, we are brought into the dialogue with a call to—in Lino’s words—“use it and transform it endlessly.”

Alan Mendoza Sosa (AMS): Could you tell our readers who are unfamiliar with expanded poetry what it is? 

Patrícia Lino (PL): On the one hand, the association of the terms “poetry” and “expanded” is paradoxical. Poetry, since its beginnings, has always been expanded and has been linked to the idea of ​​making something both corporally and intermedially. On the other hand, the association between “poetry” and “expanded” contradicts the logocentric and occidental tendency of modern poetry and reminds us, at the same time, of the importance and validity of the plural, unoriginal, and infinite qualities and possibilities of the poem, which, in addition to being verbal, can be visual, audiovisual, three-dimensional, performative, interactive, olfactory, gustative, or cinematographically conceived—as is the case for the poem in comics. In other words, the expanded poem is a composition contrary to the hierarchy of expressions, in which the word traditionally (and colonially) occupies the top, and image, sound, or gesture are relegated to, respectively, second, third, and fourth places.

AMS: You coined the term “infraleitura”; what does it mean and how does it relate to expanded poetry?

PL: The analytical tools of traditional literary criticism, which developed in the context of the aforementioned logocentric inclination, do not, by focusing primarily on the word, account for the various dimensions and materials of the expanded poem. The “infraleitura” arises, against interpretation, to respond to the absence of a bodily and decolonial way of reading poetry. It could be defined as an-impossible-to-define form of intermedial and creative essay, in which, as well as the poet’s body that expands to make the poem, the essayist’s body expands itself to understand. This other method of comprehension considers not only the word, but also any other useful means to grasp the poem in analysis. It is about reading with the whole body.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

February 3, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Julia Sherwood, and Rubén López

The latest from Hong Kong, Guatemala, and the Czech Republic!

In this week’s roundup of literary news, we are paying tribute to the legacy of monumental writers. As Hong Kong mourns the recent loss of one of the country’s emblematic authors, Xi Xi, the Czech Republic commemorates the 100th anniversary of Jaroslav Hašek’s passing. In Guatemala, beloved writer of personal and continent-spanning histories, Eduardo Halfon, takes a new step into global recognition. Read on to find out more!

Charlie Ng, editor-at-large, reporting from Hong Kong

Renowned Hong Kong writer Cheung Yin, more commonly known by her pen name Xi Xi, passed away on December 18, 2022 from heart failure. Originally born in Shanghai, Cheung came to Hong Kong in 1950 at the age of twelve. She was educated at Heep Yunn School and the Grantham College of Education, and became a primary school teacher after graduation. Among her most prominent works are My City and Flying Carpet, both urban novels that reflect everyday lives and the transformation of Hong Kong. Another acclaimed novel, Mourning a Breast, is a semi-autobiographical work based on Cheung’s own experience of fighting breast cancer. Cheung also wrote poems and was prolific in essays, often published as articles for newspaper columns. Her most recent publications include the historical novel The Imperial Astronomer and the poetry collection Carnival of the Animals.

Loved by all generations of readers, Cheung is known for her playfulness, imagination, and experimental techniques. Blending real and fantastic elements, some of her works are described as embodying a style of “fairy-tale realism.” The Chinese characters of her pen name, Xi Xi 西西, represents the image of a little girl in skirt playing hopscotch. Cheung was awarded the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature and the Cikada Prize in 2019, and the Life Achievement Award of the 16th Hong Kong Arts Development Awards in 2022. A memorial service was held at Cheung’s alma mater, Heep Yunn School, on January 8 to commemorate her literary achievements, and on January 14, another memorial meeting was organised in Taipei, in which Hong Kong and Taiwan writers gathered to recite her works. Her translator, Jennifer Feeley, who translated Not Written Words and Mourning a Breast, also wrote a memorial, “A Translator Like Me” (available in both English and Chinese) to honour the lauded writer.

READ MORE…

The Representation of African Languages: A Conversation with Munyao Kilolo

December 5, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Wambua Muindi

We must write in the language we are most comfortable with, without being constantly questioned.

Led by founder and Editor-in-Chief Munyao Kilolo, Ituĩka Literary Platform is an online and print platform pioneering original works in African languages; producing translations from, into, and between African languages; and cultivating a network of instructors to promote education in African languages. Named from the Gikuyu word meaning rapture, revolution, transformation, and transition, Ituĩka Literary Platform aims to transform African societies by centreing and bringing greater visibility to African languages in their literary canons. In this interview, Asymptote Editor-at-Large for Kenya, Wambua Muindi, sits down with Editor-in-Chief Munyao Kilolo to discuss his career and the path that brought him to his current position at Ituĩka. This conversation seeks to review the platform’s current engagements as well as what lies ahead, hence the conversation will be two-fold: concerning the present and the future.

Wambua Muindi (WM): How has the transition been, coming from Jalada Africa Collective, where you were Managing Editor, to the founding of Ituĩka?

Munyao Kilolo (MK): Jalada was founded by a collective of writers whose vision was very clear: to publish African writers widely and effectively. However, that vision was not specific to African languages. Even so, while I worked as their Managing Editor, I conceptualized the language and translation project for them, and this is what birthed the translation project that went on to make literary history. The inaugural edition led to the single most translated short story in the history of African writing. The story, which is called The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, was translated into one hundred languages from around the world.

For several years after that, I thought a lot about this story and how African languages are represented in African literature, and it became apparent that we needed a platform that was solely devoted to African languages and translation if we were to enhance the work—work that would include publications, translations, and supporting projects enabling the production of literary material in African languages. So, I envisioned holding workshops, having databases, spotlighting people who are working in different African languages, and engaging in the formulation of theory in African languages—especially translation between one African language and another.

I spoke a lot with my friend Professor Mukoma wa Ngugi at Cornell University about these things, and eventually, the Ituĩka Literary Platform started to take shape. READ MORE…

Our Spring 2022 Issue Has Landed!

April 21, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Individuals of the woodland canine persuasion run amok in our Spring 2022 issue, thanks to Theis Ørntoft and Nina Yargekov!

Welcome to our Spring 2022 edition, released just as Russia’s invasion enters a brutal new phase. We’ve been curating a space for writers in support of Ukraine in a new Saturday column. Now, we proudly bring you Andrii Krasnyashchikh’s letters from Kharkiv, Kate Tsurkan’s interview with Zenia Tompkins, and Ian Ross Singleton’s review of Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine. Complemented by guest artist Shuxian Lee’s poignant cover, these pieces and the new issue remind us that if “humans are destructive”—as frequent contributor Theis Ørntoft puts it across so powerfully in his essay “Our Days in Paradise are Over”—“we are also an organising phenomenon in the cosmos.”

An absolute highlight amid new work from thirty-four countries, Ørntoft’s essay is itself an organizing phenomenon that deserves to be dwelt on. According to him, civilization “began with the delineation of a garden,” but capitalism has taken it to the point where every inch of planet Earth has been altered and nature no longer exists “out there”—no wonder, then, that his expedition to the West of Jutland yields zero sightings of wolves. Heavily mythologized across cultures, wolves most often represent danger, chaos, the unknown—yet, in the author’s telling, they also stand for the primeval and, therefore, a certain elusive real, in stark contrast to the various symbolisms thrust upon them. Ørntoft then inverts the anthropocentric paradigm that humans are used to—with them at the top of the food chain, even though they do not necessarily self-identify as animals—and asks us to consider what message wolves might hold for us instead.

Apart from Nina Yargekov’s uproarious adaptation of “Little Red Riding Wolf” for the age of the #MeToo movement—the obvious story with which Ørntoft’s nonfiction might be paired—“Our Days in Paradise are Over” echoes Nobel laureate Hermann Karl Hesse’s empathetic Weltanschauung in two new translations of his poems by Wally Swist; it also asks us to pay attention to the various animals conjured in this edition: from the suffering, captive bat in Bosnian author Aljoša Ljubojević’s “How We Started the War” to the suffering, liberated “Fish” in Georgian writer Goderdzi Chokheli’s story about a man who jumps into a lake and renounces his very own humanity along with the social contract it entails. Then there is the elusive boar in Pedro de Jesús’s slippery poem, in which various hunters discuss the “art of the hunt” only to miss the point; the cats with beautiful eyes in Agnieszka Taborska’s fascinating piece on surrealists vis-à-vis their chosen suicides, “yawn[ing] and stretch[ing] in all their dignity, distance, and above all their enormous indifference to the person standing there on the chair with her head in a noose.” READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2021

February 3, 2021  |  in News  |  by Sarah Moore and Xiao Yue Shan

Dive into our wide-ranging tenth-anniversary issue with our blog editors.

In ten years of Asymptote, we’ve brought you a stunning array of texts, from writers familiar to those brought out newly into the light, words of conviction, ardor, invention, and precision have graced our pages, and our history-making Winter 2021 issue is no different. Featuring three new languages—Cebuano, Kahmiri, and Marathi—and deploying works from thirty-one countries in total, we are additionally featuring a curated selection of writings in our Brave New World Literature feature, which presents a myriad of talented voices navigating and graphing the changing landscape of world literature. Here, our blog editors are rounding up their selections of the pieces of the Winter 2021 edition that ignite and inspire.

The notion of a brave new world literature indicates—beyond the trepidations upon coming towards the unknown—the writer’s own, omnipresent fears about their own craft. In writing, one is always fighting against the futility of the word, how it falters to encompass even a single sensation, let alone the impatient fabric of the milieu. Each piece of writing is measured up against its time to determine its true subject, and the works included in our landmark Winter 2021 issue has to bear the comparison to a moment in history that comes close to being immeasurable, both in the frenzied proceedings of markable events, and in the psychic tracks it has carved across the globe, as each person was forced to consider—in distinctly unequal polarities of rumination or emergency—what it means to have lived through, to be living through, such a time.

This seamless interchange between writer, reader, and the present shared between them—the writing must level all three terrains while insulating its cargo of ideas. As I move through this marvelous gallery of texts that the latest issue of Asymptote gathers, I was struck by the various and telling constellations they formed with this precise moment.

In Jan Němec’s excerpts from Ways of Writing About Love, there’s a beguiling—and somewhat precious—self-conscious tone, rendered with grace by David Short, that runs through the three proses, almost as if the writer has already recognized that the bold display on the awning of the text—those two feared and wasted words, writing and love—has already pushed the language deeply into that murky deluge where only those two most indulgent peoples, writers and lovers, would willingly submerge themselves. But as the oral rhythm of the story taps itself out (Němec and Short are to be commended for their preternatural sense of how the voice paces itself), and the symphony of the mind conducts its singular cacophony, one comes to decipher its inner textures, in which writing and love are scrutinized for the particularly heightened quality one achieves during such occupations—attention to how time, and knowledge, and sensuality congregate. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

May 1, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Daniel Persia, and José García Escobar

Despite setbacks and delays, literature around the world is still going strong.

This week, our writers bring you the latest literary news from Brazil, Central America, and Hong Kong. In Brazil, literary communities are still going strong via online events and livestreams; in Central America, journalists and writers have been reaching audiences through online videos; and in Hong Kong, universities have been putting lecture series online for the public. Read on to find out more!

Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Brazil

In the midst of rising political tensions, presidential disregard for the ongoing pandemic, and increased social distancing measures at the local and state levels, writers and readers have come together to help shape a new virtual literary landscape in Brazil. Over the past few weeks, with travel restricted and residents urged to stay in their homes, I’ve tuned in via Facebook Live, Instagram Live, Youtube, Google Hangouts, Zoom, and more to engage with authors from across the country. With some livestreams reaching two thousand-plus users in a single session, one thing remains clear: the Brazilian literary community continues strong, with readers now more than ever searching for opportunities to engage in dialogue and debate. To stay connected, you can follow writers and publishers on social media; subscribe to email newsletters; and check out how your local bookstore might be engaged with virtual encounters! READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2020

April 27, 2020  |  in News  |  by Eva Heisler, Garrett Phelps, Henry Ace Knight, Lee Yew Leong, Sam Carter, and Varun Nayar

Our section editors guide you through the riches of our Spring 2020 issue!

Our Spring 2020 issue has arrived amidst a rising desire for unity and community. As we seek new sights from views made familiar by isolation, Asymptote is proud to have gathered some of the most vivid and singular works from literary talents from thirty countries, so that we may all benefit from the vitality of their distinct imaginings and realities. Here, our section editors share their favourites and guide you around this edition’s abundance of ideas and inventions.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction and Galician Poetry Feature Editor:

If you enjoyed watching Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant, you’ll probably love “Red Ivory” by Italian writer Matteo Meschiari from the new issue: like the film, it’s a survival tale set in the extreme cold (in the Siberian permafrost, to be specific), riveting in its depiction of the elements, narrated urgently with brilliant flashes of lyricism—including one electric moment of human contact collapsing 12,000 years. By the end, it’s also a möbius strip of a story posing big existential questions. (Don’t miss the edifying note by emerging translator Enrico Cioni, who did an amazing job rendering the story.) The omniscient narrator of Mirza Athar Baig‘s “Junkshop” transports us similarly through history—this time centering around the objects of a contemporary junkshop—infusing an everyday scene with wonder at just how much we don’t know. Many delights abound in the Galician Poetry Feature headlined by Manuel Rivas, Chus Pato, and Alba Cid (translated by Jacob Rogers, who also helped put together the Feature), but be sure to acquaint yourself with Luz Pozo Garza, one of Galicia’s literary greats, who passed away at age 97 less than a week after the release of the issue. In the selection that translator Kathleen March presented, she used cadences of the canticle and other musical forms to sing of an ecstatic yet bittersweet love for an evanescent world.

From Henry Ace Knight, Interviews Editor: 

Kamila Hladíková’s conversation with Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser for the Spring issue’s interview section centers on the precariousness of Tibetan cultural memory and the poet’s resistance to its wholesale erasure. Citing Milan Kundera and Edward Said, Woeser suggests that the survival of marginalized collective identity is incumbent upon the insistence of individual eyewitness memory and testimony. “The history of a nation consists of the personal histories of its people,” she writes. “Descartes said, ‘I think, therefore I am’; but in Tibet, it should be, ‘I remember, therefore we are.’”

From Varun Nayar, Nonfiction Editor: 

Following the footsteps of the great Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō, Durian Sukegawa writes about a journey he made in 2012, traversing a landscape reshaped by the earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster the year before. Alison Watts’s vivid translation of Sukegawa’s written account of this journey acquaints us with the personal and political stakes of living in post-Fukushima Japan. Part travelogue, part political meditation, Sukegawa’s writing pairs the beauty of the Japanese landscape with the ugliness of government negligence. At the heart of this piece is a desire to bear witness to the lives rendered invisible in the eyes of the mainstream media and the country’s disaster management apparatus. In its sober reflection of the human cost of events still fresh in Japan’s collective memory, Sukegawa’s piece also conjures an eerie relation to the current pandemic we’re living through.  READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

November 1, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Daljinder Johal, Rachel Allen, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest in world letters from Beijing, Oklahoma, and the UK.

Three superpowers this week compete for our attention with their respective updates in the realm of national literature. Our editors bring you news this week from the Beijing Literature Summit, the results of the Neustadt Prize in Oklahoma, and the continued fallout of the 2019 Booker Prize award in the UK. Read on to find out more!  

Xiao Yue Shan, Assistant Blog Editor, reporting for China

“Beijing is the country’s literary mecca,” articles enthusiastically parroted this month as the nation’s capital held the 4th Beijing Literature Summit on October 18. Though the multifold of equally rich literary cities in this vast country could dissent, the summit and forum nevertheless overtook headlines as well-established members of the Beijing literati took the stage in the square at Zhengyangmen, the immediate heart of the city. Attendees included preeminent novelists Liang Xiaosheng 梁晓声 and Liu Qingbang 刘庆邦, and the poet Yang Qingxiang 杨庆祥 (a leader of “new scar poetry”), as well as an assembly of Beijing’s foremost scholars, critics, and publishers.

The talks concentrated around three predominant themes: the past, present, and future of Beijing literature. Throughout the seventy years of the People’s Republic of China, literary culture in Beijing remained at the forefront of the country’s social and cultural reality, thereby receiving the most immediate impact from the tumultuous chronology of the country as a whole. In discussing the tremendous weight of history, Liang stated that the past is not overbearing but exists in a continuous exchange with the present. The question is, he said: “How should we use the text to state it?”

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An Inventory of Resistance: Notes on Catalan Language Politics in Literature

January 17, 2018  |  in Essays  |  by Manel Mula Ferrer

Perhaps part of the uniqueness of Catalan comes from this awareness of its influence on and disconnection from Castilian and European traditions.

Part I: The Nineteenth Century

At first, I was hesitant to write an article on the uses of the Catalan language in literature throughout recent history. After the referendum for Catalan independence held this past October 1, which was deemed illegal by the Spanish government, and the subsequent episodes of violence that occurred in the region, the topic has come to be a sensitive matter for any national. However, where there is a language, there is a literature, and the history of Catalan is one of stubborn resistance. It is my contention that the history of a language is somehow lived out in those who speak it, insofar as a sentiment of ambiguity still informs contemporary critical debates on the usefulness and adaptability of Catalan literature. “Is Catalan literature diverse enough? Can it cultivate all genres? Is it economically viable?” are questions that have resonated among critics and the public alike. Catalan literature inherits a sense of shame from its own fruition, and it is this feeling that I want to explore with this genealogy of usages.

This is not a history of Catalan literature and the texts featured here have not been selected according to an aesthetic canon. This is an archive of perceptions of Catalan language and literature as experienced throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from the literary resurgence known as La Renaixença in Catalan literary history (parallel to which political Catalan nationalism as we know it unfolds) to the relatively normalized literary field in existence today. While certainly not the only appropriate approach, in what follows I present a succession of events from the nineteenth century that Catalan historiography has employed to explain the evolution of the uses of the language.

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Camila von Holdefer on the State of Literary Criticism in Brazil

March 30, 2017  |  in Interviews  |  by Maíra Mendes Galvão

The critic, as a general rule, is someone who must know how to take a beating and how to hit back.

Camila von Holdefer, 28, is a Brazilian literature critic and philosophy academic. She publishes her reviews on her own website, in the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo, and on the Moreira Salles Institute blog and the Carambaia Publishing House’s blog, among others. In this interview, building on her ten-piece series on literary criticism in Brazil, she elaborates on some of the issues surrounding the literary readership in Brazil, as well as Brazilian book publishing in general and the role of the critic.

Maíra Mendes Galvão (MMG): As an opener to this interview, I’d love it if you could give us a brief description of the present Brazilian literature scene, from your point of view and a panorama of literary criticism in Brazil: who are the critics, where do they publish, where does the readership go in search of references?

Camila von Holdefer (CvH): Brazilian literature, it seems to me, is in a much better position than its criticism. Not long ago, writer Sérgio Sant’Anna published a piece in the newspaper Estadão insinuating that there’d been an explosion in the number of authors. Many people scoffed at his statement, but that is more or less what’s happening, I mean, Sant’Anna is right. There is a large number of published authors now. This happened because of an increase in both the number of small, quality publishing houses and the availability of self-publishing platforms and services that have little to no concern at all about the quality of the work.

So, what transpires is that it isn’t very difficult to get published. Actually, it’s never been easier. Consequently, the critics are faced with an amount of new books that they will never get around to reading. If there are three or four truly exceptional writers among the newcomers, it is unlikely that we’ll manage to get to them. And this is because there is a huge demand that reviewers can no longer meet. I get around ten e-mails a week from authors asking me to review their books. There isn’t the least chance that I will manage one third of that. Even with a joint effort by the critics, there wouldn’t be enough outlets where we could publish those reviews. There are few supplements, independent or in newspapers, that are still printing (or posting) reviews. The Ilustrada supplement of Folha de S.Paulo is one of them, perhaps the one that’s most attuned to diversity. O Globo and Estadão also include some reviews from time to time. There is Suplemento Pernambuco, with good articles and reviews, and Jornal Rascunho, of mixed quality (some collaborators are excellent, some are terrible: it’s all or nothing).

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