Sara Kippur - Böcker

Though the practice of self-translation long predates modernity, it has found new forms of expression in the global literary market of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The international renown of self-translating authors Samuel Beckett, Joseph Brodsky, and Vladimir Nabokov has offered motivation to a new generation of writers who actively translate themselves.Intervening in recent debates in world literature and translation studies, Writing It Twice establishes the prominence and vitality of self-translation in contemporary French literature. Because of its intrinsic connection to multiple literary communities, self-translation prompts a reexamination of the aesthetics and politics of reading across national lines. Kippur argues that self-translated works should be understood as the paradigmatic example of world literature and, as such, crucial for interpreting the dynamics of literary circulation into and out of French.

Though the practice of self-translation long predates modernity, it has found new forms of expression in the global literary market of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The international renown of self-translating authors Samuel Beckett, Joseph Brodsky, and Vladimir Nabokov has offered motivation to a new generation of writers who actively translate themselves.Intervening in recent debates in world literature and translation studies, Writing It Twice establishes the prominence and vitality of self-translation in contemporary French literature. Because of its intrinsic connection to multiple literary communities, self-translation prompts a reexamination of the aesthetics and politics of reading across national lines. Kippur argues that self-translated works should be understood as the paradigmatic example of world literature and, as such, crucial for interpreting the dynamics of literary circulation into and out of French.

Postwar French writers were at the vanguard of global literary innovation—from the experimental minimalism of the Nouveau Roman to the literary games of the OuLiPo—but less often appreciated is the extent to which they worked closely with US editors and translators, published actively with American presses, and often theorized transatlantic connections within their work.In this exciting new work, Sara Kippur proposes a new French literary history that traces the deep connections between postwar literary experimentalism and the New York publishing industry, compellingly arguing that US-based editors, publishers, producers, professors, and translators crucially intervened to shape French literature. While Kippur attends closely to well-known writers such as Marguerite Duras, Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Georges Perec, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, she also amplifies the voices of those who have been less visible, though no less relevant, including women whose contributions have not received proper credit but who helped to foster a sense of new possibilities for twentieth-century French writing. With these untold histories, stitched together in this book through new archival discoveries from special collections and personal archives on both sides of the Atlantic, Kippur begins to dismantle rigid notions of canonicity, authorship, and national literature.

Postwar French writers were at the vanguard of global literary innovation—from the experimental minimalism of the Nouveau Roman to the literary games of the OuLiPo—but less often appreciated is the extent to which they worked closely with US editors and translators, published actively with American presses, and often theorized transatlantic connections within their work.In this exciting new work, Sara Kippur proposes a new French literary history that traces the deep connections between postwar literary experimentalism and the New York publishing industry, compellingly arguing that US-based editors, publishers, producers, professors, and translators crucially intervened to shape French literature. While Kippur attends closely to well-known writers such as Marguerite Duras, Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Georges Perec, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, she also amplifies the voices of those who have been less visible, though no less relevant, including women whose contributions have not received proper credit but who helped to foster a sense of new possibilities for twentieth-century French writing. With these untold histories, stitched together in this book through new archival discoveries from special collections and personal archives on both sides of the Atlantic, Kippur begins to dismantle rigid notions of canonicity, authorship, and national literature.

Being Contemporary is a volume of original essays by 23 preeminent scholars of French and Comparative literature, hailing from both sides of the Atlantic, in response to the editors’ invitation to “think through the contemporary.” The volume offers a sustained critical reflection on the contemporary as a concept, a category, a condition, and a set of relationships to others and to one’s own time. Being Contemporary emerges from a sense of a critical urgency to probe the notion of “the contemporary,” and the place of the contemporary critic, in French literary and cultural studies today. Its point of departure is Susan Suleiman’s book Risking Who One Is (Harvard, 1994), which proposed two decades ago that “being contemporary” offers a heuristic category for assessing the role of the scholar and critic, for studying the current moment in literature, art, and culture, and for engaging with historical and philosophical questions in a way that resonates with readers in the present day. Returning to these ideas with renewed vigor, the thought-provoking essays that comprise this volume center on 20th- and 21st-century French literature, politics, memory, and history, and problematize the contemporary as a critical position with respect to the current moment.