Transnational Approaches to Culture – serie

In a global context in which phenomena of migration play an ever more important role, the ways individual and collective experiences of migration are covered in the media, represented in culture, and interpreted are coming under increasing scrutiny. This book explores the complex relationship between creative engagements with migration on the one hand, and forms of knowledge about migration on the other, inquiring into the ways aesthetic practices are intertwined with knowledge structures. The book responds to three pressing research questions. First, it analyses how fictional texts, plays, images, films, and autobiographical accounts mediate forms of knowledge about migration. Second, it identifies the ways in which specific media approaches and aesthetic practices influence people’s ideas about and awareness of migratory experiences in a globalized world. Finally, it delineates how historical perspectives help us compare epistemological approaches to migration in the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries, and how these approaches affect the way critics and the public responded to and thought about different forms of (forced) migration. Bringing together renowned scholars working across disciplines, it investigates the possibilities and limitations that different media present when it comes to reflecting on, communicating, and imagining experiences of migration, and how these representations in turn create ways of knowing and understanding migration.

Against highly current debates on multilingual literary production, this original study of the acclaimed contemporary poet-translator Uljana Wolf considers how lyric verse is being creatively revitalised through experimental practices across languages, genres and media. Based in Berlin and New York, Wolf is concerned to explore and contest political and linguistic borders through poetry and translation as a poetic practice. Despite considerable critical acclaim, Wolf’s writing has not yet formed the subject of any book-length study, likely due to its radical form and resistance to straightforward categorisations. This English-language volume will form the first published collection dedicated to Wolf’s oeuvre and ensure that her work is made accessible to the increasing numbers of scholars and students working on multilingual literature. Original contributions by Wolf and her translators will consolidate the volume’s status as a landmark intervention concerned to trace the aesthetics and politics of Wolf’s linguistic and formal experiments. Responding to urgent questions driving comparative literature studies today, our contributors will focus on Wolf’s multilingual works, her translational networks and radical textual politics.