On world literature: when Goethe met Boltzmann

Abstract

On world literature: when Goethe met BoltzmannThe definition of 'world literature' has been a keenly debated one ever since Goethe proclaimed in 1827 that the 'epoch of world literature is at hand'. This paper enters the debate by bringing the conclusion of Ludwig Boltzmann's work on entropy into conversation with contemporary ideas about literature -about Literature proper, national literature and, in the end, world literature. If entropy describes the inevitability of an organized system becoming disorganized over time, then my rather simple claim is that world literature is nothing more than a description of the entropy of national literature. Put another way, world literature is a description of the process by which texts inevitably escape the boundaries of national literature; it is the rush of 'disorder' that one witnesses as an ordered system is put to flight. In order to elucidate this idea, I draw on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

Material and Trans-corporeal Identities in Ferrante's and Atwood's Narratives

“…As a result of Ferrante's consistent attention to the marginalized condition of women and power structures, gender politics, identity formations, and female friendships, critics have often compared her voice to those of prominent writers, such as Virginia Woolf, Elsa Morante, Alice Munro, and Alice Sebold. 1 Tiziana de Rogatis, for instance, has ascribed Ferrante's tetralogy L'amica geniale (My Brilliant Friend, 2011-2014 to the genre of the Künstlerroman, and has included Ferrante in a specific narrative tradition-as pioneered by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Doris Lessing, and Margaret Atwood-that focuses on the development of a female artist subject (de Rogatis 50). Similarly, Stiliana Milkova has observed "an uncanny similarity" between Ferrante and Atwood, specifically in their use of ekphrasis as a rhetorical tool to undermine male mechanisms of oppression and violence ("Visual Poetics" 174).…”