Transcultural Writers, World Literature and Multicultural Australia in the Global Age by Roberto Vecchi

Transcultural Writers, World Literature and Multicultural Australia in the Global Age Arianna Dagnino (University of South Australia)

A mutation is under way within the global ecumene of Letters, where new notions of belonging as well as definitions of selfhood and identity are being externalized through new creative artistic and literary processes. In the present age of transnational flows and complex globalizing phenomena, a new generation of authors is writing beyond the limits, or on the border, of their primary cultures and national landscapes. For this reason, a growing number of literary critics prefer to refer to these authors and their imaginative works as “transcultural”.1 These writers may have in their background a migrant, exile or transnational experience of some sort but in their cultural orientation and writing style they seem to detach themselves from the conventional tropes of migrant, diasporic or postcolonial writing that have dominated the last twenty-thirty years of the global literary landscape. The present article analyses the growing significance, in the wider terrain of world literature and in the symbolic space of multicultural Australia, of a transcultural way of writing more attuned to the cultural complexities of our globalized contemporaneity. Historic literary examples of transcultural writers who underwent a “creative transpatriation” – that is, the identity and cultural metamorphosis that may be triggered by moving physically, virtually, and imaginatively outside one’s cultural and homeland/national borders – can be easily found. Just keeping to the 20th century, the American writer Paul Bowles, with “his imaginative assimilation and interpretation of Moroccan culture” (Patteson 1992, p. 182), the Belgian-born French novelist living in the United States Marguerite Yourcenar, or, in his own way and with his multifarious cultural experiences, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges may be considered among the forerunners of a phenomenon that only now, at the beginning of the 21st century, is acquiring greater impetus and resonance. Transcultural theories (Rama 1982; Spitta 1993; Canclini 1995) have been deployed and engaged, especially in the Latin American region, since the late 1940s, after the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz (1947) coined the term “transculturation” 1

For an analysis of early 21st century transcultural writers see Arianna Dagnino (2012), “Transcultural Writers and Transcultural Fiction in the Age of Global Modernity”.

to describe the process of mutual – even if asymmetrical – cultural influences and fusions between so called “peripheral” and colonizing cultures. The concept of transculturation has been further developed, among others and within a postcolonial framework, by Mary Louise Pratt (1992) in her seminal text, Imperial Eyes. In the present study, I mainly refer to the subsequent conceptualizations of “transculture” and “transculturality” (Transkulturalität) devised by the Russian cultural theorist Mikhail N. Epstein (1995, 2004, 2009) and the German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch (1999, 2002, 2009) respectively. These conceptualizations aim to overcome the binaries of dominant versus subordinate, colonizer versus colonized cultures inherent in the original and postcolonial interpretations of “transculturation”. The literary phenomenon of the transcultural in early 21st century literature is particularly evident within the multicultural context of contemporary Australia. It is here that physically and culturally mobile writers such as Inez Baranay, Brian Castro, and J.M. Coetzee – just to put forward a selection of representative names – show in their creative works to be mostly interested in the dialogues, interactions and negotiation processes constantly happening between cultures. Despite having different cultural backgrounds, all three writers write in English and may be perceived as belonging de facto to the powerful sphere of “Anglo-Global” literary production.2 The present article argues, though, that also creative literary expressions inscribed within mainstream, transnational Anglophone market dynamics can evoke transcultural critical cues and outlooks.3 Let us start with Inez Baranay, who was born in Italy by Hungarian parents, grew up in Australia and now lives in Istanbul. Her way of writing has grown from the cohabitation – although not in-depth, as she admits – with other languages (the Hungarian of her early childhood, the Malay of her adolescence, the Indonesian of the young traveller, the Hindi of her maturity), by listening and repeating words from ancient liturgical idioms (the Sanskrit of her yoga practice) and, most of all, by the habit of adopting the ways of talking of her interlocutors, be they academics or underground artists, brahmins or villagers from rural India, tranquil mothers from the city suburbs of Sydney or neurotic business women from New York. As she has stated, “what the Anglos might delicately refer to as ‘my background’ gave me a different slant on the world, a different accent in my thoughts, a different kind of narrative I’ve identified with” (Baranay 2004, p. 127). That physical and cultural elsewhere would keep 2

See Jonathan Arac (2002), “Anglo-Globalism.” A similar argument is put forward in his debate on Weltliteratur/world literature by Lorenzo Mari (2013) in the article “Il mondo non è un luogo comune: immagine e statuto del ‘mondo’ in Hand Me Down World (2010) di Lloyd Jones”; see in particular p. 9.

attracting her through a never ending series of comings and goings. The first leg of her moveable feast was Bali, then came South-East Asia, Morocco, Europe, later on a year as volunteer in Papua New Guinea, along the lines of one of her characters: “I imagined I was starting to live the way I’d planned to: foreign situations, foreign possibilities.” In her novel Neem Dreams, set in India with characters coming from different parts of the world and different layers of society, the reader enters pluralistic, multivocal worlds, rich in lexical crossbreedings and bastardisations. It is a real – not faked – multiplicity that Baranay would like to see replicated also in Australia. Despite its claims of being the most multicultural country of the world, many critics and writers have pointed out to what extent the Australia of the Anglos still favours a monocultural (Anglo-Saxon) framework that acknowledges a single national language (English) and magnanimously grants its kaleidoscopic ethnic minorities the freedom to parade their costumes, traditions, foods and tastes as street-vendors would exhibit their merchandise in a country fair: it has a lot of colour and it is ok as long as it slightly rhymes with folklore but, for god’s sake, do not ever let these languages (and their underlying cultures) undermine the indisputable dominance of the Queen’s English and what it still represents down under. That is why Baranay considers even the use of the English language as a practice – in this case a supranational practice – and a means of communication stripped of too stringent pressing ethnic-cultural traits, or in any case free from the necessity to adhere to any specific national canon – be it British, American, South African, Canadian, or whatever. Baranay (2004, p. 124) claims to be in favour of “a cosmopolitan Australian English full of variations, a mongrel English, and a happily mongrel nation.” Also Brian Castro’s literary sensibility comes from a most peculiar composition of cultures, genres, genes: he was born in the cosmopolitan Hong Kong of the 1950s and sent to boarding school in the “white Australia” of the 1960s when he was eleven; his father was Portuguese but had been raised in Shanghai; his mother was the daughter of a Chinese man and an English missionary woman. Castro writes in English, feels in Cantonese but thinks, and aesthetically lives, in French – his third language, his third cultural “skin”. His novels sound like a distant litany, an invocation to an extreme, possibly baffling, elsewhere – Far East, Far East, Far East. In his writing Castro seems determined to regain that idealised state of childhood, that constant hybridisation of chromosomes, sounds, ways of talking, gestures, rituals, dress-codes, points of view experienced in his 1950s Hong Kong. His books are polyhedric, polyglot, polysensory. And he, at least as an author, is transculturally “time warped”, caught in an imaginary dimension of enriching coalescences and refined cultural sensibilities. In his recent novel, The Bath Fugues, Castro imagines wider or alternative cultural horizons through

a transnational choice of settings that involves narrative detours from Paris to Macao, from Portugal to the Australian Queensland, and, most importantly, through characters that undeniably dispute traditional concepts of home, identity and belonging. In this way, Castro shows us how his writing has crossed the threshold of all his in-born and acquired cultures and reached an external space to all cultures, what Michail Epstein calls a transcultural “Continuum”: and this is his own space, his own culture. More than a liminal or interstitial space, the transcultural Continuum devised by Epstein refers to an all-inclusive, non-oppositional point of confluence, an overlapping of cultures, a “fusion of horizons” in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s (1975, p. 273) terms, where one cannot really distinguish what belongs to one culture and what belongs to another, where us finishes and them starts. It might rather be understood as an “exospace” not limited to the “in-between” but external to all cultures: a utopian dimension, not only unreachable but also, literally, without a specific place, without a determinable location. In order to envisage and explain this contemporary cultural movement “beyond the horizon of postmodernism”, Epstein (1995, p. 328) likens transculture and its transcultural Continuum to Borges’s (1970) “Aleph”, the dimension where symbolically all cultures and noncultures, that is all their infinite possibilities, can be active and alive simultaneously: In Borges’s great story “Aleph”, the brightest point of the universe is described as a place where all times and spaces may be present together, without hiding or overshadowing each other. In the typical terms of physical reality, Aleph is a pure fantasy, but culture is, after all, a symbolic reality that can be condensed indefinitely by the increasing scope of its meanings. We may imagine transculture as the Aleph of the entire cultural world. (Epstein 1995, p. 299)

A master in the creation of that transcultural experimental space suggested by Castro as a writer and by Epstein as a cultural theorist is J.M. Coetzee. Having lived between South Africa, Europe, the United States and Australia, as well as between the English, the Afrikaans, the German and the Dutch language, Coetzee has always sailed in transcultural waters. His works seem to invite the reader to accept the fall of any barrier between rigidly defined cultural and national identities as well as the loss of any clearcut distinction between genres, facts and fiction, living and writing, the works of the imagination and the realities of life. We have arrived at the diffusion of the self – of the cultural self – through our and other people’s gaze. At each reading, at each new meeting with the Other, we form a new identity, we receive a new reflection of our selves. Is not this what Coetzee insinuates by disseminating his persona in the

autobiographical trilogy of Boyhood, Youth and Summertime? His sense of becoming is filtered through the gaze of those who have had a meaningful role in his life. In this way, by assuming the multiple versions of how the others (relatives, friends, lovers, readers, colleagues, journalists, biographers, compatriots, strangers) see him, Coetzee becomes plural, dispersed and, thus, undefinable. In this global context of increasing transnational and neonomadic experiences, the author is as much psychologically, socially, and culturally fragmented and deterritorialised as his/her characters. Is not this what Coetzee teaches us with his latest novel, The Childhood of Jesus? The story is mesmerizing and unsettling in a very strange and unexpected way. The sought-after simplicity – nakedness – of the language (an example of pure global English, deprived of any local or metropolitan inflections) is just a smoke-screen to address a series of very fundamental social and cultural issues (the treatment of refugees, the loss of the mother tongue, the disappearing importance of manual labour, the pros and cons of progress, the mother/son and the father/son relationship, the risks of compartmentalised State education, the myopic and perverse power of social workers/educators, you name it). It is highly philosophical without showing to be so. It is a masterpiece in disguise. Its elementary complexity (it seems one can find only oxymorons to describe this book) has something hypnotic: like in a good movie, one finds oneself going back to certain scenes, sentences, dialogues, impressions – searching for answers, finding only new questions. The world of Novilla created by Coetzee sounds like a well-constructed parody of modern-day “multicultural” Australia: a monolingual Spanish-speaking Australia where all the citizens seem to be migrants whose past has been erased and who seem to live without any memory of their mother tongue.4 Like the characters of their fictions, transcultural writers such as Baranay, Castro and J.M. Coetzee may be seen as open-ended agents operating in a constant state of translation. They translate idioms, world views, modes of being, customs, conventions; and at each translation, while they learn a new language and discover a new perspective, a new way of thinking, eating, seeing things, they nurture the value of confluence.5 Because it is right in the confluence, in that merging of waters, ebbs and flows where it is no longer possible to trace back a single origin or envisage a single outlet, that we 4

Associating the enigmatic and isolated land in which the two wanderers of the book find themselves with an undated Australia is a personal interpretation of the author of this article. This interpretation is however indirectly confirmed by the many conversations the author has had with J.M. Coetzee while they were both living in Adelaide, South Australia. 5 For an analysis of “translation” meant as “la categoria ermeneutica centrale per comprendere la complessità del mondo nella sua globalità” (the fundamental hermeneutic category to understand the complexity of the world in its globality), see Eleonora Federici e Vita Fortunati (2013, p. 1), “Convergenze e sinergie tra traduzione e studi comparati: una rassegna critica” (my translation).

acquire and are granted the translational and chameleonic ability to move in different contexts and adapt to the dynamic quality of cultures.6 It is no longer a question of being a Camus-like stranger, of looking at things with the detachment of the outsider. That is a way of being, and of writing, already tested, long since internalized. What instead is pressing against the pages of these writers of contemporary physical and cultural mobility is the responsibility stemming from the awareness of being in a hybridized state; of having accepted the osmosis, the constant process of dilution and crossing-over of cultural elements; of always introducing, in any context, a more open, complex, and thus more elusive and less classifiable perspective. It is the perspective of the outlier rather than of the outsider – not of the one being kept (or willing to be) out of the group, but of the one who, having transcended any cultural, ethnic, religious or territorial line of demarcation, not belonging to anything ends up feeling he/she belongs to everything. Then, and only if conceived in this new light, as the polyglot and transnational writer Hélène Cixous (1993, 80) claims, “foreignness becomes a fantastic nationality” – citizen of neither country in order to be citizen of every country.7 Thus, if we wanted to differentiate the main tropes of transcultural writing (and, in particular, transcultural prose fiction/novels) from those of its closest “cousins” – migrant and postcolonial writing – we might propose the following possible, certainly non-exhaustive, synthesis: • Migrant writing: Characters expressing cultural alienation. Out-of-placeness. Trauma. Homesickness, disintegration of the personality, sense of not belonging, nostalgia of the past, nostalgia of lost place. Disorientation. Sense of fragmentation and discontinuity. Memory as poignant nostalgia. Negative sense of displacement and precariousness of one’s existence. Processes of selfobliteration. Loss of language. Muted characters. • Postcolonial/diasporic writing: Characters showing split personalities torn between cultures. In-betweenness. Dynamics of self-affirmation. Reactions to the white/Western man’s sense of racial/intellectual/civic superiority. Colonial alienation. Hybridity. Symbolic presence of the subaltern. Mimicry. Language used to underline cultural differences, incommunicability, untranslatability. Textual resistance. Subversion. Fixed binary oppositions: native/foreigner,

On the confluential nature of cultures see, in particular, Ilija Trojanow and Ranjit Hoskoté (2012) Confluences: Forgotten Histories from East and West. 7 Hélène Cixous was born in French Algeria, raised in German, educated in France and dedicated herself to English literature.

master/slave, colonizer/colonized. Cultural antagonism. As Philipino postpostcolonial writer Miguel Syjuco (2010, p. 70) remarks, the main trope here is “an antagonistic struggle, an us-versus-them mentality, that throws us all into a senseless battle-royale”. • Transcultural writing: Independent-minded characters thriving in – or at least positively challenging – the feeling of precariousness of one’s existence. Feeling “in place” rather than lost in translation. At home anywhere, despite the difficulties inherent in any process of adaptation. Movement experienced as an opening of new possibilities, beginnings and becomings. Identity conceived as a fluid process. Feeling of enrichment through the interaction with, and immersion in, multiple cultures. Perception of the annulment or weakening of traditionally hegemonic centers. Verbally empowered characters, fluent in more than one language. Playful and creative engagement with the experience of foreign idioms, concepts, expressions. Blurring of the boundaries between self and other. Sense of becoming experienced and understood as an empowering, though sometimes distressful, process of mutual transformation and cultural confluence. It is important to note that this highly schematic differentiation neither does imply that these modes of writing are opposed to each other nor that they are subject to a linear, temporal pattern of development, with uncomfortable and unwanted evolutionist or progressive undertones. Instead, it conceives of these specific modes of writing as coexisting, interacting, and often overlapping. It also marks the process of an evergreater complexity, with its trans-boundary movements and hybridizations of cultures (as well as of literary genres), having always in mind the often asymmetrical and unequal negotiating powers of different cultures.8 The choice of the term transcultural is due not only to the fact that the cultural orientations of those writers who have already experienced in their flesh and bones, as well as in their creative minds, the effects of global mobility and transnational patterns tend to reflect themselves in their creative works, thus fostering the emergence of a transcultural mode of writing where cultures are seen as vastly fluid, confluential and collective identity maps. What makes this kind of writing different from others is, most of all, its resistance to being appropriated by any one national canon or be identified with any one ethnic expression or cultural tradition. The complex and fluid 8

For an overview of the different theorizations of this process of “inarrestabile ibridazione” (inexorable hybridization), see for example Mauro Pala (2013, p. 13), “Eterotopie letterarie: comparatistica e letteratura mondiale da Wellek ai giorni nostri”.

identity/cultural attitude of these writers, creatively expressed through their works, seems to defy any conventional pigeon-holing, to dispel any attempt to pin them down, to fit (or restrict) them into any kind of defining box, even the most flexible and academically sophisticated one. As Rosi Braidotti (1994, p. 22) says of her metaphoric polyglot nomads, they are “usually beyond classification”. If, paradoxically, it is possible to group them together, it is only on the basis of their transcultural affinities. If seen in this light, the term transcultural proves to be preferable than the term cosmopolitan, transnational or postnational, even though these adjacent conceptcategories may share several common aspects and stir similar resonances in the way they have been recently theorized by those literary scholars keen to find new interpretative frames to capture the sea-changes of global dynamics and find new ways at looking at texts. In the specific case of the term “cosmopolitan” within a literary discourse, it is hard to disregard the fact that this concept-word is highly charged and over the course of its long history has acquired a strong political connotation, to the extent that “cosmopolitics” is now one of the most en vogue neologisms. Hence, one might be open to the feeling of unease of those critics and writers, such as Milan Kundera, who are reluctant to confound literary aesthetic efforts with the assumed hopes, ideologies and often normative implications of political activism or political agendas. There may be inherent dangers, for example, in sharing Gayatri Spivak’s (2009, p. 616) view that comparativism, especially if approached “in extremis”, incarnates “the double bind between ethics and politics”, which for many scholars tends to be inevitably conducive to essentialising, authoritarian, or moralistic stances. As Kundera (1995, p. 91) states in his book Testaments Betrayed: “I have always, deeply, violently detested those who look for a position (political, philosophical, religious, whatever) in a work of art rather than searching it for an effort to know, to understand, to grasp this or that aspect of reality”. In short, being aware that every artistic product, every act of literary writing, every aesthetic effort is in itself also a political act and/or is also immersed/situated in a political dimension does not mean that it must be necessarily interpreted through the restrictive lenses of a political or ideological standpoint. As Maurizio Ascari (2011, p. 13) remarks: “It is thanks to their ability to trigger the imagination, opening us to alternative worldviews, that narratives exert an action on reality and translate into political acts”. On the other hand, this does not mean either that a comparativist should not use world literature, as David Damrosch assumes in his discussion with Spivak, “to shake comparative literature out of its dogmatic slumber, to critique its nationalist selfinvolvement, and to really push back against the market at every opportunity. So ... a

good research project challenges the reigning doxa, pushes against the euphorias of national self-satisfaction” (Damrosch and Spivak 2011, p. 463). Moreover, in more than one case the term cosmopolitan has been associated with the attitudes of a well-heeled class of international globe-trotters or of competent and perhaps not less privileged consumers of cultural folklore (mainly in terms of food and music). Taking as a paradigmatic example the situation of Australian society’s monocultural shortsightedness despite its claims of a multicultural consciousness, linguists Mary Besemeres and Anna Wierzibcka (2007, p. xiv) remark that: Although Australia prides itself of being multicultural, there is actually little awareness of what it means to live between cultures … It is not enough to be tolerant, to have good will, to be curious about other people’s folk dances, costumes and culinary traditions.

In this context, not even the term “intercultural” would pass the transcultural test, since, according to Welsch (1999), it also stems from the epistemological framework of national cultures, where cultures are seen as separate, well-defined and self-referential entities instead of metamorphic, confluential and intermingling processes. The term “diasporic”, on the other hand, still retains a tight connection to a more or less displaced minority and certainly a close identification with a community or collective group of reference, be it ethnic, religious, national or cultural. This happens even when one refers to the “voluntary” diasporic conditions of late modernity, without any physical connection to a geographical locatedness and from the perspective of a postnational constellation (instead of the nation-state). This means that diasporic subjects (and writers) are seen to be linked to a strong collective sense of identity/belonging, while transcultural subjects seem more prone to develop an individualized (or personalized) sense of identity/belonging. The term transcultural, not yet mired by any controversial or limiting sociopolitical interpretations and connotations, thus appears to be more easily and freely usable within a literary framework in which social or even political issues tend to acquire an aesthetical/imaginary dimension or be aesthetically/imaginatively transcended. Most of all, being more open and less restrictive in its meaning, it faces lesser risks to be transformed into a new ghettoizing category for writers and works that do not seem to adhere to nor comply with any specific national canon nor with the migrant or postcolonial paradigm. Nonetheless, not unlike the cosmopolitans mentioned above, transcultural writers may also represent another tiny, often well-heeled minority. If we take into account that

they are well educated and hardly belong to the category of economic or forced migrants, even though they may be children of migrants, they might be seen as privileged middle-class citizens. Thus, some critics might consider this choice of subject nd its correlated arguments too elitist, relying upon too socially a narrow conception of mobility, “celebrating the ability of elite migrants to move between locales and ignoring the quite different experience of working-class or subaltern migrations” (Apter 2011, p. 150). On the other hand, we should not lose sight of Couldry’s (2000, p. 3) remarks, at least within cultural studies, about the “downplaying of the middlebrow” (let alone of the highbrow) and “the lack of attention to the cultural experience [and, one might add, to the counterdiscourses] of the elites”. In light of this, even the study of a perceived privileged group of people – whose biographies show that their backgrounds, or their parents’ backgrounds, are/were not so privileged after all – acquires its meaning and relevance. In Couldry’s (2000, pp. 3, 4) view, more studies are needed not only of “the ‘popular’ … the ‘marginal’, the ‘deviant’”: but also of the better off, if we really want to recognize culture “as a space of multiple voices and forces”, with its plurality of selfreflexive attitudes and its creative forms of resistance to mainstream narratives. More importantly, even though at present their mobility patterns and transcultural attitudes may be seen as a niche phenomenon, through their literary works transcultural writers may also imaginatively affect and at the same time reflect and express the specific sensitivities and collective imaginaries of growing numbers of readers of transcultural fiction. At least if we adhere to Richard Rorty’s (2006, p. 123) view that “a whole lot of people can suddenly undergo a gestalt switch as a result of reading a novel”. In any case, what mostly matters is the need to find new interpretative keys and theoretical frameworks, together with a new terminology, that may prove better suited to the interception and analysis of an emerging transcultural literature. As Sissy Helff (2007, p. 279) remarks, “it seems problematic to approach transcultural texts with a narrative theory that does not consider the extra-textual world and transcultural practices as their main sources of information”. It is thus clear that the term “transcultural” not only describes a type of author and a kind of creative output but also qualifies the mode of inquiry, the set of critical tools and vocabularies that might be adopted to analyze transcultural literary texts and their creators’ ideas within a comparative paradigm. A comparative approach through a transcultural lens – what we might call “transcultural comparativism” – might thus have a role in challenging monologic understandings of culture and cultural dynamics. It would also promote a study of literature truly “without borders”, or better “beyond borders”, using the transcultural as a model to relate to one another works that are no longer identifiable with only one culture or national landscape. In this way, we would

be able to move away more easily from the paradigm of the nation-state with which till not long ago comparative literary studies have mainly been associated and embrace instead the latest theoretical developments in the field of comparative world literature, especially those emerging from the trans-Atlantic regions and, more generally, in the Anglophone world (Connell and Marsh 2011; Damrosch 2006, 2011; D’haen, Damrosch, and Kadir 2012; Gupta 2009; Thomsen 2008).9 These latest developments go beyond promoting a new definition of world literature as a non-Eurocentric, that is finally truly planetary, canon of literary texts coming from different cultural and linguistic traditions able to cross national borders. In fact, they induce us to understand and approach world literature – and this article aims to contribute to this vision – rather as a mode of reading, and not only of writing, that takes into account the complexity of the present cultural and economic globalization.10 By interpolating a “loose” formalist analysis of the texts with a socio-cultural exploration of the writers’ lifeworlds, we might thus intercept emerging patterns, new “literary waves” (Moretti 2000, p. 66) or new “constellations” (Thomsen 2008, p. 141). This sort of “bird’s eye view” or “panoptic” comparative way of reading would allow meaning to occur in a plurality of modes and would allow us, by being in the historical contextual flow of literature, to capture something confluentially new. References Apter, Emily. 2011. “Literary Readings.” In Literature and Globalization: A Reader, edited by Liam Connell and Nicky Marsh, 147-155. New York: Routledge. Arac, Jonathan. 2002, “Anglo-Globalism”, New Left Review, 16: 35-45. Ascari, Maurizio. 2011. Literature of the Global Age: A Critical Study of Transcultural Narratives. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Baranay, Inez. 2004. “Multiculturalism, Globalisation and Worldliness: Origin and Destination of the Text.” JASAL (Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature), 3: 117-132. Baranay, Inez. 2003. Neem Dreams. New Delhi: Rupa Besemeres, Mary and Anna Wierzbicka. 2007. Translating Lives: Living with Two Languages and Cultures. St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press. Borges, Jorge Luis. 1970. The Aleph and Other Stories, 1933-1969. New York: E.P. Dutton.

For an overview of the latest theorizations on World Literature see also Pier Paolo Frassinelli (2013), “World Literature and the Globalectical Imagination”. 10 See Damrosch (2003).

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