Untranslatability

Shaden Tageldin

Impasse and imposture—if not sheer impossibility—haunt the dream of translatability. If translatability has underpinned “efforts to revive World Literature” within and against the discipline of comparative literature over the last decade (3), as Emily Apter has argued in Against World Literature (2013), surely its obverse—untranslatability—is a ghostwritten word of that decade and a watchword of the next.

Ideas of the Decade

March 3, 2014

The End of Languages?

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

I think the emphasis on languages is getting less and less important as the corporatized university goes toward globalized uniformity. The coming together of comparative literary studies and the social science methodologies that we had hoped for a decade ago seems to have dissipated into various fundable directions, courting international civil society directions rather than research methods. Language learning has also become instrumental to human rights work. In this way, the focused discipline of comparative literature has undergone transformations that may not be always to the good.

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