Suchergebnisse

This is a book review of Claudia Yaghoobi, Temporary Marriage in Iran: Gender and Body Politics in Modern Iranian Film and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, British punk and reggae artists united to fight racism throughout society. Young people embraced the ideology of these musical forms, and many wrote about and published their experiences with racism and the police, and their desire to change society. Children's and young adults' highly politicized writing contrasted with that of adults who wrote about punk and reggae during the 1970s and 1980s. Adult authors divorced the music from its political meaning by focusing solely on punk and reggae style, yet left the threat of police oppression to thoroughly remove any appeal to young readers. The rejection of punk and reggae ideology by mainstream adult authority was so successful that later incarnations of punk and reggae children's books either allied the music with the authorities or turned it into commodified nostalgia.

This article examines the place of world literature today. Starting with the current political context in Britain, the first part outlines a brief history of Weltliteratur via Goethe, Marx and Engels, and contemporary literary critics such as Pascale Casanova and Emily Apter. Using Samuel Beckett's views and letters on nationalism and translation, the second part problematizes the centre and periphery model upon which most of these theories are based. The final part introduces Tagore's contrasting view of visva-sahitya, which, as evidenced through Beckett's position as a writer and translator of impotence, presents an alternative mode of perceiving world literature.