Literary Marketplace

At first, the Russian Formalists overlapped with Frankfurt School theoreticians, such as Horkheimer and Adorno, in criticizing the mechanization of life, clichéd art being one of its manifestations. Soon, however, the Formalists got interested in mass literature instead of rejecting it point blank. Rather than accuse it of all mortal sins, they recognized the necessary role it played in literary evolution. This made the Opoyaz Formalists (Shklovsky, Tynianov, and Eikhenbaum) one of the first scholars of the literary market, and the fact their theory thereof was not a Marxian one makes it doubly original. Furthermore, the Formalists remained faithful to their principle of studying something not only in abstraction but also in practice, as writers, which is the case with a novel Shklovsky co-authored, the devices of adventure fiction emulated and parodied in it. This shows that Formalists did take an interest in the sociology of literature despite their critics’ mistaken claims otherwise. However, Formalism still tried to approach sociological problems from the standpoint of literary theory proper, without conceding the autonomy of literature as a self-sufficient system. I rely on the Formalists’ texts to show how the idea of literature’s systemic independence can be elaborated and preserved when the largely sociological problem of the literary market is addressed.

This article seeks to define and illustrate the notion of 'constraint' as it applies to literary translation. After a brief discussion of various ways in which the concept of constraint intersects with literary translation, the focus turns to the notion of 'elasticity', which describes tensions exerted upon the translator by factors particular to a given translation project, whether these are stylistic, formal, lexical, or intentional literary constraints. This tension forces the translator to work 'otherwise' and dictates to a certain extent where the translator must situate him or herself along a continuum of 'faithfulness' that ranges from material form to semantic meaning. Four examples are taken from the author's own work as a literary translator, drawing on translations of 'constrained' texts of progressive difficulty by Marcel Schwob, Raymond Queneau, Olivier Salon, and J.-A. Soubira. Finally, this illustration of varying textual elasticity and constraint is examined from a sociological angle, which seeks to explore practical constraints of literary translation in today's American literary marketplace.

This article examines a series of moments of reading and writing in Leonardo Padura’s Havana Quartet detective fiction from the perspective of postcolonial spatial analysis. In contrast to the ways that spaces of crime have been the focus of the spatial examination of crime fiction in work by Hartman, Schmid, and others, and in contrast to the unspecified spaces described by Jenkins as the focus for spatial analysis in the context of a tradition of very mappable geographies in Swedish crime fiction, my work examines a Havana that, while mappable and fundamentally concerned with space, is not always focused on crime or the business of detecting crime. I will explore the spaces of reading in the Havana Quartet books to consider the ways in which reading spaces come to be connected with crime spaces, and what it means when these spaces are brought into contact, engaging with the work of David Harvey, Edward Soja, Henri Lefebvre, and Pierre Bourdieu in the context of postcolonial globalization and its impact on the literary marketplace.
As Kumaraswami and Kapcia note, the use of space as a conceptual tool enables an analysis of Cuban social reality that goes beyond ‘simplistic assumptions about power structures and their ability to determine sociocultural life’ (Kumaraswami and Kapcia, 2012, 51). I intend to show that spatial analysis enables, too, a deeper understanding of the function and significance of moments of reading in Cuban fiction, and by focusing on Padura’s crime fiction, this paper will explore the ways in which the spaces of reading and the spaces of crime come into contact in the Havana Quartet series, to establish the function and meaning of these moments in the context of the changing Cuban literary marketplace. 

Keywords
Leonardo Padura; detective fiction; postcolonial; space; spatial; literary marketplace; reading; literary culture; Cuba; Havana; globalization; Special Period; capitalism

Savremeni komparatisti poput Davida Damroša, Paskal Kazanove i Frenka Moretija razvili su nova shvatanja tradicionalnog pojma svetske književnosti. Svaki od ovih autora posvetio je manju ili veću pažnju njenom odnosu sa tržištem. Polazeći od njihovih stavova, a uz kratak osvrt na koncepciju Dionisa Đurišina, u ovom radu će se eksplicirati na koji način data veza može da se razume. U njemu se identifikuju osnovni problemi koje tržište postavlja pred svetsku književnost, kao i posledice koje za nju tržišna logika može da ima. U prvom koraku izlaže se pregled aktuelnih shvatanja pojma svetske književnosti i njene relacije sa tržištem. Potom se vrši analiza konteksta u kome se razvijaju i međusobno presecaju ideja svetske književnost i kapitalistički modus proizvodnje. U sklopu ovoga pruža se osvrt na uspostavljanje globalne cirkulacije kapitala, koja implicira komodifikaciju teksta i obrazovanje globalne/svetske čitalačke javnosti. Rad zaključuje presekom aktuelnog stanja na književnom tržištu, identifikujući centre cirkulacije kapitala kulturne industrije i njihov zanačaj za uspostavljanje, održavanje i oblikovanje svetske književnosti danas. Sa ove pozicije pruža se i kritička procena prednosti i nedostataka navedenih savremenih teorija svetske književnosti.

Juliane Witzke untersucht am Beispiel von Judith Hermanns Œuvre (1998–2014) die paratextuellen Inszenierungsstrategien der Gegenwart. Ihre Monographie schließt nicht nur eine Forschungslücke im Hinblick auf die wissenschaftliche Auseinandersetzung mit der Autorin, sondern bereichert auch die methodologische Fachdiskussion innerhalb der Literaturwissenschaften; ihr Analyseinstrumentarium ist vielseitig einsetzbar. Eine besondere Stärke der Untersuchung stellt zudem die umfassende Berücksichtigung medialer Veränderungen (z. B. Leser_innen als Kritiker_innen) dar. Die immer wieder angesprochenen Genderaspekte – insbesondere die Interpretation von Hermanns gewandelter Strategie als erfolgreiche Inszenierung von ‚Natürlichkeit‘ – hätten stellenweise einer eingehenderen gendertheoretischen Reflexion bedurft.

The volume Literary Activism, edited by Amit Chaudhuri, assembles the papers presented by academics, novelists, poets, translators, and publishers at the eponymous symposium held in December 2014 in Calcutta. The authors outline three strands that constitute the field of literary activism: The critical observation and evaluation of the global literary market and its market activism, the role of universities and literary studies as well as the role of translators within this global literary market. The book provides a well-informed and critical overview of a relatively new field of research located at the intersections of sociology of literature, history of science, world literature, and translation studies.

and how does this relate to the Cuban literary marketplace? I focus on Leonardo Padura’s Havana-based crime fiction in this essay and analyze recurrent reading spaces and one text read repeatedly across all four novels to answer this question. Private and public acts and spaces of reading dominate Leonardo Padura’s series of crime novels featuring the detective Mario Conde. Known in the UK as the ‘Havana Quartet,’ the four novels translated into English as Havana Red (2005, Máscaras 1997), Havana Black (2006, Paisaje de Otoño 1998), Havana Blue (2006, Pasado Perfecto 2000), and Havana Gold (2008, Vientos de Cuaresma 2001), and the subsequent novel Havana Fever (2009, La neblina del ayer 2005) feature detective Mario Conde, who has personality quirks like many modern literary detectives: he has a propensity to deviate, to delegate meticulous work, to get drunk, reminisce, daydream, and fall in love too easily. Unlike the majority of his Scandinavian, Southern African or British count...

The description of Christine Brooke-Rose’s texts as ‘difficult’ is a pervasive rhetorical commonplace, habitually invoked in interviews, reviews and articles. Brooke-Rose herself contributed to this discourse of difficulty surrounding her work, remaining unapologetic about the demands her writing makes on readers, but also insisting on the pleasure of the text. In this article, I trace the complex relationship between difficulty, pleasure and sales that marks Brooke-Rose’s writing career through her correspondence with publishers and her novel Textermination. Making extensive use of her archive, I investigate the ways in which difficulty is produced in the process of writing, in the text itself, and also the ways in which difficulty is negotiated in the course of publication. My paper argues that Brooke-Rose’s writing troubles any easy opposition between pleasure and difficulty. This pivots on what I call the problematic of recognition central to Brooke-Rose’s work – for the reader, in the text, and of the writer. My enquiry is framed by the question of what it means to write difficult texts as a woman writer in the late twentieth century, and the potential of viewing textual difficulty as a feminist project.

Associamos à obra de Salman Rushdie, comummente descrito como um escritor de três continentes, uma permanente reflexão sobre os desafios identitários colocados pela viagem e a migração. As repercussões de movimentos migratórios e confrontos culturais numa incessante reconfiguração de si mesmo refletem-se exemplarmente nos textos literários e não-ficcionais deste autor, dando daqueles eloquente testemunho. A obra de Rushdie é igualmente modelar pela renegociação subversiva de representações orientalistas, convidando à reconfiguração de modos de análise cultural que tenham em consideração diversas condições da produção e circulação cultural pós-colonial. Neste âmbito, o enfoque do presente ensaio incide na forma como a obra ficcional e não-ficcional de Rushdie reflete sobre a mercantilização da diferença no seio das indústrias culturais, contexto na qual se encontra inevitavelmente envolvida, dada a sua posição privilegiada no mercado literário global.

This essay argues that under contemporary capitalism, all literary production is, at first approximation, commodity production. This has consequences for our understanding of the work of literary studies. We are no longer able to easily recur to preformed theories of the 'literary' as a category at least in some way exempt from extrinsic pressures. Attention to the 'literary market' remains superficial when it insists on paying attention chiefly to so-called literary fiction on the understanding that it has prima facie higher claims to our attention than popular genre fiction-it does not. In fact, as this essay argues, appreciation of the thorough commodification of art under capitalism asks us to take seriously the need to break with our categories; to insist on the primacy of interpretative attention in determining what kinds of fiction we study.

Poverty and inequality have gained a new public presence in the United Kingdom. Literature, and particularly narrative literature, (re-)configures how people think, feel and behave in relation to poverty. This makes the analysis of poverty-themed fiction an important aspect in the new transdisciplinary field of poverty studies.