Introduction
NOTES Introduction 1. Dante Alighieri, Literature in the Vernacular (De Vulgari Eloquentia), trans. Sally Purcell (Manchester: Carcanet New Press Limited, 1981), 21–22. 2. Ibid., 27. 3. Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (Blackwell, 1995), 34. 4. Ibid., 45–46. 5. Dante Alighieri, Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, ed. and trans. Steven Botterill (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3. 6. Ibid., 3. 7. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), 67. In his discussion, Anderson places great emphasis on “piracy,” which I have found rather problematic. The word “piracy” vividly evokes the speed and pervasiveness of the emergence of the vernacular and the spread of nationalism. But it also has negative connotations of forgery, of knowledge as property. Is Anderson implying that that all the language revolu- tions in other countries are illegitimate copies, while the European one is the only original? One can’t help but think of Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the “original” and the “copies” in his well- known essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Does the construction of the “original” and the “piracy” in Anderson’s paradigm also work to uphold the concept of authenticity, granting some kind of aura to the superior West, which in turn demands some ritualistic respect from the inferior “copies”? 8. In his article “Conjectures on World Literature” (in Debating World Literature, ed. Christopher Prendergast [New York: Verso, 2004], 148–162), Franco Moretti shows the findings of his ambitious research on the rise of the modern novel (roughly from 1750 to 1950) in four continents (Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa), more than twenty independent critical studies, as such: world literature was indeed a system—but a system of variations.
[Show full text]