Transcontextual Gestures: A Lyric Approach to the World of Literature

Giusti, Francesco

Book Section

Francesco Giusti

Transcontextual Gestures

A Lyric Approach to the World of Literature

In: The Work of World Literature, ed. by Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Lewis Robinson, Cultural Inquiry, 19 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021), pp. 75–103

Open Access

What if one thinks not in terms of shared meanings or contents, but rather in terms of iterable gestures available for re-enactment in different times and places in order to conceive of a cross-cultural world of literature? This essay sets out to explore, within the discursive mode of the lyric, whether the notion of gesture could be more helpful than meaning-based translation to account for the transferability of literary texts and for envisioning a form of community based on the shareability of certain gestures. To do so, it will look at how the act-event of reading described by Derek Attridge is processed in two cases in which poems are transferred from an earlier authoritative tradition into a new one.

Part of The Work of World Literature Containing:
The Work of World Literature / Francesco Giusti, Benjamin Lewis Robinson
Untranslatability and the Challenge of World Literature / Derek Attridge
World Literature and the Problem of Postcolonialism / Lorna Burns
Transcontextual Gestures
The World after Fiction / Benjamin Lewis Robinson
Extracting Indigeneity / Rashmi Varma
Being Taught Something World-Sized / Dirk Wiemann
Working Conditions / Jarad Zimbler
Afterword / Emily Apter

Title	Transcontextual Gestures
Subtitle	A Lyric Approach to the World of Literature
Author(s)	Francesco Giusti
Identifier	https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-19_04
DOI Target	https://press.ici-berlin.org/doi/10.37050/ci-19/giusti_transcontextual-gestures.html
HTML Page	https://press.ici-berlin.org/doi/10.37050/ci-19/giusti_transcontextual-gestures.html
Description	What if one thinks not in terms of shared meanings or contents, but rather in terms of iterable gestures available for re-enactment in different times and places in order to conceive of a cross-cultural world of literature? This essay sets out to explore, within the discursive mode of the lyric, whether the notion of gesture could be more helpful than meaning-based translation to account for the transferability of literary texts and for envisioning a form of community based on the shareability of certain gestures. To do so, it will look at how the act-event of reading described by Derek Attridge is processed in two cases in which poems are transferred from an earlier authoritative tradition into a new one.
Is Part Of	The Work of World Literature
Place	Berlin
Publisher	ICI Berlin Press
Date	2021
Subject	gesture lyric transferability world literature community transcontextual translation re-enactment
Rights	© by the author(s) This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Harvested	yes
Language	en-GB
short title	Transcontextual Gestures
page start	75
page end	103
Source	The Work of World Literature, ed. by Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Lewis Robinson, Cultural Inquiry, 19 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021), pp. 75–103
Bibliographic Citation	Francesco Giusti, ‘Transcontextual Gestures: A Lyric Approach to the World of Literature’, in The Work of World Literature, ed. by Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Lewis Robinson, Cultural Inquiry, 19 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021), pp. 75–103 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-19_04>
Format	application/pdf application/pdf application/pdf