Summary
In Anna Bernard’s use, following David Damrosch, texts that travel beyond their culture of origin — the status that makes Palestinian and Israeli writers in English circulation be read as a unitary nation ‘finding its voice’ (Rhetorics of Belonging, PDF p.9, p.13).
Details
- Bernard’s corpus is the subset of Palestinian and Israeli writing Brennan describes as entirely discussed in English while registering as foreign (1997, 314) (PDF p.12-13): reviewed in English-language newspapers, taught in English departments, discussed in English book groups (PDF p.13).
- She reads such texts as ‘worldly’ also in Said’s sense — located in the “social world, human life, and of course the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted” (Said, 1983, 4, quoted PDF p.13), a context including their metropolitan reception (PDF p.13).
- The ‘world novel’ gets its metropolitan cachet from literature’s elite status; reading it is taken to enhance and confirm one’s ‘worldly’ knowledge (PDF p.11).
- Even if the presence of national allegory in ‘world novels’ only demonstrates the impact of Western markets on global literary production (Slaughter, 2007, 37–38), Bernard’s question is how to interpret what writers write under those conditions, given authors’ awareness of the multiple fields of reception their texts will enter (PDF p.33-34).
Related pages
Rhetorics of Belonging, National allegory, National narration