Rethinking Circulation in World Literature and Cinema

9 Novembro 2022 | 11:00 - 12:30 | Sala B112.B


Over the past two decades, world literature and world cinema have developed separately rather than in conjunction, with little attention paid to each other despite their structurally related objects of study. Literary scholars rarely discuss films apart from occasional direct adaptations, and while world cinema has sometimes looked at the theoretical framing developed in world literature studies, as with the cartographical direction opened by Dudley Andrew’s take on Franco Moretti and David Damrosch’s work, neither discipline has thought more generally beyond its respective medium. Yet writers, painters, musicians, and filmmakers never think in terms of disciplinary boundaries, nor do they develop their art with a tunnel vision. In his essay “In Defense of Mixed Cinema” (1952), André Bazin emphasized the organic connectedness of cinema with other media. If world literature is that which travels in translation as David Damrosch writes, and if translation changes everything as Lawrence Venuti has argued, what happens when the translation involves not two languages, but two or more media? From Norman Manea’s Holocaust memoir The Hooligan’s Return structurally informed by Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Ivan’s Childhood, Marc Chagall’s painting and the prophetic visionary text The Book of Ezekiel to Radu Mihăileanu’s film Va, vis et deviens organically constructed on the filmmaker’s earlier poetry, this talk discusses the complex network of circulation of artistic ideas that defies our disciplinary borders and invites us to rethink our methodological premises.