세계를 읽는 방식: 세계문학론과 번역이론의 접점 읽어내기

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to conceive world literature using translation theory to understand the world and literature in a broader context in the age of globalization. Translation is key concept to figure out the nature and the form of world literature that we need to re-imagine our world outside of the dominant narrative of universality which the West has produced and spread all over the world. Translation opens up a possibility where another type of world, another type of modernity, and another type of other－in other words, a perspective which could be critical and independent of Eurocentrism－can be articulated, with its constant mobility, disconnectivity, and negativity. The unique mechanism of translation in both linguistic and epistemological terms makes the easy assimilation of the idea of world into the Eurocentric universality quite hard. Translation inscribes mobility and relationality on the idea of world literature, making it tentative, insecure, incommensurable. It presents the world as hopelessly fragmented, disconnected, and doomed to fail, not only to reveal the failure of the entire system of signification of Eurocentric nationalism and universalism, but also to anticipate a birth of new terrain of world literature.