Journal Article

Travel (of) Literature and the Question of Hospitality: Spectrum of World Literature

Ait Kharouach, Mustapha

2025

Overview

Travel literature and travel of literature both resonate with the movements of literatures in different literary spaces, traditions, and geographies, through which works of literature gain and lose in a process of thrivingness and flourishment. Central to these tectonic movements raises the question of hospitality of literatures in new literary spaces and homes by ways of translation, mistranslation, adaptation, acculturation, and finally localization. The debates taking place in the discipline of comparative and world literature over the newly emerged concept “Untranslatability” as a driving force in projecting an alternative “world literature” coincide consistently with the debate of hospitality in languages and literatures. The question of translation comes to fore since “world literature” was viewed as “literature in translation,” which invokes the possibilities and limitations of translating literature into different literary and aesthetic spaces. As such, this research investigates the way literatures move and circulate through different transnational channels, with the Mediterranean space as its focal point, by extending the postulates of world literature through a close reading of Della Descrizione dell’Africa and Leon L’Africain as two samples of Mediterranean literatures that project new spectrums of theorizing world literature.

• Publisher: Common Ground Research Networks
• Subject: Acculturation / Literary translation / Localization / Miscommunication / Questions / Travel literature / World literature