Literature has always been nurtured by travelling texts,people and media—travelers along the Silk Road, European troubadours,oral storytellers and singers, translations and today through the proliferation of modern m...Literature has always been nurtured by travelling texts,people and media—travelers along the Silk Road, European troubadours,oral storytellers and singers, translations and today through the proliferation of modern media.For centuries,colonization and slavery,trade and business,teaching and research have instigated migratory movements that changed the direction of literature.Cultural encounters fostering exchange of values, themes,forms and languages have been and still are the driver of this process,making such encounters more salient for literature than the local confinement of national literatures which,after all,has only been a predominant practice during the last few centuries.This dynamics of exchange has been most challenging and productive,when they have also been most complex and marred by conflicts,as has been the case between cultures defined not only by different languages but also by different cosmologies and anthropologies.In this article I discuss literary and cultural encounters on the basis of the Indian-Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore’s novel The Home and the World(1916),in which the encounter happened between Western,mainly European,and Eastern,in this case Indian,and world views clashed to the detriment not only of the life of characters but also of their entire social environment.Beyond its social themes the novel offers through its narrative structure a view of the full complexity of encounters with a resonance in today’s globalized world.展开更多
文摘Literature has always been nurtured by travelling texts,people and media—travelers along the Silk Road, European troubadours,oral storytellers and singers, translations and today through the proliferation of modern media.For centuries,colonization and slavery,trade and business,teaching and research have instigated migratory movements that changed the direction of literature.Cultural encounters fostering exchange of values, themes,forms and languages have been and still are the driver of this process,making such encounters more salient for literature than the local confinement of national literatures which,after all,has only been a predominant practice during the last few centuries.This dynamics of exchange has been most challenging and productive,when they have also been most complex and marred by conflicts,as has been the case between cultures defined not only by different languages but also by different cosmologies and anthropologies.In this article I discuss literary and cultural encounters on the basis of the Indian-Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore’s novel The Home and the World(1916),in which the encounter happened between Western,mainly European,and Eastern,in this case Indian,and world views clashed to the detriment not only of the life of characters but also of their entire social environment.Beyond its social themes the novel offers through its narrative structure a view of the full complexity of encounters with a resonance in today’s globalized world.
