Walter Benjamin’s view that the translator’s task is to "expand and deepen their language by means of the foreign language" has most commonly been understood in semantic terms. However, contemporary translation theorists like Emily Apter have emphasized the importance of preserving the formal and structural features of literatures in translation. This shift in methodology and the current boom in translated fiction have profound implications for World Literature, especially as the influence of non-Anglophone formal aesthetics on contemporary Anglophone literature has grown increasingly apparent. This can be seen in the influence of László Krasznahorkai’s challenging long sentences on novels like Ducks, Newburyport, or the confounding simplicity of Clarice Lispector’s grammar in Sheila Heti's work. There is also a historic precedent in the translation of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, which contributed to a boom in experimental literary forms in English.


This trend reverses models of World Literature that posit the outward influence of “central” works on those at the “periphery,” as seen in the rise of independent presses prioritizing internationalist, experimental works, reflecting a renewed interest in such fiction in a globalized literary space. Despite this shift in the distribution of literary prestige, a significant gap remains in scholarly work examining the effects of translated fiction on Anglophone writing.


This seminar will explore the migration of literary formalism across languages, mediums and geo-political boundaries as a means of addressing the influence of translated literature on Anglophone writing. We invite contributions that engage with these issues, but also encourage responses that expand the focus beyond the Anglophone, whether by engaging with a novel’s source language or challenging the cultural hegemony of Pascale Casanova’s Greenwich-literary-meridian.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• What “needs and projections [of] the translating culture”, as Nicole Ward Jouve has it, do these adopted forms address.


• Whether the metamorphoses of a specific literary form can be understood through its use in disparate socio-political contexts.


• How experimental aesthetics rooted in a particular language’s form can be translated without being anglicized or homogenized.


• How to trace or understand a translated work’s influence given the above.


• Whether specific formal experiments present a greater challenge to the process of translation and appropriation than others.


• The place of multilingual authors, whose additional languages inform their writing.


• The effect on feminism, queerness and gender expression when moving between gendered and non-gendered languages.


• The influence of the publishing industry and internet on international literary space and the popularisation of translated literature.


• The disjunction between globalized literary aesthetics and literary/political nationalism.