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? We invite essays that problematize the translation and creative circulation of ideas between literature and film; we are particularly interested in writers with a cinematic imagination and filmmakers who think like poets or musicians, whose work intervenes simultaneously in both practices.
Those of you who are interested in contributing to this issue, please send your proposal including the title and abstract to the guest editors Michael Wood (Princeton, mwood@princeton.edu) and Delia Ungureanu (U of Bucharest & Harvard, deliaungureanu@fas.harvard.edu) by August 1, 2020.