World News, World Novel, World Image: On Edouard Levé’s Newspaper (2004, 2015)

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank: Richard Pevear and Jeanne-Marie Jackson for their help with the Russian; those who gave feedback at the 2015 Institute for World Literature and at the 2015 University of Stellenbosch English Department Research Seminar series, especially Kylie Thomas; as well as Neal Allar, Colette Gordon, Mee-Ju Ro and Elizabeth Wijaya, who read the piece in various versions and gave sensitive and valuable input.

Notes

^1. Levé, Newspaper.

^2. Ibid., 30.

^3. Ibid., 74.

^4. Ibid., 77.

^5. Ibid., 121.

^6. Levé, Autoportrait, trans. Lorin Stein, 87.

^7. See Stein and Steyn, “Deconstructing Edouard Levé.”

^8. de Botton, The News, 11.

^9. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 33.

^10. Barnard, “Fictions of the Global,” 207.

^11. Of course the difference between “describing” and “producing” is large, one that I will be addressing later in this article. For now, however, the important thing is that an image of the world qua community be produced, whether that image is affectively and ethically subscribed to or not, i.e., it is less important for this part of my argument whether the imagined global community translates into an effective version of cosmopolitanism than are the literary possibilities and limitations for imagining that community in the first place.

^12. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 26.

^13. Ibid., 25.

^14. Hannerz, Foreign News, 29.

^15. Bassnett and Bielsa, Translation in Global News, 59.

^16. Ibid., 57.

^17. Levé, Newspaper, 7–9.

^18. Hannerz, Foreign News, 20.

^19. A common critique of Fabian is to point out that there is no shared time, even at the moment of fieldwork. Marc Augé, for example, claims, “it is the investigation circumstances themselves that create a temporal hiatus between observer and observed” (47). See Augé, An Anthropology for Contemporaneous Worlds, 45–51.

^20. Fabian, Time and the Other, 31. Fabian’s emphasis.

^21. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment, 26. Povinelli’s emphasis.

^22. Ibid., 49.

^23. Ibid., 50.

^24. Erber, “Contemporaneity and Its Discontents,” 30.

^25. De Botton, The News, 26.

^26. Pettegree, The Invention of the News, 364.

^27. Ibid., 365.

^28. Of course, one of the measures of when a district becomes “not one’s own” is when the local news begins to seem irrelevant.

^29. Orthofer, “Newspaper by Edouard Levé.”

^30. Levé, Newspaper, 18–19.

^31. See “Russian Planes Bomb Chechnya for 2nd Day,” New York Times, September 25, 1999.

^32. Jack, “Grozny airport raid marks shift in Moscow tactics.”

^33. Richard Pevear, personal correspondence.

^34. Kovalev, “Putin’s War.”

^35. John Russell, Chechnya—Russia’s War on Terror, 69–70.

^36. De Botton, The News, 11.

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Jan Steyn

Jan Steyn is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Cornell University. His current project focuses on world literature, translation and the limits to contemporaneity. He is also an active literary translator and critic of contemporary works in Afrikaans, Dutch, English and French.