Translation studies accents in the university teaching of foreign literature

Abstract

A compulsory course of the history of foreign literature is a significant component of the university training in Philology. However, the current practice of the indirect familiarization of students with recommended literary texts often creates a kind of a communicative paradox. Students do not always realize that they read not foreign authors themselves, but a translator’s interpretation of their work. Such a confusion is unacceptable in the training of philologists. The aim of this work is to propose educational and didactic recommendations for academically and methodically correct elimination of this paradox. According to the author of the article, a reader of the a and literary course of foreign literature needs to lay special emphasis on translational aspects in the educational materials. The most significant theoretical categories necessary to solve this problem are the categories of both world and translated literature. Therefore, the author of the article gives a summary of modern scholarly ideas of these categories. The world literature is now understood as a historically developing systemic unity of interconnected and mutually correlated literary phenomena that reveal the main laws of the world literary process. This definition forms the idea of translated literature as a special literary phenomenon that correlates with the original and receiving literature and differs from them at the same time. Thanks to translated literature, translated texts go beyond the boundaries of their national context, thus expanding the scope of their socio-cultural existence. It is these translational positions that determine the fundamental novelty of the specific methodological recommendations set forth in the article.