Volume-XII, Issue-V, September 2026 |
The Global Classroom Life of The Great Gatsby: Translation, Paratext, and Canonization in India and Bangladesh Anika Tanzim Rodoshi, Independent Researcher, Dept. of English, University of Chittagong, Chattogram, Bangladesh |
Received: 03.08.2026 | Accepted: 20.09.2026 | Published Online: 30.09.2026 | Page No: 292-299 | ||||
DOI: 10.29032/ijhsss.vol.12.issue.05W.393 | |||||||
ABSTRACT | ||
F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is full of the particular features of 1920s America, such as bootlegging, the worries of people who have recently become rich, and the specific American idea of self-invention, yet it has become a standard part of the secondary and university teaching programmes in places like Delhi and Dhaka, even though none of these features are part of the lived experience of the students. The present paper examines how a book so closely tied to a particular place can be taught in both countries and maintains that the explanation lies not in the content of the novel but in the local processes which grant it legitimacy for use in classrooms. By referring to Damrosch's idea of world literature as circulation and re-reading, Bourdieu's theory of institutionalised cultural capital, and Genette's theory of the paratext, the paper compares Bangladesh and India as two hybrid cases of canonization. In Bangladesh, the reputation of a single translator, Kabir Chowdhury, transfers legitimacy onto the novel even though English remains the language of classroom instruction. In India, English is already the medium of higher education, so translation is not required for the novel's inclusion in the curriculum, even though vernacular translations circulate separately for general readers across several regional languages— a division which in fact sharpens the comparison. In brief, the two cases suggest that the mediation by which a nation grants a novel its canonical status will depend on the position of English in its domestic institutional hierarchy, and this observation has implications for world literature beyond the phenomenon of canon formation. | ||
Keywords: world literature; paratext; translation studies; cultural capital; canon formation |