scholarly journals Terrestrial Realism and the Gravity of World Literature: Joe Sacco’s Seismic Lines

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-322
Author(s):  
Dominic Davies
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Gravitational Force ◽  
Uneven Development ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Theoretical Discussion ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Seismic Lines

Through a close reading of Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land (2020), a graphic novel about the struggle of the Dene people in Canada’s Northwestern territories, this article shows how Sacco effects a “peripheral realism” that draws the systemic continuities of different phases of colonial modernity into view. The article then describes Sacco’s “terrestrial realism,” which combines his peripheral realism with the dialectical participation of the reader as well. Finally, in a concluding theoretical discussion, I consider how the practice of drawing allows us to think through a response to modernity’s combined and uneven development that is both materialist and decolonial at the same time. Although the former typically insists on singularity and totality, and the latter promotes a contradictory plurality, the peripheral and terrestrial realisms of Paying the Land suggest a way for theorists of world literature to find a point of methodological solidarity that is both in and against capitalist modernity’s gravitational force.

World Literature as a Speculative Literary Totality: Veselovsky, Auerbach, Said, and the Critical-Humanist Tradition

2021 ◽  
Vol 82 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-251
Author(s):  
Ben Etherington
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Distant Reading ◽  
Literary Practice ◽  
The Face ◽  
Humanist Tradition ◽  
Literary Experience

Abstract This essay revisits critical-humanist approaches to literary totality that have largely been sidelined during the recent revival of world literature studies. While there has been no shortage of defenses of close reading in the face of distant reading and other positivist approaches, this essay argues that it is precisely the hermeneutic attention to particular works that has allowed critical humanists to think about literary practice within the most encompassing purview. For those in this tradition, “world literature” can never be a stable object but is a speculative totality. The essay discusses three exemplary critical concepts that assume a speculative epistemology of literary totality: Alexander Veselovsky’s “historical poetics,” Erich Auerbach’s “Ansatzpunkt,” and Edward Said’s “contrapuntal reading.” Each, it is argued, is grounded in the distinctive qualities of literary experience, a claim for which Theodor Adorno’s account of speculative thinking serves as a basis.

Seeing Race in Comics

Neo-Passing ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Glaser
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Police Shootings ◽  
History Of ◽  
Shed Light

This chapter discusses the power of the medium of comics to shed light on discussions of race, racism, and the act of passing. Glaser moves from a close reading of Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s recent neo-passing narrative, the graphic novel Incognegro (2008), to a wider look at the history of visual media in representing racial violence during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This chapter makes the argument that comics provide an arena for thinking both about how we see and interpret race and how visual depictions of racial violence—from photographs of lynchings to recordings of police shootings of unarmed African American men—force us to grapple with complex ethical questions.

scholarly journals Soviet Colonial Modernity and the Everyday in Twenty-First Century Latvian Literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 408-422
Author(s):  
Benedikts Kalnačs
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
First Century ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Socialist Realist ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Baltic

This paper intends to discuss the case of Latvia in comparison with other European postcolonial situations and to trace the problems which determine the complexity of self-consciousness of the inhabitants of the country from postcolonial and post-Soviet perspective. The focus of this investigation is on the series of novels which deal with twentieth-century history and memory in Latvia. Due to the fact that the chosen texts attempt an evaluation of the Soviet past, an attention is paid to those aspects of representation of the everyday which considerably distinguish contemporary fiction from literary works created during the period of socialist realist dominance. The importance of history and of different everyday practices in forming specific features of national identity is also seen in the context of the attempts of contemporary authors to discover and define themselves as part of today’s global community as they try to position themselves within world literature. In this perspective, the contemporary as well as the historical experience of the Baltic nations testifies to the common roots of European society helping to build bridges between different ethnic and social groups and their members.

Yoko Tawada’s Kafka Kaikoku

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 454-474
Author(s):  
Arina Rotaru
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Franz Kafka ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Temporal Dimension ◽  
Literary Theories ◽  
East And West

Despite the vast body of scholarship on Yoko Tawada, an author who writes in both German and Japanese, her work has not been examined in light of the question of modernity. Through a close reading of her play Kafka Kaikoku and an examination of recent world literary theories, this paper situates Tawada’s work in relation to a complicated nexus that features as protagonists two contemporaneous authors, Franz Kafka and Izumi Kyōka, engaging with their migrations between pre-modern and modern pasts. How does this complicated temporal dimension re-imagine putative divisions between East and West in relation to modernity and modernities, and how does that affect our understanding of world literature? My paper proposes the notion of “interlaced modernities” to address these questions and reflects on its implications for world literature.

‘Composition of place’, experiential set, and the meditative poem

2001 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reuven Tsur ◽  
Motti Benari
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Theoretical Discussion ◽  
Mental Set ◽  
Orientation Process ◽  
Over Time

Meditative poetry has the ability to reproduce aspects of the meditative experience. In this paper we explore this ability, trying to clarify the phenomenon by pointing out the cognitive processes involved. We focus on Christian Jesuit meditation and pinpoint one of its most effective elements: “the composition of place”. We argue that three main abilities associated with “the composition of place” are responsible for the meditative quality detected in poetic meditative texts: The text’s ability to evoke an orientation process; the text’s ability to support diffuse perception and encourage divergent ways of processing; the text’s ability to generate the mental set required for this experience, the absence of purpose, and to supply the conditions that enable such a mental set to exist over time. We illustrate our theoretical discussion through a close reading of two meditative poetic masterpieces: Donne’s Holy Sonnet No. 7, and the Spanish anonymous sonnet “A Cristo Crucificado”.

scholarly journals Geography of Societal Transformation: General Questions of Study

Geografie ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 101 (2) ◽  
pp. 82-91
Author(s):  
Martin Hampl
Keyword(s):  
Czech Republic ◽  
Uneven Development ◽  
Theoretical Discussion ◽  
Societal Transformation ◽  
The Czech Republic ◽  
Empirical Generalization

The paper is devoted both to empirical generalization of contemporary transformation in the Czech Republic and to the theoretical discussion of selective problems of geographical cognition. Stress is put upon the question of geographical regularities, relation between social and geographical structures and the problem of uneven development.

scholarly journals “The point is to change it”: The Imperative for Activist Literary Studies

2020 ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Christian Smith
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

The task undertaken in this paper is to discover a means by which the practice of literary criticism can derive an imperative for activism that confronts and changes the social conditions it critiques. The case of Karl Marx’s use of world literature in his critique of capitalism and the state, set within the history of the development of continental philosophy, is explored through a close-reading of its interterxtuality. Particular attention is paid to Marx’s use of quotations from and allusions to world literature, including Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe and Heine, to register the harmful inversions caused by an economy based on money and commodities. If literature registers the contradictions of its time in its form and content, then the urge to resolve those contradictions sits restless in literature. When Marx inserts literature into his theoretical texts, he transfers into his text the impulse of the contradiction to resolve itself. Similarly, literary criticism is well-placed to unfold clear, obvious and necessary logic which leads to activism.

South-South Exchanges

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Thayse Leal Lima
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Book Publishing ◽  
Global South ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Transnational Literature ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
Latin American Countries

Abstract This article addresses circulation and exchange in the Global South by examining the case of Biblioteca Ayacucho (1973), a transnational collection of over 500 books from several Latin American countries. Conceived as an “instrument for Latin American integration,” Ayachucho sought to connect the region by assembling and disseminating its diverse cultural and intellectual traditions. I discuss Ayacucho’s strategies of transnationalization which, in addition to book publishing, also relied on networks of intellectual collaboration and exchange. Focusing on its Brazilian titles, I argue that Ayacucho articulates a model of world literature that employs a contextually grounded yet transnationally based framework. By engaging Latin American specialists and relying on local scholarship, Ayacucho offers an inclusive model of world literature that allies both distant and close reading in the construction of a transnational literature. As such, it defies established assumptions about literary circulation and center-based conceptions of world literature.

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