SCALE IN THE BALANCE: READING WITH THE INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR ARABIC FICTION (“THE ARABIC BOOKER”)

2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne-Marie E. McManus
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
Theoretical Methods ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Institutional Settings ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Arabic Fiction

AbstractThis article brings area studies approaches to Arabic novels into dialogue with world literature through a critical engagement with the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), commonly known as “the Arabic Booker.” This prize launches Arabic novels out of national fields and into a world marketplace whose reading practices have been shaped by the Anglophone postcolonial novel, canonized by the IPAF's mentor: the Booker Prize Foundation. Against this institutional backdrop, the article develops a scale-based method to revisit the intersection of postcolonial tropes and national epistemologies in two winning IPAF novels: Bahaʾ Taher'sWahat al-Ghurub(Sunset Oasis, 2007) and Saud Alsanousi'sSaq al-Bambu(The Bamboo Stalk, 2013). By interrogating the literary and political work performed by comparative scale in these novels, the article argues that dominant applications of theoretical methods inherited from postcolonial studies fail to supply trenchant forms of critique for Arabic novels entering world literature. Bridging the methods and perspectives of area studies with those of comparative literature, this article develops new reading practices that are inflected through contemporary institutional settings for literature's circulation, translation, and canonization.

scholarly journals EDITORIAL FOREWORD

2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-215
Author(s):  
Akram Khater ◽  
Jeffrey Culang
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Global Marketplace ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
Arabic Fiction ◽  
National Domain ◽  
Editorial Foreword

This issue is focused on reframing analytical categories in ways different from how scholars have used them, and mechanisms of power in juxtaposition to how states intended them. We open with two articles on “Reading in Translation.” Anne-Marie E. McManus's “Scale in the Balance: Reading with the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (‘The Arabic Booker’)” focuses on the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, or IPAF. Founded in 2007 with funding from Dubai and based on the more well-known Man Booker Prize, the IPAF is awarded to one Arabic novel each year. The prize supports that novel's translation into English and catapults it from the national domain into a global marketplace of readers whose reading practices, McManus suggests, have already been shaped by the postcolonial Anglophone novel. Arguing that methods inherited from postcolonial studies are inadequate for addressing these modes of reading and interpretation (i.e., the national and the global), McManus develops a comparative “scale-based method” combining insights from postcolonial and world literary theory and from area studies, which she brings to bear on two IPAF-winning Egyptian novels: Bahaʾ Taher's Wahat al-Ghurub (Sunset Oasis) and Saud Alsanousi’s Saq al-Bambu (The Bamboo Stalk). In her analysis of these literary works, McManus shows us why “a stark either/or between national and world literary frames . . . cannot apprehend the ways in which a movement between them is institutionalized in bodies such as the IPAF, nor can it grapple with the implications for reading.” “Reading with the IPAF,” she suggests, requires instead “a resituation of national frames, institutionally and hermeneutically, within the nodal relation the IPAF represents.”

Net Work: Area Studies, Comparison, and Connectivity

PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (3) ◽  
pp. 615-621 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vilashini Cooppan
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Open Market ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
Work Area ◽  
Disciplinary Field ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
Temporal Measures ◽  
Globalization Theory

Area studies and world literature share a spirit of comparison, despite their distinct historical formations in cold war tactics of knowledge for power and the flurry of globalization theory that accompanied the neoliberal 1990s vision of open market as world stage, and notwithstanding recent critical narratives that cleave area studies' particularized zones of specialized, philologically deep knowledge from world literature's globe-spanning yet difference-erasing ambition. That spirit will not speak in these brief remarks, nor can I promise a report, readable or otherwise, to one disciplinary field (the comparative) from any other field (e.g., area studies). Area studies was always comparative. It emerged alongside a host of comparative methodologies whose slicing spatial divisions (continents, spheres of influences, West/East) and stealth temporal ladders (civilization, modernity, development) later comparatists of the literary-critical persuasion may question but whose gestures we are perhaps condemned to repeat in cutting the globe to new spatio-temporal measures. The task is not to redress historical error in the name of comparison (as if the verbal sense of discipline was intended and comparative literature could complete area studies) but rather to re-cognize comparison, which we are always learning how to do, through the remembrance of area studies' ambitions and omissions.

scholarly journals Comparative Literature: Recent Debates on an Imagined Discipline

MANUSYA ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 88-108
Author(s):  
Suradech Chotiudompant
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
High Time ◽  
Imagined Community ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Comparative literature is always a problematic discipline. Scholars from different countries and times such as René Wellek, Charles Bernheimer, Susan Bassnett, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Djelal Kadir, have attempted to delimit its scope. The variety of definitions have led to ensuing problems of shifting methodologies and frameworks. If, in the early twentieth century, a scholar tended to interrogate and theorise how one distinguished comparative literature, world literature, and general literature from one another, towards the end of that century and potentially continuing well into the new millennium, the parameters surrounding disciplinary formation have significantly changed, leading to a shift in the set of questions. Should comparative literature be differentiated from the relatively recent disciplines of postcolonial studies and cultural studies? If so, what are its scope and defining qualities? These puzzling parameters are what this essay aims to explore, as it is high time we looked inward, thinking of the discipline itself as an imagined community whose terrain is constantly shifting. Following this line of argument, the essay intends to probe into the construction of the discipline and gauge its historical development.

On the sources of cosmopolitanism as an idea: The Russian and the European views

2020 ◽  
pp. 44-69
Author(s):  
E. E. Dmitrieva
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
General Term ◽  
Literary Process ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Literary Environment

The article is concerned with the difference in understanding of the term ‘cosmopolitan’ inRussiaandFrance. Often considered a predominantly negative phenomenon inRussia, cosmopolitanism fi st provoked a discussion at the time when the emphasis shifted from ideology to understanding of the historical-literary process. Since the late 18th c., the idea of the possible existence of a literary work within the global literary environment (the concept of world literature)   was adjusted by the ‘golden chain’ metaphor, which enabled implementation of the ‘universality’ concept as a unity principally separate from the French idée universelle. During this evolutionary period emerged a distinctive subject of literary history: fi st, ‘humanity’ as a general term (initially identifi    with universalism or cosmopolitanism), and then ‘a nation’. But it is the discovery of the national that the author believes is connected with particularism and provincialism,   the latter summoning the memory of the noble intention of universalism and cosmopolitanism. An interim summary of the process was produced by Joseph Texte, a professor of comparative literature inLyon, at the end of the 19th c.

The world in Auerbach’s mouth: Weltliteratur after philhellenism

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-452
Author(s):  
Mathura Umachandran
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Human Activity ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Complex Structures ◽  
Intercultural Understanding ◽  
The World

Abstract We live in an age of globalized and globalizing phenomena: the contemporary agenda of academic inquiry takes in ‘networks’, ‘connectivity’, and other modes of articulating complex structures of human activity. In Comparative Literature and beyond, the idea of world literature has borne the weight of idealist intercultural understanding, the hopes of translation studies, and the anxieties around the failure of communication. Erich Auerbach offers a touchstone in the conceptual genealogy of world literature (Weltliteratur). This article illuminates how Auerbach’s Weltliteratur is predicated on a polemic with German philhellenism, tracked through Auerbach’s declaration that his idea is ‘ungoethisch’. Auerbach’s revisions to Weltliteratur constituted a strategy to render it a historicist concept. Since Auerbach’s notion of historicism was itself derived from nineteenth-century German humanism, this essay argues that Auerbach was attempting to go with Goethe beyond Goethe. Finally, this essay assesses how successful Auerbach’s decoupling of Weltliteratur from universalism, under the sign of Goethe and the Greeks. I suggest that Weltliteratur is still a pertinent concept today because of Auerbach’s intervention to install historicist and dialectical resources therein.

Against Global Literary Studies

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Edmond
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand ◽  
Institutional Frameworks ◽  
The World

Abstract Literary studies has taken a global turn through such institutional frameworks as global romanticism, global modernism, global anglophone, global postcolonial, global settler studies, world literature, and comparative literature. Though promising an escape from parochialism, nationalism, and Eurocentrism, this turn often looks suspiciously like another version of Anglo-European imperialism. This essay argues that, rather than continue the expansionary line of recent decades, global literary studies must allow other perspectives to draw into question its concepts, practices, and theories, including those associated with the terms literature, discipline, and comparison. As a settler colonial (Pākehā) scholar in Aotearoa New Zealand, I attend particularly to Māori literary scholars from Apirana Ngata, Te Kapunga Matemoana (Koro) Dewes, and Hirini Melbourne to Alice Te Punga Somerville, Tina Makereti, and Arini Loader. Their work highlights the limitedness of global literary studies in its current disciplinary guise. Disciplines remain important when they bring recognition to something previously marginalized, as in the battle to have Māori literature recognized within Pākehā institutions. What institutionalized modes of global literary studies need, however, is not discipline but indiscipline: a recognition of the limits of dominant disciplinary objects, frameworks, and practices, and an openness to other ways of seeing the world.

Stranger Fictions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca C. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Global Circulation ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Arabic

Zaynab, first published in 1913, is widely cited as the first Arabic novel, yet the previous eight decades saw hundreds of novels translated into Arabic from English and French. This vast literary corpus influenced generations of Arab writers but has, until now, been considered a curious footnote in the genre's history. Incorporating these works into the history of the Arabic novel, this book offers a transformative new account of modern Arabic literature, world literature, and the novel. This book rewrites the history of the global circulation of the novel by moving Arabic literature from the margins of comparative literature to its center. Considering the wide range of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century translation practices, the book argues that Arabic translators did far more than copy European works; they authored new versions of them, producing sophisticated theorizations of the genre. These translations and the reading practices they precipitated form the conceptual and practical foundations of Arab literary modernity, necessitating an overhaul of our notions of translation, cultural exchange, and the global. The book shows how translators theorized the Arab world not as Europe's periphery but as an alternative center in a globalized network. It affirms the central place of (mis)translation in both the history of the novel in Arabic and the novel as a transnational form itself.

Comparative Literature and Hegel's Historical Thinking

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (2) ◽  
pp. 439-448 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Park
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Theoretical Methods ◽  
The Real ◽  
Widespread Adoption ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
The Cost

Haun saussy opens his influential discussion of past and present conceptions of comparative literature, “exquisite cadavers Stitched from Fresh Nightmares,” by linking them in an apparently historic claim to victory: “Comparative literature has, in a sense, won its battles” (3). The ambiguous nature of that claim, and the real subject of Saussy's ensuing discussion, is indicated, however, by the qualifying phrase “in a sense.” In another sense, Saussy implies, the achievements of comparative literature remain open to debate. For, despite the widespread adoption by national-literature departments of comparative literature's theoretical methods of inquiry, comparative approaches to literature continue to be considered inessential or secondary to the defining aim of national-literature departments—investigating and describing the reality of historically grounded national traditions and identities. Saussy's “sense” of victory is thus snatched from the jaws of an unapologetic sense of defeat:What needs propagating is the comparative reflex, the comparative way of thinking, not the departmental name; and if those are to spread at the cost of identity and institutional reward, so much the worse for identity.—It so happens that identity is the pivot of our triumph—and our wraithlikeness. (5)

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