scholarly journals Locating the World in Metaphysical Poetry

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fatima Burney
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
World Literature ◽  
North India ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Metaphysical Poetry ◽  
The World ◽  
Natural Expression

Abstract Discussions on world literature often imagine literary presence, movement, and exchange in terms of location and prioritize those literary traditions that can be easily mapped. In many regards, classical ghazal poetry resists such interpretation. Nonetheless, a number of nineteenth-century writers working in Urdu and English reframed classical ghazal poetry according to notions of locale that were particularly underpinned by ideas of natural essence, or genius. This article puts two such receptions of the classical ghazal in conversation with one another: the naičral shāʿirī (natural poetry) movement in North India, and the portrayal of classical Persian poet Hafiz as a figure of national genius in the scholarship of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Both these examples highlight the role that discourses of nature and natural expression played in nineteenth-century literary criticism, particularly with regard to conceptions of national culture. They also demonstrate how Persianate literary material that had long circulated in cosmopolitan ways could be vernacularized by rereading conventionalized tropes of mystical longing in terms of more worldly belonging.

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.

scholarly journals INTERCONNEC TERCONNECTION OF L TION OF LANGUAGE AND CUL GE AND CULTURE IN THE TURE IN THE WORLD LITERATURE

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-207
Author(s):  
Ikbol Komiljonovna Kozieva ◽  
◽  
Dilnora Zokirdjanovna Chorakulova
Keyword(s):  
National Culture ◽  
Infinite Number ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
World Literature ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
National Spirit ◽  
Spiritual Energy

Background. The language, reflecting the originality of the people, the national spirit, the national vision of the world, the national culture, represents the united spiritual energy of the people, which is imprinted in certain sounds. The "national spirit" is the driving force behind the development of the language. "Language is a constantly renewed work of the spirit to make the articulated sound suitable for the expression of thought." The concept of "internal form" is considered in connection with the concept of "national spirit". The most important attribute of language, Humboldt singles out the "linguistic internal form", which means the totality of the laws of language reproduction, the laws according to which the spirit acts. Methods. Language is recognized as a mediator between reality and consciousness, since the world as an “inexhaustible 'continuum of diversity'”, offering us an infinite number of classifications of these varieties, does not impose any of them. Reality and its proposed classifications are reflected not directly in the language, but in consciousness, which fixes this reflection in conventional signs. Results.

scholarly journals The Gay Novel and the Gay World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guy Davidson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Culture Theory ◽  
Global Capital ◽  
Gay Community ◽  
Peculiar Form ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cost

In a recent review essay, J. Daniel Elam charts the emergence of “gay world literary fiction,” a subgenre of the category “world literature,” which over the last twenty years or so has become both a marketing strategy for publishers and a “disciplinary rallying point of literary criticism and the academic humanities.”[i] While Elam’s essay is implicitly underpinned by the usual disciplinary understanding of world literature (fiction from potentially anywhere in the globe, translated into English, and studied comparatively), its focus is narrowed to the “gay world” within the planetary world—a putatively homogenous, transnational gay subculture enabled by digital connectivity and the flows of global capital. This new gay world is, according to Elam, characterized by atomization: “From Sofia to Shanghai, authors of gay fiction describe a collection of scattered and isolated individuals, needy but incurious.” The situation has emerged from the “curious paradox” that “visibility and acceptance” have “made life better” for many gay men “at the cost of community and identity.” “Gay visibility, with its attendant politics of respectability” has occurred at the expense of older subcultural institutions like “the gay bar, the bathhouse, the piano bar, and cruising areas,” rendering the gay community “a banally knowable object rather than the product of a passionately forged experience of self-making. In place of the urgent longings of 20th-century queer literature, one encounters a peculiar form of worldly, muted yearning. So-called gay world literature emerges from a global community that isn’t a community at all.”   [i] J. Daniel Elam, “The World of Gay Lit,” Public Books (16 October 2017). Web. Accessed 1 March, 2018. “Disciplinary rallying point”: Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013), 1. For a discussion of the interrelations between “world literature” as the marketization of cultural differences and as a field of scholarly enquiry, see Simon During, Exit Capitalism: Literary Culture, Theory and Post-Secular Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2009), 57–58.

The Challenges of Writing a National Literary History in the Era of Transnationalism: Insights from a Peripheral Literary Space

Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 14-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Snejana Ung
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Asymmetry ◽  
Romanian Literature ◽  
Literary System

It goes without saying that during the nineteenth and twentieth century literary historiography tries to define national identities. However, a methodological and paradigm shift occur at the beginning of the twenty-first century when, under the auspices of globalization and the emergence of world literature and transnational literary studies, literary historiography is re-thought as a collective and transnational project. Yet, the asymmetry of the world literary system affects literary historiography too. When it comes to this scholarly genre, the asymmetry is most visible in the fact that in the era of transnationalism, national histories are still written at the periphery. Given the aforementioned observation, this paper a) looks into the challenges of writing literary history in Romania in the age of world literature and transnational studies, and b) tries to explain why a national literary history is still needed and how it can change the way we think about Romanian literature. The starting point of this inquiry is represented by the publication of Mihai Iovănel’s Istoria literaturii române contemporane: 1990-2020 [History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020]. In the context of the ‘transnational turn’ in literary studies, the attempt to write relevant national histories in a peripheral literary space such as Romania is faced, in my view, with two major challenges: 1) the fact that transnationalism manifests itself differently at the periphery and 2) the tradition of Romanian literary criticism and history. The former refers to the fact that unlike central literatures, where transnationalism is shaped to a large extent by migrant writers (those who enter these literatures), in Romanian literature it comprises exiled or migrant writers (those who left Romania and not vice versa) and, to a lesser extent, the literatures written by ethnic minorities. A comparative approach can cast light on this difference. For example, while the thirteenth volume of The Oxford English Literary History is dedicated entirely to migrant and bicultural writers, transnational histories concerning the peripheries, such as History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, focus on multiple literary spaces and therefore have a different approach to dealing with transnationalism. The latter challenge is represented, as shown by Iovănel, by the long-lasting tradition of the “principle of aesthetic autonomism”, which persists even in post-communist Romania. In this regard, this paper aims to show that Iovănel’s History… overcomes the above-mentioned hindrances of literary criticism and succeeds in offering an image of Romanian literature not as confined to its national boundaries but as part of the world literary system. Along with other significant scholarly works on Romanian literature as and in world literature, this project is a significant step towards re-thinking Romanian literature as a “literature of the world” (Terian 2015).

Occasions and Nations in Brahms's Fest- und Gedenkspruche

2006 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Minor
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Continuity ◽  
The World ◽  
German Nation ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Fathers And Sons

Brahms's Fest- und Gedenkspruche have long been discussed and sometimes dismissed as an occasional work. But although many scholars have debunked this designation, pointing out that Brahms wrote the motets with no particular occasion in mind, a more salient description of the composition deserves further investigation: the motets are a work for occasions, rather than an occasional work. This article looks at the repercussions of this distinction by focusing on the motets' orientation around the world of plurals (in Benedict Anderson's words) that was both presupposed and fostered by a national culture of festivity in late-nineteenth-century Germany. For one, the title of Brahms's motets--Spruche--references the contemporary collections of sayings that sought to capture and disseminate the multiplicity of the Volk in the new German Kaiserreich. This emphasis on national identity as a localized, participatory act was well suited to the flurry of commemorative festivities taking place throughout the newly unified Germany; it also finds musical expression in the motets. In particular, Brahms makes programmatic use of the double chorus to illustrate processes of unification, narration, and historical continuity, all of which were crucial strategies in the attempt to buttress Germany's new political identity with mnemonic supports. And by setting biblical texts that promote a contractual memory between fathers and sons, Brahms depicts a community in which collective participation in remembering the national past serves as an optimistic bulwark against the centrifugal antagonisms that would soon beset the young German nation.

scholarly journals O krok do Nobla i krok po nim – recepcja twórczości Olgi Tokarczuk na Ukrainie

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-162
Author(s):  
Olesia Nachlik
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
The World

The paper distinguishes and analyses the interpretative dominants in the Ukrainian reception of Olga Tokarczuk’s work over the last twenty years or so. This reception comprises numerous interviews, public conversations, translations and their presentations, literary criticism and literary studies dissertations, revealing the specificity of the point of view Poland’s neighbouring culture has on works which are now part of the world literature canon.

scholarly journals DISCOURSES THAT MATTER: WOLE SOYINKA’S THEATRE AS A FORM OF REPRESENTING AND READING THE WORLD

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (14) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosa Branca Figueiredo
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Wole Soyinka ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Religious Extremism ◽  
The World ◽  
Professional Critics

Abstract: Wole Soyinka is a most significant figure in contemporary world literature. From the perspectives of the politics of postcolonial writings, perhaps the ultimate challenge of the complexity of Soyinka’s works and career lies in the fact that the metanarratives that imaginatively and discursively underwrote the great liberation movements of the twentieth century do not feature in his works in their conventional and familiar configurations. Overarching all the struggles waged by these movements is the struggle for self-representation as the existential and expressive roots of human freedom.The best examples of this structure in Soyinka’s theatre are A Dance of the Forests, Kongi’s Harvest, Madmen and Specialists and From Zia With Love. Soyinka’s critical essays also operate in a great variety of social and intellectual contexts and cover an extraordinary range of topics, including literary criticism and aesthetic theory, theatre and cultural history, political power and ideology, and, more recently religious extremism and nuclear pollution. One “form of attention” which has been influential in the reception of Soyinka’s works is that of professional critics, especially with regard to the institutionalisation of the academic study of Anglophone writings of the developing world in the second half of the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Archetypical Image of the Old Man in Buryat Literature of the 20th Century

2020 ◽  
pp. 1995-2011
Author(s):  
Imikhelova Imikhelova ◽  
Eugeny D. Mongush
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Traditional Culture ◽  
National Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
Man And Nature ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
Deep Layers ◽  
Acute Crisis

The article reviews the archetypical nature of the image of the Old Man in Buryat literature, which originates from the character of Buryat-Mongol myths, the White Elder (Sagaan Ubgen). The article aims to reveal the typological properties of the archetype of the Old Man in a key genre for national literature, a novel, involving also dramatic and lyrical epic works. This goal necessitates involving a comparative typological analysis, as well as mythopoetic and comparative-genetic methods used in the study of traditional culture. Their use in literary criticism is important and relevant since the authors try to explain the strengthening of the universal interpretation of man in the art of the 20th century, and the desire of writers to outline ways out of the acute crisis relations between man and the world, man and nature. Earlier in the texts of national culture the socially determined explanation of these relations was sought; but at the present time another interpretation is getting up to date, precisely an interpretation based on the writers’ appeal to the deep layers of mythological thinking, their reliance on universally existent, ontological causes of the crisis phenomena. The analysis of the “sacred / profane” dichotomy which is peculiar to mythological thinking showed that this hero of Buryat literature is committed to search for ancestral memory as for truth; he considers serving his kinship the essence of human existence. The presence of an axiological aspect leads to the universal ontological values inherent in the archetype of the Old Man. The leading method of analysis was comparative-typological, aimed at establishing typological patterns in the field of representation of archetypes in the literature and ensuring specificity in the results obtained. The usage of this method made it possible to distinguish such typological features and properties of the Old Man’s archetype as ambivalence, poetry and ontology of binary oppositions, craving for a miraculous outcome. It is concluded that these archetypal properties impart the analyzed images the symbolic meaning of eternal rebirth, the cyclicity of life and its harmonious order

scholarly journals Võrdleva kirjandusteaduse ja maailmakirjanduse sümbiootilise koosolu väljavaatest / Towards a Symbiotic Coexistence of Comparative Literature and World Literature

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (17/18) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jüri Talvet
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
World View ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Literary Creation ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Broad Field ◽  
The World

Teesid: Artiklis on sedastatud, et võrdleval kirjandusteadusel ei ole kunagi tegelikult olnud avaral kirjandusväljal otsustavat ega keskset staatust, ent samal ajal pole ka kirjandustraditsioonide põhjalik eraldi uurimine suutnud täita arvukaid tühikuid kirjandusloome kui laiema kultuurinähtuse mõistmisel, ehkki see mõjutab (sageli nähtamatult) tervete ühiskondade maailmavaadet ja väärtushinnanguid. Arendades edasi mõtteid, mis on esitatud raamatus „Sümbiootiline kultuur“ ning artiklis „Edaphos and Episteme of Comparative Literature“, aga ka Juri Lotmani ideid, on soovitatud kasutada sümbiootilist lähenemist kirjandusele, mis püüaks lepitada äärmuslikke vastandeid ning algatada dialoogi, tugevdades seega võrdleva kirjandusteaduse positsiooni ning ühtlasi maailma kirjanduste uurimise valdkonda. In his article Jüri Talvet postulates that comparative literature has never really enjoyed a pivotal or central status in the broad field of literary studies, yet at the same time specialized studies of separate literary traditions have not been able to fill numerous gaps in the understanding of literary creation as a broader cultural phenomenon influencing (although often invisibly) the world view and axiological attitudes of entire societies and vast communities of people. Developing some ideas presented in his book A Call for Cultural Symbiosis (2005) and in his article “Edaphos and Episteme in Comparative Literature”, (Intelitteraria 2005), as well as the ideas of Juri M. Lotman, Talvet proposes a symbiotic approach aimed at reconciling extreme oppositions and establishing a dialogue that would strengthen the position of the discipline of comparative literature, as well as the field of world literatures.  

scholarly journals Comparative Literature, World Literature and Ethical Literary Criticism. Literature’s “Infra-Other”

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-18
Author(s):  
Jüri Talvet
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
World Literature ◽  
International Association ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Literary Research ◽  
Research And Teaching ◽  
The World ◽  
Sociological Approaches

Relying on some of the ideas of Yuri M. Lotman on “semiosphere”, the dynamics and dialogue between “centres” and “peripheries”, as well as on my own ideas on cultural symbiosis expounded in my essay books A Call for Cultural Symbiosis. Meditations from U (Toronto, 2005) and Kümme kirja Montaigne’ile. “Ise ja “teine” (Ten Letters to Montaigne. ‘Self ” and ‘Other’, in Estonian: Tartu, 2014; in English, 2018) and inspired by the recent foundation in China of the International Association for Ethical Literary Criticism, I will try to meditate on the interrelation of Comparative Literature, World Literature and Ethical Literary Criticism both in theory and in the practice of teaching and researching literature at universities and high schools. The main purpose is to look at the ways how a “self”-centred practice of literary research and teaching (formalistic as well as sociological approaches, restricting World Literature to the Western mainstream, or just dealing with one’s own national literature, avoiding its comparative contextualization) could be gradually replaced by a symbioticdialogical treatment of literature, capable of providing our activity with a firm and solid ethical dimension, something that would definitely strengthen the position of humanities in the world academia.

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