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.

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Daniel Elam
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
British Empire ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Face ◽  
Theories Of Reading

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth recovers an alternative strain of anticolonialism that does not seek national sovereignty, authority, and political recognition, but advocates instead inexpertise, unknowing, unintelligibility, and collective unrecognizability. Early twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was a world they knew they would likely not live to see. Written in exile, in abjection, or in the face of death, anticolonial thought could not afford to base its politics on the hope of eventual success. This book shows how anticolonial thinkers theorized inconsequential practices of egalitarianism in the service of impossibility: a world without colonialism. To trace this impossible political theory, this book foregrounds anticolonial theories of reading and critique in the writing of four thinkers, Lala Har Dayal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh. These activists theorized reading not as a way to cultivate mastery and expertise, but as a way of rather to disavow mastery and expertise altogether. Reading was antiauthoritarian precisely because it urged readers to refuse authorship and, relatedly, authority. To become or remain a reader, and divest oneself of authorial claims, was to challenge the logic of the British Empire and European fascism, which prized self-mastery, authority, and sovereignty. Bringing together the histories of comparative literature and anticolonial thought, Elam demonstrates how these early twentieth-century theories of reading force us to reconsider the commitments of humanistic critique and egalitarian politics.

scholarly journals Perkembangan Sejarah dan Isu-Isu Terkini dalam Sastra Bandingan

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-176
Author(s):  
Dipa Nugraha
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Review Article ◽  
Literature Study ◽  
Study Program ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
New Directions ◽  
Chinese School

This article aims to describe the historical development of comparative literature and its current issues. Comparative literature is a mandatory course in the Indonesian language and literature study program in most Indonesian universities. There are at least six books used as common references in teaching comparative literature in Indonesia. However, these books have not covered recent development in comparative literature, especially the emergence of Chinese school and some new directions within comparative literature. This literature review article collects references from selective authoritative sources on the internet to describe the historical development of comparative literature and its current issues. This article shows that the expansions in comparative literature are intricate with deconstruction and reconstruction of world literature, dialogue and the meeting between West and East, and the presence of the digital age. From the dialogue on world literature and West meeting East vice versa, the Chinese school has its foundation, whilst the presence of the digital age makes comparative literature have new things to explore and work on the usage of the different medium in an umbrella term, intermediality.

Intellectuals

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Allan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Andre Gide ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Literary Writing ◽  
Epistolary Exchange ◽  
André Gide

This chapter examines the provincialism of a literary world in early twentieth-century Egypt and France by focusing on two scenes of epistolary exchange: the letters exchanged between André Gide and Taha Hussein in 1939, and a series of imagined letters exchanged in the context of Hussein's 1935 novella Adīb (A Man of Letters). It first considers the transformation of theological questions into literature in the correspondence between Gide and Hussein before asking about the world that literature makes thinkable. It then analyzes the imaginary correspondence staged in Adīb that recounts the story of a friendship between two intellectuals from the same village. The Gide–Hussein correspondence invites us to contemplate on the circulation and dissemination of literary writing—the sorts of transnational exchanges by now integral to discourses of world literature and access to texts across languages and nationalities.

scholarly journals The origins of marketing practice in Britain: from the ancient to the early twentieth century

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 467-487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Hawkins
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
The State ◽  
Marketing Practice ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the development of marketing practice in Britain from the ancient to the early twentieth century. It builds upon the author’s chapter in the 2016 Routledge Companion to the History of Marketing. Design/methodology/approach This paper is based on a review of secondary history and archaeology literature supplemented by digitised historic newspaper and magazine advertising. The literature is frameworked using a modified version of Fullerton’s 1988 periodization which has been extended to include the medieval and Roman eras. Findings One of the significant findings of this paper is the key role the state has played in the development of marketing practice in Britain, the construction of pavements being a good example. Originality/value Apart from Nevett’s 1982 history of British advertising and the author’s Routledge Companion to the History of Marketing chapter, this is the first survey of the historical development of British marketing practice. It assembles and presents in a useful way important information. This paper will be of interest to marketing historians, especially students and researchers new to the subject.

scholarly journals V.M. SHUKSHIN AND “NEW PEASANT POETS”: SURVIVED CHILDREN OF NOT SURVIVED FATHERS

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-15
Author(s):  
A.A. Shorokhov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The article combines two significant historical and literary phenomena. The first is a group of Russian poets and prose writers of the early twentieth century, known under the general name “new peasant poets”. The second is a group of Russian writers of the late twentieth century, whose work has received a steady definition of “village prose”. V.M. Shukshin’s works are also referred to this cultural phenomenon. The article attempts to get away from simplifying definitions of “urban romance”, “village prose”, and to establish the civilizational continuity of Shukshin’s work with “new peasant poets” of the early twentieth century. The author also tries to consider the phenomenon of the group of “new peasant poets” from the cultural, philosophical and historical-biographical points of view – In the unity of their work, fate and dramatic changes in the history of Russia. The article uses theoretical works on Russian and world literature and history by M.M. Bakhtin, V.V. Kozhinova, I.R. Shafarevich, G.I. Shmeleva, P.F. Alyoshkina, S.Yu. and S.S. Kunyaevs, recent publications on Shukshin’s works by V.I. Belov, A.D. Zabolotsky, and A.N. Varlamov.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Emily Sun
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Comparative Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Republican China ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Disciplinary History ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of

The Introduction situates the book’s approach to comparative literature in relation to recent debates in the field over the status of “world literature.” It historicizes the notion of world literature in terms of the global disciplinary history of literary studies, contextualizing redefinitions of literature and efforts to write literary modernity in terms of connected yet heterogeneous epistemic shifts in eighteenth-century Europe and early twentieth-century China. It introduces the design of the book and offers chapter summaries. And it explains how efforts to write literary modernity in the asynchronous periods of Romantic England and Republican China constitute experiments also with new socio-political forms of life in different cultural contexts.

The Martyr, the Moviegoer: Bhagat Singh at the Cinema

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Daniel Elam
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Circulation Distribution ◽  
Political Form ◽  
The Moviegoer

This article attempts to rethink Indian anticolonial agitator Bhagat Singh within four alternative lineages, rooted in his often undiscussed love of early Hindi and American cinema. To date, Bhagat Singh has often been confined within the rubrics of a properly political form of revolution, whereby revolution is recognizable to the colonial state. To rethink revolution requires scholars to question the repetition of these colonial logics by moving away from the “recognizably political” to other forms of anti-authorial, anticolonial practices. This article focuses on Bhagat Singh’s viewing and response to the 1927 American iteration of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the 1927 Hindi film Wildcat of Bombay. The article considers the ways in which Bhagat Singh moved beyond “properly political” forms of agitation in favor of affective, aesthetic, and experiential models of movie-going in the early twentieth century. By doing so, it reorganizes the categories of “world literature” away from the nation-state in favor of worldwide circulation, distribution, and interpretation.

Modern reinterpretation of Weltliteratur. World Literature in Quest of World(-)System Theories

Tekstualia ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (31) ◽  
pp. 111-128
Author(s):  
Adam Kola
Keyword(s):  
System Theory ◽  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
World Literature ◽  
World System ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
World System Theory

While I. Wallerstein’s world-system theory (W-ST) is frequently referred to in literary studies (see: Moretti; Casanova; and Liu, Robbins & Tanoukhi) and cultural studies (King), A.G. Frank’s notion of world system (without hyphen) is not used in comparative literature. However, the two approaches are not competitive, but rather complementary. The article explores the applications of W(-)ST to comparative literature and studies.

Merely Comparative

PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (3) ◽  
pp. 652-659 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Melas
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Moral Development ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Specific Method ◽  
Analytic Tool ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Temporal Unity

When one has so general and comprehensive an intention one can at first do nothing.—Erich AuerbachComparison was once supremely a matter of method. ernest renan in his pensées de 1848 called comparison “the great instrument of criticism” (296). Echoing the sentiment some two decades later, Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett asserted that “we may call consciously comparative thinking the great glory of our nineteenth century” (76). Comparison had been extensively deployed as an analytic tool before the nineteenth century—to produce, for instance, the massive taxonomies that lay the foundations for natural history and in the gathering of the concordances and chronologies of universal histories. What sharply distinguished the comparative method, what made it in effect a specific method, for nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century scholars, by their own account, was the principle of development. This underlying temporal unity allowed for the most disparate entities to be set into meaningful relation. In words from an 1871 lecture by an early and enthusiastic proponent of comparative literature:[T]he method in which this study can be best pursued is that which is pursued in anatomy, in language, in mythology…, namely, the comparative. The literary productions of all ages and peoples can be classed, can be brought into comparison and contrast, can be taken out of their isolation as belonging to one nation, or one separate era, and be brought under divisions as the embodiment of the same aesthetic principles, the universal laws of mental, social and moral development (Shackford 42)

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