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.

Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett, World Literature, and the Colonial Comparisons

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 330-349
Author(s):  
Blaž Zabel
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
British Empire ◽  
World Literature ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
Imperial Politics

Abstract This article discusses the work of the early Irish comparatists Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett, who in 1886 published the first monograph in English in comparative literature. By bringing into discussion Posnett’s lesser-known journalistic publications on politics, the essay argues that his comparative project was importantly determined by the contemporary challenges of British imperial politics and by his own position in the British Empire. The article investigates several aspects of Posnett’s work in the context of British colonialism: his understanding of literature and literary criticism, his perception of the English and French systems of national literature, and his understanding of world literature and classical literature. Recognising the imperial and colonial context of Comparative Literature additionally highlights the development of literary comparisons, which have marked subsequent discussions in the discipline.

scholarly journals CZECH-SLOVAK COMPARATIVE STUDIES “REBORN”. A NEW ASSOCIATION ON THE WAY

Porównania ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 339-348
Author(s):  
Miloš Zelenka
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Comparative Research ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Literary Research ◽  
The World ◽  
New Association ◽  
The One ◽  
Interdisciplinary Study ◽  
Globalized World

The paper conveys information on the current state of Czech and Slovak comparatist thought as regards its methods, thematical orientation and institutional base. Czech and Slovak comparative research has always been a complementary whole embracing, on the one hand, the tradition of Slavonic studies grounded in structural aesthetics (S. Wollman) and, on the other, the endeavour to develop the theory of interliterarines and interdisciplinary study of the world literature (D. Ďurišin). Much to our regret, the disruption of this “symbiosis” at the turn of 1990s resulted in losing contacts with the rest of the world. Therefore the prime objective of the newly established Czech-Slovak Association of Comparative Literature, based in the Institute for World Literature SAV, Bratislava, is to encourage Czech and Slovak literary research. The constitutive members of this association already in 2013 participated in the 20th World Congress of Comparative Literature in Paris (AILC/ICLA) so as to present the English version of their World Literature Studies journal under the title Comparative Literary Studies as Cultural Criticism. The first joint conference of Czech and Slovak comparatists (Slavica Litteraria 18, 2015, No. 1) was held in Bratislava in February 2015. For our next event, the 21st AILC Congress in Paris 2016, Czech and Slovak scholars, together with their foreign colleagues, have prepared a joint panel presentation Old and New Concepts of Comparative Literature in the Globalized World. Convinced that theoretical and methodological discourse is carried on in various languages and power stands, present-day Czech and Slovak comparative research, while following the pillar traditions of the past, espouses modern inspirations that obviously relinquish historical poetics and the theory of interliterariness, bound for exploring new cultural identities, post-colonial and area studies.

Indonesian Literature’s Position in World Literature

TEKNOSASTIK ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Dina Amelia
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
The Other ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Western World ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
The Voice

There are two most inevitable issues on national literature, in this case Indonesian literature. First is the translation and the second is the standard of world literature. Can one speak for the other as a representative? Why is this representation matter? Does translation embody the voice of the represented? Without translation Indonesian literature cannot gain its recognition in world literature, yet, translation conveys the voice of other. In the case of production, publication, or distribution of Indonesian Literature to the world, translation works can be very beneficial. The position of Indonesian literature is as a part of world literature. The concept that the Western world should be the one who represent the subaltern can be overcome as long as the subaltern performs as the active speaker. If the subaltern remains silent then it means it allows the “representation” by the Western.

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.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne Lipson Freed
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
The World ◽  
Historical Specificity

The Conclusion explores how the logic of haunting might recast the stakes, if not the substance, of the World Literature/Comparative Literature debate. Briefly tracing some of the most influential arguments in favor of sameness—in the form of translation, literary circulation and critical expansiveness—and difference—in the form of singularity, historical specificity and untranslatability—the conclusion suggests that these two opposing positions are both valid and fundamentally irreconcilable. Recognizing that encounters with works of fiction, like encounters with ghosts, are only temporary allows for this kind of instability; ultimately, it is not the text, but the reader who is responsible for acting ethically toward others in the non-fictional world.

scholarly journals Maamesilasena maailmas ehk lihtsalt Jüri Talveti meetodist / On Jüri Talvet’s Comparative Method

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (17/18) ◽  
Author(s):  
Arne Merilai
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Bumble Bee ◽  
Leaves Of Grass ◽  
The World ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
English Speaking World

Teesid: Artikkel defineerib maailmakirjanduse professor Jüri Talveti komparativistlikku meetodit nii maamesilase metafoori kui ka tema poolt tutvustatud mõistete edaphos (’pind’) ja episteme (’teadmine’) kaudu. Võrdleva kirjandusteadlase ülesanne on kahesuunaline: tutvustada eesti kirjandust maailmas ja vahendada mujal loodut meie kultuurile. Kuigi õpetlaste teoreetiline metasüsteem ja mõistevõrk – episteme – võib areneda väga keeruliseks, peab see alati juurduma edaphos’es kui toitvas pinnases, mille loovad sõnakunstiteosed ja rahvuslikud kirjanduslood. Avardades võrdlevat edaphos’t, aktiveerime ja rikastame ka maailma episteme’t. The article aims at defining the comparative method of Jüri Talvet, professor of comparative literature. This can be carried out by an application of Talvet’s own metaphor for himself – a bumble bee, or via two concepts elaborated by him – edaphos (base) and episteme (knowledge). The bumble bee, by nature more reclusive and peaceful but somehow more attractive looks than a regular bee flies out from its modest sod nest across blooming meadows, disseminating homely pollen among the leaves of grass of the wide world. Then it faithfully returns with nourishing nectar that feeds its family. As chairman of the Estonian Comparative Literature Association, and founder and editor-in-chief of the comparative literature journal Interlitteraria, Talvet has written: “Its purpose is to channel new literary-philosophical ideas from the international area to Estonia and, at the same time, to spread knowledge about Estonian literary and philosophical studies outside Estonia, as well as to let the wider world have some idea of Estonian literature itself which, because of the language barrier, has belonged traditionally to the majority of “silent” literatures of the world, unjustly ignored by the area of the dominant Western languages.” Yet, no matter how complex our theoretical meta-systems and conceptual framework – episteme – might develop, it always needs to be firmly based on edaphos as its foundation, that is, on works of literature and national literary histories. By extending the comparative edaphos, we also enrich the world’s episteme. It is therefore not surprising that, as a scholar with extensive knowledge of world literature, Talvet has great affinity for tellurism, an aesthetic concept used in Hispanic cultures that is largely unknown to the English-speaking world. 

scholarly journals A Comparative Study in the (myth of Pygmalion) between Bernard Shaw and Sadeq Hedayat

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Latin Literature ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Many ◽  
Bernard Shaw ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
European Renaissance

In our time, not too long ago, the universities of the world have been fast to take care of the study of an innovative type of technical and human studies, called the science of "comparative literature". Comparative research studies have grown and flourished rapidly in response to the demands of both mental and artistic life. This shows the increasing awareness at both the modern national and the international levels in order to develop through connecting with the international intellectual, nental and artistic currents to nurture ethics and originality. Comparative studies show that the beginning of the comparative literature goes back to the time when the Latin literature was connected to the Greek literature and the comparative literature was shaped in the era of European Renaissance. Today, it is one of the most authentic sciences in universities, with complex branches, due to its being an inevitable result of increasing human awareness and the result of the great demand by the conscious public to benefit from the many human and cognitive aspects provided by the comparative literature through its connection with the heritage of the world literature and unity of the human spirit in its past and present. One of the most important factors of the prosperity of any civilization is the degree of contact with and benefit from other civilizations. Long time ago, different cultures were used to enrich each other, and the relationship between cultures took many forms such as imitation, translation, influencing others, as well as the exchange of information between cultures, in addition to intellectual and cultural invasion and domination. It is impossible to imagine that a particular culture evolved without any contact with other cultures. Instead, any isolated culture certainly suffered from deterioration.

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.

scholarly journals Against haute littérature? André Gide's Contribution to the World Literature Debate

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-411
Author(s):  
Richard Hibbitt
Keyword(s):  
French Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Andre Gide ◽  
The World ◽  
Contemporary Writers ◽  
Literary Innovation ◽  
André Gide ◽  
Nouvelle Revue Francaise

In 1909 André Gide published three short articles in the journal La Nouvelle Revue française, subsequently grouped under the title ‘Nationalisme et littérature’ (Nationalism and literature). They were written as his response to a survey by the young French journalist Henri Clouard, ‘Enquête sur la littérature nationale’ (Survey on National Literature), in which contemporary writers and critics answered questions regarding possible definitions of French literature. Gide questions the value of the term ‘national literature’ and objects to the view that haute littérature (good literature) is synonymous with neo-Classical values, arguing instead for a conception of literature that embraces curiosity and innovation. For Gide the term haute littérature is problematic because it implies a hierarchical, regimented and limited view of both literature and culture tout court. The first part of this article argues that Gide's critique of both national literature and haute littérature can be read as a preference for a literariness that is liberated from the constraints of balance and imitation. The second part reads Gide's agronomic metaphor for literary innovation through the lens of Alexander Beecroft's theory of overlapping literary ecologies. Beecroft's model of different ecologies of world literature helps us to locate what I propose to be Gide's own contribution to the world literature debate: an emphasis on literariness that transcends the national-literature ecology and reclaims the notion of haute littérature for a different aesthetic.

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