scholarly journals Comparative Literature, Postcolonial Studies, World Literature, and the Revised Rise of the Novel

AmeriQuests ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vilashini Cooppan
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
The Novel

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.

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.

Intersecting Imperialisms

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-457
Author(s):  
Ben Holgate
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
Narrow Road ◽  
National Literatures

Abstract Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013), which features the Thai-Burma “Death Railway” in World War Two, depicts a complex web of imperial regimes that converge and clash in the mid-twentieth century. The protagonist is an Australian soldier effectively fighting for his country’s former colonizer, Britain, which is losing its empire to Japan. I build on Laura Doyle’s concept of “inter-imperiality” to explore how the novel illuminates the historical process of imperial factors intersecting at multiple levels, from the geopolitical and economic to the personal and cultural. The novel demonstrates how inter-imperial identities challenge simple binary models of imperialism, and how so-called national literatures are produced in a world context. This is evident in Flanagan’s intertextual homage to classical Japanese author Matsuo Bashō. The novel also highlights how world literature discourse ought to take into account temporal and ethicopolitical factors (Pheng Cheah), suggesting an overlap with postcolonial studies.

„Das indianische Kanaan“: Weltliteratur, Exil und epischer Fluss in Alfred Döblins Amazonas

2021 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-104
Author(s):  
Daniel Weidner
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
New World ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary System

Abstract The paper reads Alfred Döblin’s novel Amazonas (1937/1938) in the context of current debates about world literature. It argues that these debates not only refer to a certain group of texts or to a literary system, but concern problems of reading and representation, namely how to read literature beyond the paradigms of national and comparative literature and how to represent a world, especially the modern globalized and secularized world. Döblin’s novel refers to different meanings of ‘world’ that are implied in these questions: It depicts the ‘discovery’ and violent colonization of the ‘New World’ both from the perspective of the indigene people and the Europeans, as well as the ‘Jesuit republic’ as a different project of colonization with an utopian aspect. Written in exile, it also uses the detour via an exotic setting to diagnose a crisis of Europe. Finally it tries to develop a narrative form beyond the novel, using different forms of mythic but also topographic narration which are figured as the materiality of the Amazonas-‘stream.’

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.

On translating Emily Brontë’s style in Wuthering Heights into Arabic

Babel ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fatima Muhaidat
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Figurative Language ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Considerable Effort ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Arabic Translation ◽  
Wuthering Heights

Abstract Translating Emily Brontë’s (1818–1848) Wuthering Heights (1847) into Arabic is a complex and multifaceted task. This paper explores the challenges involved in this task by discussing distinctive features of Brontë’s style and their counterparts in Mamdouh Haqqi’s Arabic translation of the novel. Stylistic features under focus include lexis, figurative language, and structure. As for Brontë’s lexis, it intricately knits elements like characters, setting, and themes. To take their readers to the unpredictable world of Wuthering Heights, translators try to find Arabic equivalents suggesting the associations and connotations of the Source Text (ST) style. Among the obstacles translators need to overcome are lexical gaps, as some lexicalized thoughts and experiences in English have no lexicalized equivalents in Arabic. Resorting to paraphrases may result in sacrificing the compactness of the source text (ST) and losing some shades of meaning. Further complications result from dealing with figurative language. Conveying Brontë’s imagery, personifications, and references to abstract notions in terms of material objects requires thoughtful consideration. Furthermore, the structure of Brontë’s language significantly expresses characters’ attitudes and other subtle traits. Less vivacious translations are expected when the function of expressions in the ST eludes translators’ attention. Throughout the discussion, suggestions are made to provide readers of the text in Arabic with better access to the ST. At the same time, the researcher acclaims Haqqi’s translation which reflects a considerable effort to make a landmark of English/world literature accessible to Arab readers.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: EAST AND WEST STUDIES

2021 ◽  
Vol 02 (09) ◽  
pp. 8-14
Author(s):  
Aziza Komilovna Akhmedova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Professional Ethics ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World Science ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Ideal ◽  
The Ideal

The article analyzes the results of the research on the representation of the aesthetic ideal through the image of the ideal hero in two national literatures. For research purposes, attention was paid to highlighting the category of the ideal hero as an expression of the author's aesthetic views. In Sinclair Lewis’s “Arrowsmith” and Pirimkul Kodirov's “The Three Roots”, the protagonists artistically reflect the authors' views on truth, virtue, and beauty. In these novels, professional ethics is described as a high noble value. The scientific novelty of the research work includes the following: in the evolution of western and eastern poetic thought, in the context of the novel genre, the skill, common and distinctive aspects of the creation of an ideal hero were revealed by synthesis of effective methods in world science with literary criteria in the history of eastern and western literary studies, in the example of Sinclair Lewis and Pirimkul Kodirov.

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