Globalit, Inc.; or, The Cultural Logic of Global Literary Studies

PMLA ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 116 (1) ◽  
pp. 158-172
Author(s):  
Ian Baucom
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Study ◽  
Cultural Logic ◽  
Global Literature ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

“Charter'd Companies may indeed be the form the world has now increasingly begun to take,” announces Charles Mason in Thomas Pynchon's 1997 novel Mason and Dixon. Taking that cryptic comment as a starting point and drawing on Giovanni Arrighi's account of the recurrent organization of capital by metropolitan “spaces-of-flows,” this essay investigates what it might mean for Mason's comment to be true of both his late-eighteenth-century moment and the late-twentieth-century moment of the novel's publication and asks what such a reading of the “form [of] the world” implies for contemporary attempts to rethink literary study under the sign of the global. The essay offers “laws” of such a global form (expansion contracts, contraction enriches, enrichment haunts) and deploys them to read the two modes of globalized literary study that have achieved dominance of late: global literary study as method and as project—the key method in question understood here as a type of global historicism and the key project as the appeal to reconfigure literary study as the study of something called global literature.

Globalit, Inc.; or, The Cultural Logic of Global Literary Studies

PMLA ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 116 (1) ◽  
pp. 158-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Baucom
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Study ◽  
Cultural Logic ◽  
Global Literature ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

“Charter'd Companies may indeed be the form the world has now increasingly begun to take,” announces Charles Mason in Thomas Pynchon's 1997 novel Mason and Dixon. Taking that cryptic comment as a starting point and drawing on Giovanni Arrighi's account of the recurrent organization of capital by metropolitan “spaces-of-flows,” this essay investigates what it might mean for Mason's comment to be true of both his late-eighteenth-century moment and the late-twentieth-century moment of the novel's publication and asks what such a reading of the “form [of] the world” implies for contemporary attempts to rethink literary study under the sign of the global. The essay offers “laws” of such a global form (expansion contracts, contraction enriches, enrichment haunts) and deploys them to read the two modes of globalized literary study that have achieved dominance of late: global literary study as method and as project—the key method in question understood here as a type of global historicism and the key project as the appeal to reconfigure literary study as the study of something called global literature.

Closer Still: The Total Artwork

Lyric Cousins ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Sampson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Interior Decoration ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Future ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter considers the Gesamtkunstwerk, which English musicologists translate as ‘total artwork’. Richard Wagner had used the expression to characterise his operas, though he had only ever used the term in two essays, both published in 1849: ‘Art and Revolution’ and ‘The Artwork of the Future’. Moreover, the term did not originate from Wagner himself, and he did not even spell it in the conventional way. Since the late twentieth century ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ has been applied to other artforms, particularly architecture, which like opera can unite a number of elements. (Architecture, for example, marries engineering, landscaping and interior decoration, among others.) But the term's origins are in the late eighteenth-century notion that all the arts could be unified in poetry.

The Woman behind the Man behind the World: Mary Wells and the Feminisation of the Late Eighteenth-Century Newspaper

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Knowles
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Print Media ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Female Poets

The rediscovery of the Della Cruscans, a late-eighteenth century poetic coterie, has helped to revive an interest in papers of “elegance” such as John Bell’s the World, which established a successful template for the late eighteenth-century newspaper, one that was exploited by many of the papers that followed in its wake. In this chapter, Claire Knowles examines the contribution made to this paper not only by women in general, but by one woman in particular, Mary Wells. Wells was a popular actress and the mistress of the paper’s proprietor, Edward Topham. She was implicated in the paper’s establishment and played an important role in its daily running. By examining Wells’ largely unacknowledged role at the World alongside the work of the female poets that the paper encouraged, Knowles suggests that the paper can be seen as an important example of the increasing feminisation of print media in the late-eighteenth century.

Disciplinarity (Embedded and Specialized Systems)

System ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clifford Siskin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Embedded Systems ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Useful Knowledge ◽  
Mary Hays ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
True Knowledge

During the final decades of the eighteenth century, Enlightenment efforts at comprehensive mastery gave way to different uses of system—to delimited and dedicated systems and to the dispersing of systems into other forms, including the specialized essays of the modern disciplines. Their “travel” filled the world in new ways. This transition highlights our differences from Enlightenment. For Smith, who based his master SYSTEMS on “sentiments” as probable behaviors, true knowledge was useful knowledge that worked in the world to change that world. For us knowledge is knowledge because it is true. The end-of-century proliferation of systems and of print made inclusive master SYSTEMS unsustainable. Late eighteenth-century Britain is a laboratory for studying the consequences of this proliferation: instead of becoming parts of master SYSTEMS, systems were inserted into other forms. This shifted the organization of knowledge from every kind being a branch of philosophy, moral or natural, into the specialized and professionalized disciplines of modernity. This “travel” of system into other forms—embedded systems—was exemplified by Mathus’s Population “essay,” and in works, also published in 1798, by William Wordsworth and Mary Hays. Systems embedded in other forms and stretched to accommodate more things meant system proliferated into every aspect of everyday life.

Reading Henry Maundrell’s Sacred Geography in Eighteenth-Century England and Germany

2019 ◽  
pp. 210-226
Author(s):  
Simon Mills
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Sacred Geography ◽  
History Of

This chapter explains the remarkable popularity of Henry Maundrell’s A Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem at Easter AD 1697 (1703). It argues that Maundrell’s eye-witness reportage of his travels in the Holy Land provided the book’s readers with a storehouse of geographical observations and descriptions of eastern customs with which they could recreate imaginatively the world of the Scriptures. Tracing the book’s use by editors, commentators, translators, and paraphrasts, it argues that Maundrell was most often put to work in defence of the Bible against attacks on its claims to truth. Yet in the hands of Maundrell’s late eighteenth-century German translator, the naturalist and historicist tendencies inherent in his account were brought into sharper focus; ‘sacred geography’ was transformed into a history of biblical culture.

The world of the Sylheti seamen in the Age of Empire, from the late eighteenth century to 1947

2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-446 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashfaque Hossain
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Ecological Environment ◽  
Transnational Mobility ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
North Eastern ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Usa

AbstractThis article examines the maritime activities and emigration of Muslim Sylhetis, from what today is north-eastern Bangladesh. Among the Bengali people, Sylhetis were the pioneers in crossing the sea in the Age of Empire. In their voyages, they worked as crewmen on merchant ships, and then began to settle abroad, mainly in Britain and the USA. Some of those who settled in Britain started restaurants and lodging houses. One of the unexplored questions of South Asian historiography is: why was it the Sylhetis who became seamen and emigrants, even though they lived about 300 miles away from the sea? This article traces the socioeconomic, religious, and ecological environment of Sylhetis to understand their transnational mobility, notably within the increasingly interconnected realms of the British empire.

Samar in the Late Eighteenth Century

1980 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-52
Author(s):  
Bruce Cruikshank
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Spanish Colonies ◽  
Jesuit Missionaries ◽  
Parish Churches

In 1767 Charles III issued his famous decree expelling the Jesuits from Spain and the Spanish colonies around the world. The repercussions of this edict were felt even on Samar, a large but relatively unimportant province in the eastern Visayas in the Philippine colony (see Map One) whose missions, later parish churches, had been staffed by Jesuit missionaries from the last few years of the sixteenth century until the order of expulsion arrived on Samar in September 1768. The Jesuits were replaced by Augustinians in the pueblos of Guivan, Balangiga, and Basey; and in the rest of the pueblos by Franciscans (see Map Two).

Writing Ideology: Ranavalona, The Ancestral Bureaucrat

1995 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 73-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald M. Berg
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth

In the late eighteenth century, Imerina was checkered with a myriad of tiny principalities, each ruled from hilltop fortresses. In just fifty years from 1780 to 1830, it was unified under a single ruler, drawing Merina into increasingly wider systems of obedience and creating a vast imperium that held sway over most of the Island of Madagascar, a landmass the size of France, Belgium, and Holland combined.And yet, the half century of tumultuous change that characterized the empire's rise brought no revolution in the Merina's own understanding of the world of power, a view which I have termed hasina ideology. Merina saw historical reality not as the product of human agency, but of ancestral beneficence, hasina, which flowed downwards on obedient Merina from long-dead ancestors in a sacred stream that connected all living Merina. For obedient Merina, politics consisted in nothing more nor less than a lifelong quest to position one's self favorably in that sacred stream as close as possible to ancestors and then to reap the benefits of that cherished association. With the passage of time, the hasina stream flowed into new generations and so generated new social relations expressed in terms of kinship. The vast transformation of the Merina political landscape only enhanced Imerina's devotion to ancestral hasina.The origins of hasina ideology are not known, though by the time Andrianampoinimerina began to unify Imerina in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, its character is clearly perceptible. Andrianampoinimerina's son Radama built on his father's legacy. In the 1820s he transformed Imerina from a small and isolated kingdom into an empire capable of projecting its power over the length and breadth of Madagascar.

scholarly journals VISUALIZING POVERTY IN WORDSWORTH’S POETRY

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 161-178
Author(s):  
Martina Domines Veliki
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Way

VISUALIZING POVERTY IN WORDSWORTH’S POETRY This paper departs from the assumption that Wordsworth’s poetry is highly visual in its quality and it focuses on his three “great period” poems, “Michael”, “The Old Cumberland Beggar” and “Resolution and Independence” (1798–1805) to show how Wordsworth represents poverty. By taking as its starting point some New Historicist readings of these poems (Simpson, Pfau, Connell, Liu) which highlighted Wordsworth’s blindness to social reality of the poor, it wants to enlarge the scope of historicist readings by introducing the framework of the New Poverty Studies (Korte, Christ). Furthermore, it insists on the assumption that the Romantic need to visualize landscape in the picturesque form becomes an important strategy of “configuring” (Korte) the reality of the poor. In other words, the way in which the poor are represented in Wordsworth’s poetry tells us something about practical engagements with poverty in late eighteenth-century England. Also, Wordsworth’s position of a middle-class observer who builds the tension between the seen and the deliberately unseen aspects of his social surrounding, show us how Wordsworth unconsciously falls under the spell of a larger class-related sensibility and thus fails in his humanitarian project.

Bibles, Schools and Citizens

2019 ◽  
pp. 110-152
Author(s):  
Andrés Baeza Ruz
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South America ◽  
Personal Projects ◽  
Global Mission ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Different Parts

Many Britons travelled to Chile because were representing the interests of another group of individuals and not only their own personal projects. This was the case of the British Protestant societies that emerged in Britain since late eighteenth century and were sending agents and missionaries to different parts of the world. These societies aimed to civilise the rest of the world and were therefore embarked on what they saw as a global mission. Some of them, like the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) and the British and Foreign School Society (BFSS), reached South America and Chile when the struggles for the Independence were coming to an end. This chapter analyses the process of interaction and the exchange of ideas and practices between the agents of these societies who travelled to Chile in the 1820s, and the Chileans who were involved in the construction of the new state.

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