Surprise Me If You Can

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (5) ◽  
pp. 1423-1434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nirvana Tanoukhi
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Cold Weather ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Lord's Prayer ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
Globalizing World ◽  
David Damrosch ◽  
Foreign Work ◽  
Verse Form

Hey! Whatcha readin' for?—Bill Hicks, comedian, Sane Man (1989)Miller Reads So the Chinese (and Young, Western Computer Gamers) Don't Have ToIn August 2010, I Attended a Lecture that J. Hillis Miller Gave at the Shanghai jiao Tong University on the Challenge of Reading world literature. The lecture argued that in a globalizing world, traveling literature grows distant from its linguistic milieu, local readership, and aesthetic context, making it our challenge to find a reading method that could safeguard these endangered aspects of the text's specificity. To do this, he proposed to imagine himself as a Chinese anthologist who, wishing to include a translation of William Butler Yeats's poem “The Cold Heaven” in a Chinese anthology of world literature, must ask himself, “Just what would I need to tell Chinese readers to make them the best possible readers of this poem?” Miller concluded that, as that anthologist, he would need to give them the facts about Yeats's life and works, an account of the generic rules of the poem's verse form, a note on the broad recurrence of “sudden” and “suddenly” in Yeats's oeuvre, information about “[w]hat sort of bird the rook is and why they are delighted by cold weather,” a clarification of the differing connotations of “heaven” and “skies” for Christian readers familiar with “The Lord's Prayer,” an explanation of what the oxymoron “burning ice” has meant in the Western poetic tradition, a pointer to the allusion in the word “crossed” to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and some sense of the embedded subtext of Yeats's failure to woo Maud Gonne (256). For, according to Miller (citing David Damrosch), when culturally distant readers are not made aware of the “vast substratum beneath” a poem, they are “likely to impose domestic literary values on the foreign work” (254). In short, a respectful reading method must ensure that such readers are guided through the text, in the light of its original context.

Comparing Comparisons: Political Implications of Different Notions of Difference

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-26
Author(s):  
Glenn Odom
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
World Literature ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
David Damrosch ◽  
Location Point

With the rise of the American world literature movement, questions surrounding the politics of comparative practice have become an object of critical attention. Taking China, Japan and the West as examples, the substantially different ideas of what comparison ought to do – as exhibited in comparative literary and cultural studies in each location – point to three distinct notions of the possible interactions between a given nation and the rest of the world. These contrasting ideas can be used to reread political debates over concrete juridical matters, thereby highlighting possible resolutions. This work follows the calls of Ming Xie and David Damrosch for a contextualization of different comparative practices around the globe.

scholarly journals Nectar production of pear (Pyrus communis L.) cultivars

2000 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Benedek ◽  
G. Kocsisné Molnár ◽  
J. Nyéki
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Fruit Trees ◽  
Significant Negative Correlation ◽  
Sugar Concentration ◽  
Cold Weather ◽  
Nectar Production ◽  
Pyrus Communis L ◽  
The World ◽  
Pear Trees ◽  
Very High

Detailed studies were made on the nectar production of 44, 16 and 18 pear cultivars, respectively, in a cultivar collection of pear during three consecutive years with highly different weather in the blooming. Results clearly show that pear does not necessarily produce small amount of nectar as stated in the world literature. In fact, pear can produce extremely high amount of nectar sometimes much higher than other temperate zone fruit trees species but its nectar production is highly subjected to weather, first of all to air temperature. Low nectar production seems to be more frequent than high one and cold weather can prevent its nectar production at all. On the other hand, results corroborate to the earlier statements on the low sugar concentration of pear nectar. There is a highly significant negative correlation between the amount of nectar produced by pear flowers and its sugar concentration (r = -0.52, n = 291, p< 0.001 for 1996, r = -0.34, n = 197, p< 0.001 for 1998). Sugar concentration in individual flowers may be up, to 40% in exceptional cases but generally it is well below 20%. Very high figures for sugar concentration in pear nectar at the literature seem to be incomprehensible. In contrast of some earlier statement in the literature no real difference could be established in the nectar production of pear cultivars, based on much more measurements than in earlier studies. Very low sugar concentration in pear nectar can explain the fact that the overwhelming majority of honeybees are pollen gatherers at pear trees even in the case of exceptionally high nectar production.  

scholarly journals Komparatystyka i (inna) Historia Literatury / Comparative Literature Studies and (an Alternative ) History of Literature

2012 ◽  
Vol 53 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 401-422
Author(s):  
Andrzej Hejmej
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Comparative Studies ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Model ◽  
David Damrosch ◽  
History Of Literature

Summary This article examines the relationship between comparative studies and history of literature. While paying special attention to the present-day condition of these two disciplines, the author surveys various approaches, formulated since the early 19th century, which sought to break with the traditional, national model of the history of literature and the ethnocentric model of traditional comparative studies, driven by an impatience with both nationalism and crypto-nationalism. In this context he focuses on the most recent projects of literary history like ‘comparative history of literature’, ‘international history of literature’, ‘transcultural history of literature’, or ‘world literature’ - all of which are oriented towards the international dimension of literary history. The article explores the possible reasons for the late 20th and early 21st- century revival of Goethe’s idea of Weltliteratur (in the critical thought of Pascal Casanova, David Damrosch, and Franco Moretti) and the recent vogue for ‘alternative’ histories of literature produced under the auspices of comparative cultural studies. At the same time it voices some skepticism about the radical reinvention of comparative studies (along the lines of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Death of a Discipline).

scholarly journals Decentred Geographies: Poetics and Politics of the Avant-garde

2020 ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Zrinka Božić Blanuša
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Primary Interest ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Franco Moretti ◽  
David Damrosch ◽  
Definition Of

Thanks to the work of Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti, David Damrosch and many others, over the past two decades, the concept of world literature has once again become the subject of thorough examination within the field of literary studies, especially in relation to cosmopolitanism and globalization. When it comes to the study of individual national literatures and specific regional contexts, as well as to the definition of comparative literature as a discipline, debates regarding its background, its reach and limitations could not be ignored. World literature thus appears as a heterogenous entity – always manifesting in different contexts in different forms – consistently in dialogical exchange with specificities of a particular literature and culture. Instead of discussing the problematic relation between centre and periphery or criticizing the idea of global literary and cultural canon, the avant-garde as an international and global phenomenon that appears even more radically on the so-called periphery is what is of primary interest to me. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that avant-garde (in its various forms and radical expressions) simultaneously challenges art as an institution and introduces the idea of a decentred geography of world literature.

Contemporary Greek Poetry as World Literature

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 71-78
Author(s):  
Ritwik Ghosh
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Thematic Analysis ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
Greek Poetry ◽  
Vital Part ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Living Tradition ◽  
National Boundaries

In this paper, I argue that Greek poetry is a living tradition characterized by a diversity of voices and styles and that Greek poetry is a vital part of contemporary World Literature. The diversity of voices in contemporary Greek poetry gives it both aesthetic value and political relevance. Greek poetry, as it survives translation into a number of languages, including English, gives us a model for the successful translation of texts in both World literature and Comparative literature. A thematic analysis of some poems is presented in this paper. The aim is not to chronicle the contemporary Greek poetic production but to show how Greek poetic tradition continues to expand beyond national boundaries. 

Animal Studies and the Contemporary Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisha Cohn
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Empirical Observation ◽  
Contemporary Novel ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Globalizing World ◽  
Industrial Modernity ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Interspecies Relations

Animals have prowled literature from its beginnings in the ancient world through medieval bestiaries and out from the margins of the novel in the modern era. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, animals’ literary presence has generated increasing critical interest. Animal studies, a relatively new interdisciplinary field, calls attention to the accelerating exploitation of animals in the period of industrial modernity and questions what it is possible to know about animals’ own experiences. Foundational theoretical approaches to understanding the historical and philosophical condition of thinking about animals—John Berger’s “Why Look at Animals?” (1972), Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974), and Jacques Derrida’s “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” (2002)—propose a fundamental aporia or gap between human and animal experiences, and they caution against the projection of anthropocentric categories onto animal lives. Many novels from this recent period likewise treat animals as charismatic strangers. Yet other contemporary literature sometimes reimagines human-animal relationships to insist on affinity and continuity. In such novels, animals prompt diverse and often experimental stylistic choices that put pressure on the novel’s traditional association with everyday life, the individual self, the boundaries of the nation, and empirical observation more broadly. Still, many recent novels remain essentially committed to a realist tradition. Some of these—most notably by J. M. Coetzee—depict relations of care between humans and often vulnerable or dependent animals that prompt reflection on the meaning of ethical action. In novels that purport to narrate from animals’ own perspective, writers likewise meditate on the ethics of interspecies relations as they use language innovatively in an effort to realistically evoke the sensorium of another species. Pushing the boundaries of realism, other novels reinvent the animal fable, using varying degrees of fantasy to imagine wild or domesticated animals as tropes that reflect upon human embodiment, community, and politics. Whether realist or fabulist, the novels of contemporary postcolonial and world literature particularly explore the power and limits of mapping histories of human belonging and domination onto animal figures, even as they often highlight the limitations of these comparisons. Not all of these approaches are equally invested in creating a literature that could materially impact the lives of animals in an era of diminishing biodiversity. However, uniting this varied and ever-growing array of novels is a question of how literature can represent the lives of intimately entangled bodies in a globalizing world.

The World and the Postcolonial

2014 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-308 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elleke Boehmer
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
Globalizing World ◽  
The World ◽  
Current Term

This article examines the increasing competition in the academic market between conventional terms such aspostcolonialandanglophone literatureand their cognates, and the newly current termworld literature. Even in postcolonial studies circles, world literature is increasingly taken to refer not only to ‘the best ever written’, as before, but to literature produced within and in response to a globalizing world. The paper explores the different valences of this shift, and the tensions and contradictions it has generated within the wider anglophone literary field.

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