scholarly journals Comparative Literary History in Assamese: Some Possibilities

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
Dhurjjati Sarma
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Indian Literature ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
Postgraduate Study ◽  
Indian Context ◽  
History Of ◽  
Comparative Cultural Studies

The essay attempts to explore some possibilities of Comparative Literary History with respect to Assamese literature. Writing a literary history is a complex business, and the tenets underlying its conceptualisation and execution have often been determined by factors other than purely ‘literary’ ones. In the essay, the conceptual dimensions of literary historiography are examined in relation to its recently developed nexus with comparative literature and cultural studies. Within this theoretical framework, the essay briefly touches upon the development of literary historiography within the Indian context in the precolonial, colonial and postcolonial periods, and subsequently moves on to discuss its position vis-a-vis Assamese literature, particularly in the latter’s institutionalisation as a subject for graduate and postgraduate study under Gauhati University, Assam, in the post-Independence period. The essay deals specifically with the efforts of Professor Satyendranath Sarma, prominent academician and literary historian of Assam, towards the academic study of Assamese literary history. It explores the possibilities of comparative literary history in Assamese—one that is not based on a linear narrative of succeeding generations of poets and writers recorded and documented under a progressive model of impact and response, but rather a history of literary reception with many complex and multidimensional narratives often at loggerheads with each other.Key words: Literary Historiography, Comparative Literature, Comparative Cultural Studies, Indian Literature, Assamese Literature, Satyendranath Sarma

scholarly journals Suvremena strujanja u komparatistici

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (1.) ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarina Ivon
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Literary History ◽  
European Studies ◽  
Research Paradigms ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Literature ◽  
Focus Point

This paper is a preview of contemporary trends in comparative literature. The starting point of this research is the fact that change of research paradigms is a key feature of contemporary comparative literature. Change of research paradigms refers to imagery research, a new focus point of comparative literature that deals with images of certain country and its culture in another cultural surrounding, and to the notion of intercultural history of literature, which also includes the concept of interliterary community. The author also presents two new tendencies in contemporary comparative literature: cultural studies and European studies. The paper analyzes the responses of these new trends in Croatian literary history, but it also focuses on their impact on further researches in Croatian literature.

scholarly journals Historia Literatury, Komparatystyka, Przekład / History of Literature, Comparative Studies, Translation

2012 ◽  
Vol 53 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 423-432
Author(s):  
Tomasz Bilczewski
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Comparative Studies ◽  
Frederic Jameson ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
David Damrosch ◽  
History Of Literature ◽  
Comparative Cultural Studies

Summary This article analyzes the problem of constructing historical and literary narratives in the context of latest developments in comparative cultural studies, which have been subjected to the influence of the so-called ‘translation turn’. This perspective requires that one acknowledges the return and reinterpretation of Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur, and the appearance of analyses of the philosophical, ethical, and political dimensions of the category of “comparison” (undertaken especially by anthropologists and scholars of postcolonialism). The revival of interest in the history of literature among comparative literature scholars (e.g., Frederic Jameson, David Damrosch, Walter F. Veit, Frances Ferguson, Jonathan Arac, Hans Ulrich Gumbricht, or Rebecca Walkowitz) is discussed in relation to the publication of Pascale Casanova’s La République mondiale des lettres (Paris, Seuil, 1999), which turned out to be one of the most important and most interesting works devoted to the problem of constructing transnational historical and literary narratives to appear in the last two decades.

scholarly journals Transnational literary history? Dutch-speaking writers in Karel van het Reve’s ‘ventistic’ Geschiedenis van de Russische Literatuur [History of Russian Literature]

Werkwinkel ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 27-48
Author(s):  
Michel De Dobbeleer
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Abstract In his Geschiedenis van de Russische literatuur [History of Russian Literature, 1985] the famous Dutch Slavist and essayist Karel van het Reve, links Russian writers, such as Gavriil Derzhavin and Aleksei Pisemskii to Dutch and Flemish ones, such as Vondel and Willem Elsschot. Further on, in the chapter on Lev Tolstoi, Multatuli’s Max Havelaar is cited, although it is clear from the start that none of these Dutch-speaking authors could have had any influence on the Russian writers to whom Van het Reve devotes his colourful chapters. In this article I explore the ‘transnational’ potential of Van het Reve’s self-willed literary-historiographical approach. It turns out that Van het Reve mentions most of these Dutch-speaking authors rather to indicate - directly or indirectly - that he (dis)likes them, than to contribute to the achievements of comparative literature. Both in his choice of authors and his way of practicing literary historiography Van het Reve manifests himself as a proponent of the vent (cf. the well-known vorm of vent or manner or man discussion). Nevertheless, some of his observations could be considered as transnational constellations (in the world-literature sense of the term).

The Subaltern Critique of Dominant Historiography and a Case for Retrieving a Historiography of Dalit Literary Traditions in India

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-15
Author(s):  
Vandana
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
History Of ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
The Third World

In order to retrieve literary history in India, teleology operates on three levels: ancient, medieval and modern. As per the longue duree approach to the study of history, history is not an event or an object, but like the concept of time, is a configuration and a process. The history of the longue duree gives priority to long-term monumental historic patterns, moments and shifts in society, that is, the slow-paced structural processes which tend to have strong historical consequences. Similarly, languages and literatures, too, marked by historical catastrophes, undergo a process of sedimentation. For this reason, instead of a single literary history of South Asia, Sheldon Pollock proposes the concept of ‘literary cultures’ which allows room for ‘historical individuation’ of each culture rather than homogenising them merely for the sake of historical analysis. The basic questions that I have tried to look into through this study include: Why is it problematic to retrieve literary history in India? Why is it essential to have an alternative literary historiography of Dalit literature? How does Dalit subalternity differ from colonial subalternity? How the Dalit voice is disintegrated from within because of the prevalence of graded inequality? What constitutes the politics of history writing and canon formation in the third world countries like India where retrieving subaltern literary trends remain a problematic discourse?

The Politics and Poetics of Cicero's Brutus

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher S. van den Berg
Keyword(s):  
Roman Republic ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political History ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
History Of

Cicero's Brutus (46 BCE), a tour-de-force of intellectual and political history, was written amidst political crisis: Caesar's defeat of the republican resistance at the battle of Thapsus. This magisterial example of the dialogue genre capaciously documents the intellectual vibrancy of the Roman Republic and its Greco-Roman traditions. This book is the first study of the work from several distinct yet interrelated perspectives: Cicero's account of oratorical history, the confrontation with Caesar, and the exploration of what it means to write a history of an artistic practice. Close readings of this dialogue-including its apparent contradictions and tendentious fabrications-reveal a crucial and crucially productive moment in Greco-Roman thought. Cicero, this book argues, created the first nuanced, sophisticated, and ultimately 'modern' literary history, crafting both a compelling justification of Rome's oratorical traditions and also laying a foundation for literary historiography that abides to this day.

scholarly journals Translocal Anglo-India and the Multilingual Reading Public

PMLA ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 135 (2) ◽  
pp. 272-298
Author(s):  
James Mulholland
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary History ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Indian Literature ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
History Of ◽  
Travel Poetry ◽  
Anglo Indian

This article proposes a new literary history of British Asia that examines its earliest communities and cultural institutions in translocal and regional registers. Combining translocalism and regionalism redefines Anglo‐Indian writing as constituted by multisited forces, only one of which is the reciprocal exchange between Britain and its colonies that has been the prevailing emphasis of literary criticism about empire. I focus on the eighteenth century's overlooked military men and lowlevel colonial administrators who wrote newspaper verse, travel poetry, and plays. I place their compositions in an institutional chronicle defined by the “cultural company‐state,” the British East India Company, which patronized and censored Anglo- India's multilingual reading publics. In the process of arguing for Anglo‐Indian literature as a local and regional creation, I consider the how the terms British and anglophone should function in literary studies of colonialism organized not by hybridity or creolization but by geographic relations of distinction. (JM)

The Geological Unconscious

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Groves
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Literary History ◽  
German Language ◽  
Stable Point ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Current Climate ◽  
Environmental Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Point Of Reference

Already in the nineteenth century, German-language writers were contending with the challenge of imagining and accounting for a planet whose volatility bore little resemblance to the images of the Earth then in circulation. In The Geological Unconcious, Jason Groves traces the withdrawal of the lithosphere as a reliable setting, unobtrusive backdrop, and stable point of reference for literature written well before the current climate breakdown, let alone the technologies that could forecast those changes. Through a series of careful readings of romantic, realist, and modernist works by Tieck, Goethe, Stifter, Benjamin, and Brecht, the author traces out a geological unconscious—in other words, unthought and sometimes actively repressed geological knowledge—where it manifests in European literature and environmental thought. This inhuman horizon of reading and interpretation offers a new literary history of the Anthropocene in a period where this novel geological epoch, though arguably already underway, remains unnamed and otherwise unmarked. These close readings also unearth an entanglement of the human and the lithic in periods well before the geological turn of cotemporary cultural studies. In those depictions of human-mineral encounters on which The Geological Unconcious lingers, the minerality of the human and the minerality of the imagination becomes apparent. While The Geological Unconcious does not explicitly set out to imagine alternatives to fossil capitalism, in elaborating a range of such encounters and in registering libidinal investments in the lithosphere that extend beyond Carboniferous deposits and beyond any carbon imaginary, it points toward alternative relations with, and less destructive mobilizations of, the geologic.

Origins

2020 ◽  
pp. 12-49
Author(s):  
David Damrosch
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Tang Dynasty ◽  
Arab World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Tang Dynasty ◽  
China And Japan ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
Comparative Philology

This chapter explains how the history of comparative literature is a history of archives, such as of libraries and collections that are either preserved or lost and studied or forgotten. It mentions the first library that was established by the Tang Dynasty monk Xuanzang when he returned from his epochal journey to the western regions in order to collect Buddhist manuscripts. It also talks about the foundations of comparative literature that were established by the comparative philology that began in Renaissance Italy and spread to many parts of Enlightenment Europe. The chapter looks at Max Koch who wrote about comparative literary history and how it gained a sure footing with the inclusion of Oriental material. It also analyzes non-Eurocentric comparatism that draws on philological traditions from China and Japan to the Arab world.

Corruption and Redemption: The Legend of Valluvar and Tamil Literary History

2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Blackburn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
History Of Literature

This [the Valluvar legend] is one of the traditions which are so repugnant to inveterate popular prejudice that they appear too strange for fiction, and are probably founded on fact. (Robert Caldwell 1875:132).If we now recognize that literary history is more than a history of literature, it is perhaps less widely accepted that the writing of literary history is an important subject for literary historiography. Yet literary histories are a rich source for understanding local conceptions of both history and literature. More accessible than archaeology, more tangible than ethnology, literary histories are culturally constructed narratives in which the past is reimagined in the light of contemporary concerns. Certainly in nineteenth-century India, the focus of this essay, literary history was seized upon as evidence to be advanced in the major debates of the time; cultural identities, language ideologies, civilization hierarchies and nationalism were all asserted and challenged through literary histories in colonial India. Asserted and challenged by Europeans, as well as Indians.

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