Comparative Literature and Postcolonial Studies Revisited. Reflections in Light of Recent Transitions in the Fields of Postcolonial Studies

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monika Albrecht
Author(s):  
Renisa Mawani

The emergence of postcolonial studies as a distinct field of inquiry has commonly been attributed to the work of Edward W. Said, particularly his groundbreaking book, Orientalism. Since the early 1980s, Said’s insights have had a significant influence in the humanities, reshaping the fields of comparative literature, English, history, and anthropology. However, his arguments and interventions have held comparably less force in law and legal studies. Forty years after the publication of Orientalism, this chapter reconsiders to what extent Said’s work—and postcolonial studies more generally—has influenced themes, debates, and directions in law and legal studies. To do so, this chapter borrows Said’s three-part edifice—“The Scope of Orientalism”; “Orientalist Structures and Restructures”; and “Orientalism Now”—as a mode of organizing and as a method of reading the scholarship that falls under the sign of postcolonial legal studies and as a way to consider directions for further study.


Author(s):  
Erin Graff Zivin ◽  
Peggy Kamuf ◽  
Geoffrey Bennington

The impact of Derrida’s work in the U.S. and continental Europe—principally in the disciplines of philosophy, English, French, Comparative Literature, gender and queer studies and postcolonial studies—has been studied at length, but the significance of his writing for Hispanism has been, until now, overlooked. And yet Derrida developes a terminology and addresses sets of problems in ways that have a direct and distinctive effect on philosophers and literary critics in Spain and Latin America, where his work circulates widely in excellent translation. Problems and themes that resonate distinctively in one way in the European or North American context echo quite differently in Latin America and in Spain: the trace; nationalism and cosmopolitanism; spectrality and hauntology; the relation of subjectivity and truth; the university; disciplinarity; and institutionality. Remarkably, the influence is in a profound sense reciprocal: over the course of his career, Derrida takes up and makes central to his thought the theme of marranismo, the phenomenon of Sephardic crypto-Judaism. Derrida’s marranismo is a means of taking apart traditional accounts of identity; a way for Derrida to reflect on the status of the secret; a philosophical nexus where language, nationalism and truth-telling meet and clash in productive ways; a way of elaborating a critique of modern biopolitics. It is far from being simply and only a marker of his work’s Hispanic identity, but it is also, and irreducibly, that.


1997 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Burt Foster

MANUSYA ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 88-108
Author(s):  
Suradech Chotiudompant

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.


2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne-Marie E. McManus

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.


2021 ◽  
pp. 161-196
Author(s):  
Shubhangi Shrinivas Rao ◽  

This chapter is based on the Multimodal theory of translation. Although the practice of translation is long-established, the study developed into an academic discipline much later as of the second half of the twentieth century. Before that translation had normally been the element of language learning which was dominated by the Grammar translation method centered on the role study of the grammatical rules and structures of foreign language. The Romantic approach of originality of work has always denied the study of translation as a discipline. The original character of the text has tampered with when it is translated. The idea of Mimesis given by Plato and Aristotle stating all arts as imitative clearly would deny the systematic study of translation. Translation was considered a part of comparative literature but it gained recognition as a separate discipline of study only after the mid-twentieth century along with the emergence of various other disciplines like cultural studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies etc. Since translation studies emerged as an academic discipline, there have been questions about the equivalence of translation from one language to another. But there are also instances in which translation according to the culture is said to be an art in itself. Looking from another perspective, translation from one text to another is entirely dependent on the semantic side of the text which is why a broader study of translation studies can be done in the form of Multi-modality of translation or Inter-medial translation. This inter-medial translation may include the source text in any art form such as films, adaptation, music, dance, sculptures, dubbing, subtitles, paintings and many more. This chapter would focus briefly on translation studies as a discipline in itself, the issues of equivalence and untranslatability and challenge these issues in the form of studying and analyzing various modes in translation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (43) ◽  
pp. 94-117
Author(s):  
Haidar Khezri

Abstract This essay studies the history, current, and future status of the discipline of comparative literature in Iran. It compares the theoretical norms of contemporary comparative literature to the Pre-modern Perso-Islamic notion of “comparison,” which has been theorized in Iran and the Arab World as the Arabic, Islamic, and Iranian schools of comparative literature. The article highlights profound institutional and canonical Perso-Shi’a centrism in Iranian academia, and shows how the discipline of comparative literature has been used as a vehicle for transnationalism of this Perso-Shi’a centrism that has manifested in “Persianate World” in the context of European and North American academia. Marshall Hodgson’s 1960s neologism “Persianate World” has been placed with the paradigm shifts ushered in by the linguistic and cultural turns of the 1970s, the postcolonial scholarship that grew from Edward Said’s Orientalism in the late 1990s, and Sheldon Pollock’s formulation of a ‘Sanskrit cosmopolis’ in the 21st century. The article explains how the Persianate comparatists, under the banner of postcolonial studies, not only erased the experience of the subaltern and internally colonialized non-Persians of Iran in favor of the Middle Eastern states in a binary matrix (Western Imperialism versus a “colonialized” Islamic world), but also represents an unrealistic and exaggerated picture of the discipline to Western readers. The article further maps the conversations within the postcolonial Middle East about “internal colonialism,” as an analytic tool for thinking about operations and interlocking systems of power in the Middle East and abroad, here applied to the discipline of comparative literature for the first time.


Author(s):  
David Damrosch

This chapter explores the major role of emigrants in the history of comparative literature. It pays special attention to the role played by midcentury émigrés from Europe, such as Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, René Wellek, and Paul de Man. It also looks into Lilian R. Furst, whose family fled Vienna in 1938 and who published a memoir with the title “Home Is Somewhere Else.” The chapter recounts the immigration story of Hu Shih and at Lin Yutang that provides an additional dimension of comparative study throughout the century. It also analyzes Hu Shih and at Lin Yutang's popular writings and academic scholarship that had a lasting influence on comparative literature and developed many of the terms explored in East/West and postcolonial studies.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 342-353
Author(s):  
Zeynep Arslan

Through comparative literature research and qualitative analysis, this article considers the development of Alevi identity and political agency among the diaspora living in a European democratic context. This affects the Alevi emergence as political actors in Turkey, where they have no official recognition as a distinct religious identity. New questions regarding their identity and their aspiration to be seen as a political actor confront this ethno-religious group defined by common historical trauma, displacement, massacre, and finally emigration.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document