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.

Boatmen, Wastrels, and Demons: Figures of Literature

CounterText ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simona Sawhney
Keyword(s):  
Social Studies ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Sanskrit Text ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The World ◽  
National Literatures

Engaging some of the questions opened by Ranjan Ghosh's and J. Hillis Miller's book Thinking Literature Across Continents (2016), this essay begins by returning to Aijaz Ahmad's earlier invocation of World Literature as a project that, like the proletariat itself, must stand in an antithetical relation to the capitalism that produced it. It asks: is there an essential link between a certain idea of literature and a figure of the world? If we try to broach this link through Derrida's enigmatic and repeated reflections on the secret – a secret ‘shared’ by both literature and democracy – how would we grasp Derrida's insistence on the ‘Latinity’ of literature? The groundlessness of reading that we confront most vividly in our encounter with fictional texts is both intensified, and in a way, clarified, by new readings and questions posed by the emergence of new reading publics. The essay contends that rather than being taught as representatives of national literatures, literary texts in ‘World Literature’ courses should be read as sites where serious historical and political debates are staged – debates which, while being local, are the bearers of universal significance. Such readings can only take place if World Literature strengthens its connections with the disciplines Miller calls, in the book, Social Studies. Paying particular attention to the Hindi writer Premchand's last story ‘Kafan’, and a brief section from the Sanskrit text the Natyashastra, it argues that struggles over representation, over the staging of minoritised figures, are integral to fiction and precede the thinking of modern democracy.

scholarly journals World Studies and Relational Comparison

PMLA ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 130 (2) ◽  
pp. 430-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shu-Mei Shih
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
World Music ◽  
The West ◽  
World Cinema ◽  
The World

A new kind of world studies is emerging. This is a world studies 2.0, since some forms of world studies, such as world literature, world music, and world cinema, have existed for some years in the humanities. These categories have been more narrowly defined and refer to literature, music, and cinema from places other than the West—that is, “the rest,” as seen from the West. In this vein, world literature has sometimes been euphemistically called “literature of the world at large,” conjuring a chase, if only halfhearted, after a world that somehow slipped away: at large.

scholarly journals The Painter and the Princess: Constructing Feminism/Decentring Orientalism between Copenhagen, Istanbul, Cairo and Tunis

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-71
Author(s):  
Ragnhild Johnsrud Zorgati
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Literature And Politics ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The World ◽  
International Importance ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article explores the encounters between a Polish-Danish painter and an Egyptian princess in the second part of the nineteenth century, at the junction of Orientalism, modernism and Islamic reformism. The painter Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann is known for her Orientalist paintings and autobiographical writings, while Princess Nazli Fadhel was a hostess of influential intellectual salons in Cairo and Tunis and, as such, a contributor to the world of art, literature and politics. Jerichau-Baumann and Nazli Fadhel were both creative and controversial personalities engaged in the cultural and political debates of their time. They were outspoken and well-travelled, which challenged conventional gender roles. Based on Scandinavian, English, French and Arabic sources concerning Jerichau-Baumann and Nazli Fadhel's lives, this article argues that the activities of these two women are testament to the increasing international importance of feminist discourses in the late nineteenth century. Their encounter is emblematic of the rapidly expanding connections across cultural, linguistic, and religious boundaries that characterized the nineteenth-century world. It thus questions the binary constructions – the idea of the West/Europe and the Other – underlying the paradigm of Orientalism.

Intellectual Captivity

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-110
Author(s):  
Chen Bar-Itzhak
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Current Situation ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Unequal Distribution ◽  
Academic Field ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The World ◽  
Recent Developments

Abstract This essay concerns the unequal distribution of epistemic capital in the academic field of World Literature and calls for an epistemic shift: a broadening of our theoretical canon and the epistemologies through which we read and interpret world literature. First, this epistemic inequality is discussed through a sociological examination of the “world republic of literary theory,” addressing the limits of circulation of literary epistemologies. The current situation, it is argued, creates an “intellectual captivity,” the ethical and political implications of which are demonstrated through a close reading of the acts of reading world literature performed by scholars at the center of the field. A few possible solutions are then suggested, drawing on recent developments in anthropology, allowing for a redistribution of epistemic capital within the discipline of World Literature: awareness of positionality, reflexivity as method, promotion of marginal scholarship, and a focus on “points of interaction.”

scholarly journals Reception aesthetics in Vietnam

2013 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-57
Author(s):  
Hieu Van Do
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
National Identities ◽  
The West ◽  
Local Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
Western Theory ◽  
Literature Theory ◽  
Effective Use ◽  
Important Basis ◽  
Reception Aesthetics

Reception aesthetics is a theory of literature which has exerted major impacts throughout the world from the late 1960s to the late 1980s in the West, espacially dymanically in China from the 1980s of the 20th century to the first decade of the 21st century. In Vietnam, although this theory was born quite early (1985), its mark is still not deeply engraved; thus a lot of potentials not having been discovered and utilized. Recreating the complete appearance of reception aesthetics in Vietnam and explaining the cause of that appearance is an important basis for discussion about the reception of foreign theory. How to make Vietnam literature theory integrated and successfully communicated with the world literature theory? How to make the most effective use of the Western theory in solving problems of the local literature? How to build a firm theory background imbued with national identities in the context of globalization? etc. are the author’s issues of great concerns.

The poetics of world literature as a comparative problem

2019 ◽  
pp. 50-73
Author(s):  
Igor O. Shaytanov
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Clear Indication ◽  
Distant Reading ◽  
Special Mode ◽  
Literary Context ◽  
The World ◽  
Potential Applicability ◽  
Main Plot ◽  
Comparative Poetics

Treatment of the notion ‘world literature’ is complicated by the problematic character of its components. This fact, in turn, prompts the need to challenge the approaches to the study of world literature, e. g. whether it can be defined by poetics, and if so, in what way would the latter be special? The everpersistent attempts to define world literature as a subject of a special mode of reading (D. Damrosch) or through the concept of distant reading (F. Moretti) are a clear indication of the demand for poetics as an art of reading a text, replacing the hitherto dominating cultural studies on the scholarly agenda. Both historical and comparative poetics are considered in terms of their potential applicability and development. Today, scholars are increasingly interested in the concept of historical poetics, originating in A. Veselovsky’s works. To test the application of historical poetics, the author suggests his way of reading the main plot of E. Zamyatin’s oeuvre, from the story Alatyr , which mythologizes Russian reality, to the world-famous dystopia We [ My ] in a world literary context.

The World Literature and Cultural Studies Program

1993 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 666-676 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristin Ross
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
World Literature ◽  
The World

scholarly journals World Literature, Indian Views, 1920s–1940s

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Orsini
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
The World ◽  
Recent Debate ◽  
Global Patterns ◽  
David Damrosch ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
System Approaches

Abstract “For any given observer,” David Damrosch argued in What is World Literature?, “even a genuinely global perspective remains a perspective from somewhere, and global patterns of the circulation of world literature take shape in their local manifestations.” Within world-system approaches that fix centres, peripheries and semiperipheries, or with approaches that consider world literature only that which circulates transnationally or “globally,” the relativizing import of this important insight remains inert or gets forgotten. As Indian editors and writers in the early decades of the twentieth century undertook more translations of foreign works and discussed the relationship between India and the world, overlapping understandings of world literature emerged in the Indian literary field. This essay explores three different visions of world literature from the same region and period but in different languages – English, Hindi, and Urdu – highlighting their different impulses, contexts, approaches, and outcomes in order to refine our notion of location. And whereas much of the recent debate and activities around world literature has revolved around the curriculum or around publishers’ series and anthologies, in the Indian case exposure to and discussion of literature from other parts of the world took largely place in the pages of periodicals.

scholarly journals EUROPE IN OUR BLOOD... About the Nadezhda Venediktova`s book Caesar and Venediktova. Cultural excavations

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 206-208
Author(s):  
M. V. Silantyeva
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Walk Away ◽  
The West ◽  
Late Autumn ◽  
French Enlightenment ◽  
Hands On ◽  
The World ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
Way Of Thinking

Cultural Excavations by Nadezhda Venediktova were published in late autumn 2021, at the time most suitable for philosophical speculations. This way of thinking brings us close to a collapse that might equally turn out productive or catastrophic. Its anaemic academic manner stands out among full-blooded well-crafted literature of saturated and inspiring reality. Pandemic or not, we seek to know whether there is a need to distinguish between various cultures if at the end of the day people are still people. The author does not provide the answer but rather invites us to join a sophisticated mental game in fine textual decorations. And readers will walk away a little confused about simplicity of binary oppositions, and straightforwardness of the logic that a bored visitor so happily lays their hands on, eager and happy to get down to work. The book evolves around the topic of meeting thyself in different cultural surroundings. Sunlit essays bear the imprint of the bitter rationalism of the French enlightenment coupled with a weathered love of personal presence in the world. In her latest work, Nadezhda Venediktova ‘ambitiously comments on life’s creative abilities’. Vivid sketches entitled Passions for Europe may take place by a nameless lake in Zurich but remind readers of Michel Houellebecq’s concrete jungle, of Spengler’s mathematics. But nothing here speaks of The Decline of the West, under the author’s thoughtful gaze Europe comes to life fresh and real — a proverbial sphynx with its intriguing riddles. The author’s underworld meetings with the world literature alternate with colorful Italian landscapes. Vibrant images of friends are so true to life that remind of the immortality of soul. The soul of Europe is truly immortal and found across the continent — Italy, Britain, Austria, Germany, France, Greece, Switzerland, Spain — gave their name to the chapters but cannot be reduced to a dusty catalogue. Nadezhda Venediktova presents European countries through effortless florid metaphors. This what happens when Europe looks into the author’s soul, though it might look otherwise from an outside perspective.

Bringing the Monkey King to the World

2021 ◽  
Vol 89 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-259
Author(s):  
Ji Hao
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Chinese Poetry ◽  
National Context ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
David Damrosch ◽  
Monkey King ◽  
Xiyou Ji ◽  
National Literatures

By the end of 1930s, Waley had already established his reputation as a sinologist and an outstanding translator of Chinese poetry. Under what circumstances did Waley decide to translate the novel Xiyou ji into English? How does Monkey connect to social and literary realities during his time? If we follow Pascale Casanova’s application of Abram de Swaan’s “floral figuration” to her discussion on the literary world, how is this Chinese novel of the periphery linked to the center through Waley’s translation and other “cosmopolitan intermediaries”? Furthermore, if world literature, as David Damrosch proposes, is “an elliptical refraction of national literatures,” in what ways does Monkey respond to the tension between the receiving culture and its national context? By addressing those questions, this paper seeks to demonstrate Waley’s multiple relationship with Xiyou ji and highlight various factors that contribute to the canonization of the novel in a larger space of world literature.

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