Modern reinterpretation of Weltliteratur. World Literature in Quest of World(-)System Theories

Tekstualia ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (31) ◽  
pp. 111-128
Author(s):  
Adam Kola
Keyword(s):  
System Theory ◽  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
World Literature ◽  
World System ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
World System Theory

While I. Wallerstein’s world-system theory (W-ST) is frequently referred to in literary studies (see: Moretti; Casanova; and Liu, Robbins & Tanoukhi) and cultural studies (King), A.G. Frank’s notion of world system (without hyphen) is not used in comparative literature. However, the two approaches are not competitive, but rather complementary. The article explores the applications of W(-)ST to comparative literature and studies.

scholarly journals Embodied Social Cognition and Comparative Literature

Poetics Today ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-186
Author(s):  
Lisa Zunshine
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Social Cognition ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
Cognitive Approaches ◽  
Cognitive Literary Studies ◽  
Social Mind

There is a growing sense among scholars working in cognitive literary studies that their assumptions and methodologies increasingly align them with another paradigmatically interdisciplinary field: comparative literature. This introduction to the special issue on cognitive approaches to comparative literature explores points of alignment between the two fields, outlining possible cognitivist interventions into debates that have been animating comparative literature, such as those concerning “universals,” politics of translatability (especially in the context of world literature), and practices of thinking across the boundaries of media. It discusses both fields’ indebtedness to cultural studies, as well as cognitive literary theorists’ commitment to historicizing and their sustained focus on the embodied social mind.

Against Global Literary Studies

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Edmond
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand ◽  
Institutional Frameworks ◽  
The World

Abstract Literary studies has taken a global turn through such institutional frameworks as global romanticism, global modernism, global anglophone, global postcolonial, global settler studies, world literature, and comparative literature. Though promising an escape from parochialism, nationalism, and Eurocentrism, this turn often looks suspiciously like another version of Anglo-European imperialism. This essay argues that, rather than continue the expansionary line of recent decades, global literary studies must allow other perspectives to draw into question its concepts, practices, and theories, including those associated with the terms literature, discipline, and comparison. As a settler colonial (Pākehā) scholar in Aotearoa New Zealand, I attend particularly to Māori literary scholars from Apirana Ngata, Te Kapunga Matemoana (Koro) Dewes, and Hirini Melbourne to Alice Te Punga Somerville, Tina Makereti, and Arini Loader. Their work highlights the limitedness of global literary studies in its current disciplinary guise. Disciplines remain important when they bring recognition to something previously marginalized, as in the battle to have Māori literature recognized within Pākehā institutions. What institutionalized modes of global literary studies need, however, is not discipline but indiscipline: a recognition of the limits of dominant disciplinary objects, frameworks, and practices, and an openness to other ways of seeing the world.

scholarly journals The agent-structure problem in international relations theory

1987 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander E. Wendt
Keyword(s):  
System Theory ◽  
International Relations ◽  
World System ◽  
Structuration Theory ◽  
System Structure ◽  
World System Theory ◽  
Structure Problem ◽  
State Agents ◽  
State Actors ◽  
Agent Structure

While neorealism and world-system theory both claim to be “structural” theories of international relations, they embody very different understandings of system structure and structural explanation. Neorealists conceptualize system structures in individualist terms as constraining the choices of preexisting state agents, whereas world-system theorists conceptualize system structures in structuralist terms as generating state agents themselves. These differences stem from what are, in some respects, fundamentally opposed solutions to the “agent-structure” or “micromacro” problem. This opposition, however, itself reflects a deeper failure of each theory to recognize the mutually constitutive nature of human agents and system structures—a failure which leads to deep-seated inadequacies in their respective explanations of state action. An alternative solution to the agent-structure problem, adapted from “structuration theory” in sociology, can overcome these inadequacies by avoiding both the reduction of system structures to state actors in neorealism and their reification in world-system theory. Structuration theory requires a philosophical basis in scientific realism, arguably the “new orthodoxy” in the philosophy of natural science, but as yet largely unrecognized by political scientists. The scientific realist/structuration approach generates an agenda for “structural-historical” research into the properties and dispositions of both state actors and the system structures in which they are embedded.

The World-System Theory of Oliver C. Cox

1985 ◽  
Vol 37 (5) ◽  
pp. 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herbert M. Hunter
Keyword(s):  
System Theory ◽  
World System ◽  
World System Theory ◽  
The World
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document