Translation of Tao Qian’s poetry as inspiration for literary theory, sinology, and comparative literature

As someone who entered the United States as a foreign student in the late 1980s, my academic career was intensely shaped by the then burgeoning discourses on colonialism and postcolonialism.1 The triumvirate of Said, Spivak, and Bhabha functioned like a citation machine; and despite Said’s Orientalism, South Asia, especially India, dominated as the colonial/ postcolonial site par excellence. Much of this had to do not just with the presence of many a South Asian scholar studying, writing, and teaching in U.S. universities but also with the fact that some of the most brilliant work was being undertaken on India: Lata Mani’s work on the discourses on sati, the work of the Subaltern Studies historians, Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and her famous essays on the Rani of Sirmur, and of course Bhabha’s legendary essays “Sly Civility” and “Signs Taken for Wonders.” The outpouring of anglophone fiction from South Asia, topped off by the publication of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, made certain that there would be no dearth of work on South Asian (read Indian) postcolonial fiction, and even today, despite a fairer distribution of attention to other parts of the ex-colonial worlds, works on South Asia continue to dominate the scene. Much has been written about this privileging of South Asia (again, read India) and its incarnation as the quintessential postcolonial site, and I am not going to rehearse the debates here. But suffice it to say that while my teaching spans continents, my first book was part and parcel of the work on the discourse of gender and nationalism in colonial and postcolonial literary representations by British, Bengali, and anglophone South Asian writers. But, in another sense the book was comparative because it brought into play writers working in different languages, and I remember getting a report from Cambridge University Press asking me why there was no chapter on Rushdie.

Reviews 65 Zuoya Cao. The Internal and the External: A Comparison oftheArtistic Use ofNatural Imagery in English Romantic and Chinese Classic Poetry. Asian Thought and Culture, vol. 32. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. 163 pp. Hardcover, isbn 0-8204-3815-4. This mechanical little book sets out to disprove an assertion ofthe late Paul de Man that "the merging of the internal and the external can never be reached in poetic language." A revised 1993 dissertation from Pennsylvania State University, Zuoya Cao's monograph recalls an earlier, pre-Derrida era when comparative literature could be a rather uncomplicated business: compare and contrast a handful of carefully chosen poems from two disparate literary traditions, chronicle their "similarities" and "differences," and then account for these discoveries by recourse to the literary history and theory of each tradition. Professor Cao follows this old formula closely. For students of Chinese poetry, the saving grace ofher exercise is its focus on natural imagery, certainly a central issue in the Chinese poetic tradition. The work is divided into four chapters. Chapters 1 and 2, "The Use ofNatural Scenery" (pp. 7-42) and "The Use ofNatural Objects" (pp. 43-77), compare, respectively, how the two traditions employ, first, complex landscape descriptions and then individual flora and fauna. These chapters rely on a carefully contrived series of comparisons, each between one Western and one Chinese poem. Despite the promise ofthe title, the corpus ofpoetry subject to comparison is actually quite small. "English Romantic" is confined to Wordsworth, Shelley, and Coleridge; and despite the definition of "Chinese Classic Poetry" as T'ang and Sung "lyrics" (p. 1), the Chinese poems chosen for comparison are limited to the shih poetry ofWang Wei, Tu Fu, and Li Po and the tz'u poetry of Su Shih. The entire work does not cite a single Sung dynasty shih poem. Virtually all the poems in these first two chapters are well-known anthology chestnuts—the opening pair being Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" and Wang Wei's "Mt. Chung-nan" (Chung-nan shan f^^fLLI). In short, Zuoya Cao has severely constricted the parameters ofboth traditions, confining herselfto rather late and rather middlebrow conceptions of these traditions. These opening chapters do not really compare "English Romantic and Chinese Classic Poetry" but rather pit Three Hundred T'ang Poems against Palgrave's Golden Treasury. Obviously, any consideration of the discursive quality of Sung shih poetry or exploration into the lesser-© 1999 by University ^0Vm byways ofEnglish Romantic poetrywould havevastlycomplicated ProfesofHawai 'i Press„ , . sor Cao s task. Within the narrow confines ofthis chosen corpus, her conclusions are focused and predictable. Both traditions employ natural imagery (the "external") to 66 China Review International: Vol. 6, No. ?, Spring 1999 express the poet's feelings (the "internal"). But the Romantics are more likely to turn the natural object into a symbol for imaginative meditation, to intellectualize the object into a subjective mental construct, and this process in turn deflects interest away from the physical reality ofthe object itself. However, for the Chinese poet, the physical object "always remains concrete," and "Chinese poets often create a fusion ofnatural scene and feeling where objective and subjective worlds are united in one artistic world" (p. 40). These conclusions are hardly revelations and have been expressed in some detail elsewhere—badly, I have previously argued— by Pauline Yu, whom Zuoya Cao cites, and—much better—by François Jullien, whom she does not cite.1 If Cao's theoretical conclusions are predictable, her exegesis of specific Chinese poems is largely correct and sometimes insightful. Her readings, however, appear as univocal and sui generis. Poetic texts, for Cao, are static, with only one perennial meaning. When quoting Chinese poems, she provides a Chinese text in simplified characters, followed always by another scholars' previously published translation in brackets, which is then footnoted. Her Chinese texts, therefore, are referenced not by citation to any traditional or modern Chinese editions ofthe poets' works but by citation to previous English translations. Thus, textual problems, ofwhich there are many even in the few poems under discussion, are fully ignored. Likewise absent is any mention ofthe rich and complex commentarial tradition. Cao provides no references to traditional commentary and only...

The title of Gloria Fisk's monograph is somewhat deceptive. Seemingly a throwback to a fast-disappearing species of literary criticism—the single-author study—the book is not that at all. Taking Orhan Pamuk as an exemplary case study, Fisk brilliantly leapfrogs from there to raise broader questions on how the field of world literature is constituted in Euro-American academies and institutions; on what underpins our assumptions when reading literary works from different regions, especially those from the global South; and on the chasm between local and global forms of reception while reading international authors. Her monograph can be situated in a two decades-long conversation regarding the field and compass of world literature that has been shaped by a series of key texts, among them, Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters (originally published in French in 1999 and translated into English in 2005); David Damrosch's What Is World Literature? (2004); Gayatri Spivak's Death of a Discipline (2005); Eric Hayot's On Literary Worlds (2012); Emily Apter's Against World Literature (2013); the Warwick Research Collective's Combined and Uneven Development (2015); and Aamir Mufti's Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literature (2016). Populated by heavyweight critics, the field has generated a daunting debate that has grown alongside a flourishing mini-industry—at least relative to the rest of the squeezed humanities—that caters to the pedagogy of world literature in undergraduate and graduate curricula, tenure-track hires, research institutes, textbook anthologies, and academic monographs.It is undoubtedly reductive, though nonetheless accurate, to suggest that this debate has largely been divided into the polar camps of the proponents and opponents of world literature. Its proponents see world literature expanding the narrow confines of the Western canon, thereby breaking down disciplinary linguistic and national-literary boundaries, and also generating knowledge about other cultures to foster a cosmopolitan diversity. But its detractors invariably read world literature as the literary handmaiden to a neoliberal ethos that superficially celebrates diversity while reinforcing both the global forces of capitalism and the hegemony of the Anglophone, since these authors and their works are mainly propped up by multinational publishing industries, Western-based literary prizes (e.g. the Booker and the Nobel), and Anglo-American academic institutions. The divide between the enthusiasts and the skeptics of world literature was conveniently on display at a 2011 conversation at the American Comparative Literature Association between Damrosch and Spivak. The former suggested that we “have much to celebrate here” (456), thanks to a global expansion of the literature canon that might lead to “a more genuine understanding of the world” (463), whereas the latter maintained that “to say that [world literature] is the message of capitalist globalization is not to be tendentious” (467).Fisk comes neither to praise nor to bury world literature but instead to intervene elegantly and incisively in this impasse. As she writes, “I am reading the debate for and against world literature with less interest in taking sides than in taking the polarity apart” (166). The two ostensibly opposed camps have more in common than it may seem, she argues, in that both are structurally generated out of the same institutional framework. Operating in a domestic context in which a rhetoric of crisis pervades the humanities, in which the literary sphere of letters is marginalized in the broader public sphere, in which tenure-track positions and undergraduate enrollments in literature departments have dropped precipitously, critics are quick to instrumentalize literature to make more ambitious claims for its political utility. The supporters of world literature insist on “the good world literature can do” because of “the view it gives its readers on [foreign] worlds they would find hard to see without a local and literary guide” and because of “the kinds and degrees of solidarity [it] creates among strangers” (3–4). The importance of the humanities becomes legible insofar as world literature provides an aesthetic incubator for ethical principles that help readers navigate an increasingly plural and globalized world and that can thus counter the homogenizing processes of capital. Detractors, by contrast, see world literature as a product of neoliberal capitalist systems and seek to unmask its underlying complicity with “the cultural logic of the multinational corporation and the neoliberal university” (184). Fisk sees this anti–world literature position making similarly “grandiose claims” for the political radicalism and ethical good of literary studies. She notes the material irony of this critique in view of both the structural marginality of the humanities and the fact that mounting them helps us to “amass the cultural capital we need to get and keep a tenure track job” (184–85) in the neoliberal university in which we all work. Burdened by the assumptions we bring to world literature, we approach global novelists like Pamuk with the expectation that they, too, must function as a political agent of the liberal values of Western academies—to wit, as a defender of free speech, a cross-cultural bridge, a voice for the marginalized, and a critic of capitalism—without any regard for the position these authors occupy in their national spaces. This leads to the promotion of some global authors at the expense of others who do not meet these standards of liberal goodness, and forces novelists writing for a global readership into an uneasy role, caught between their domestic constraints and the international literary norms imposed on them.Fisk unfolds this argument over the course of her monograph with a dazzling demonstration of methodological scope and variety that reveals an expert grasp of different ways of reading. This scope is revealed in the tripartite structure and expanding foci of the book. The first two chapters examine the good attributed to the global novel in the kinds of cultural work it is expected to perform; the next two consider the good values the novelist is expected to champion qua world author; and the final two chapters interrogate the literary institutions (the Nobel Prize and the U.S. academy) that make claims for the good of world literature. Fisk's scale of interpretation thus widens from section to section, with the first hewing toward the more traditional approaches of close reading. She slyly titles her first two chapters “A Novel Can Teach You about Other People” and “A Novel Can Teach You about Other People's History”—common assumptions about the cultural work expected of world literature—but goes on to argue that a novel fails to reliably do such things. Focusing primarily on Pamuk's Snow, she shows how Pamuk toggles between realist conventions and metafictional postmodernism to cannily satisfy and subvert the reader's expectations by creating both proximity and distance between Western readers and his foreign characters. Furthermore, by altering the representation of historical events in Turkey in ways that elude most non-Turkish readers, Pamuk “thematize[s] the limits of the mimetic representation in world literature” (84) and reveals how realism is always culturally specific rather than a transparent lens into a different world.Turning in the next section from a hermeneutic focus on the text to the broader methods of cultural analysis, Fisk explains how the figure of the global author is constructed in the world republic of letters. Chapter 3 examines the controversy stemming from Pamuk's acknowledgment of the mass murder of Armenians—though he does not use the word genocide, as Fisk points out—under the Ottoman Empire to the fury of nationalist Turks, on one hand, and the admiration of his Western readers, on the other. Tracing the reasons for these opposed responses in his local and global readerships, Fisk criticizes how we box a novelist like Pamuk into being an advocate of human rights, even as we fail to attend to the local histories—nationalism, class, colonialism—that shape the Turkish public sphere and make it dangerous for Pamuk to occupy such a position. By doing so, we inadvertently “reinforce the global unevenness we critique” (112). Chapter 4 expands on this paradox by juxtaposing Pamuk with the father of comparative literature, Erich Auerbach, showing how the disciplinary fetishization of authorial exile forces world writers to sacrifice their relationship to their national publics to become celebrated international figures. Finally, in chapters 5 and 6, Fisk draws on the methods of the sociology of literature to clarify the way our definitions of world literature are inseparable from the norms with which our institutions of literary prizes and universities operate. The Nobel Prize honors foreign authors “for behaving like good citizens of participatory democracies” (164), a political standard rarely applied to Western authors, while U.S. academics make claims about world literature to “advance institutional interests” (171) that have little to do with Pamuk himself or his work. Moving deftly from text to context, from the literary to the extra-literary, from the internal dynamics of the work of art to the institutions the work inhabits, Fisk displays a rare methodological versatility and performs these analyses with a sophistication that is rarer still.The strength of Fisk's argument rests on her reorientation of the debate over world literature, reading it as a product of its institutional location, rather than the terms it sets for itself. She reminds us of the political limits of criticism; of the meaningful difference between aesthetics and politics in their effects on the world; of our privileged status as tenured or tenure-track faculty trafficking in world literature; and of our complicit if agonized relationship with the structures of literary and academic capitalism. In this respect, her monograph is an accomplished example of what Jeffrey Williams has described as a “new modesty in literary criticism.” He traces the fullest articulation of this trend to Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus's 2009 essay “Surface Reading,” which recognizes that, despite the long and robust tradition of criticism conducted in the name of “political activism”—particularly under the aegis of the hermeneutics of suspicion and symptomatic reading—such claims overlook the fact that the “disasters and triumphs of the last decade have shown that literary criticism alone is not sufficient to effect change” (2). Fisk echoes their call for a new “political realism about the revolutionary capacities of both texts and critics” (Best and Marcus 15) when she insists that critical discourses which make grandiose pronouncements about world literature—whether about its ethical good or its complicity with capital—obscure the material conditions allowing those pronouncements to be made in the first place. These arguments rely solely on a form of “magical thinking,” Fisk complains, a phrase she repeatedly uses to describe these critical modes, and “we should not confuse talk of revolution for revolution” (Fisk 170). Williams rightly suggests that this trend toward critical modesty emerges in the wake of the waning power and status of the humanities and literary studies. Rather than being “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”—the Shelleyesque aims of the Nobel Prize formulated by Alfred Nobel (Fisk 137)—we are closer today to Auden's modest rebuttal that “poetry makes nothing happen.” But if critical modesty aspires to “less hubris” in its claims, it also loses something by virtue of its pragmatism—“the utopian impulse of criticism,” according to Williams, what Fisk would call “magical thinking” perhaps. This loss has led to the accusation that these varieties of surface reading ultimately succumb to a certain “political quietism” (Best and Marcus 16), an acceptance of the status quo of the diminished standing of humanistic study in the world.Given that the coda to her monograph is titled “Now, What?,” Fisk is clearly not proposing the quiet acceptance of the world as it is. If the assumptions we make about the good of world literature make us rather bad readers, we could do better, she argues, by developing reading methods that acknowledge our complicity with the neoliberal university instead of polemics that assume our autonomy from it. This might return us to the solutions of a modest criticism: more accurate descriptions of our state of affairs and self-reflexivity about how we are conditioned by them. Fisk's persuasive sociological analysis, however, also points us in a different direction, suggesting that the answer lies not in the intellectual realm of improved reading methodologies but in the material realm of institutional change. If we can arrive at a more nuanced understanding of Pamuk's local constraints—“give literary establishments . . . a vocabulary through which to see the complexity of [his] relation to the nationalist discourse” (194)—instead of expecting him to function as a neutral conduit across cultures, we can do so only if we continue to have access to scholarship from historians knowledgeable about Turkey, critics fluent with Turkish literary traditions, or institutional ties that link U.S.-based scholars with scholars elsewhere, all of which Fisk's brilliant monograph is indebted to. Put differently, we read world literature best when we retain access to the very methodologies that the present formation of “world literature” has institutionally supplanted to some extent: “area studies, for example, critical race studies, Marxist theory, postcolonial theory, and translation theory” (166), housed in the shrinking departments of comparative literature and foreign languages. Fisk acknowledges that there are better and worse polemics against world literature, but in choosing to focus on the “least convincing arguments that scholarly critics make” against it (168), her argument does not give sufficient attention to critiques that are less about establishing one's political purity or academic credentials by inveighing against neoliberalism, and more about confronting the institutional losses and deaths of disciplines that make us collectively worse readers. We need not return to a fetishization of reading world literature in the original language—for Fisk, Apter's Against World Literature is an exemplary instance of this—to argue that there is a profound intellectual loss when that language and literature ceases to be taught if it is replaced by the proliferation of world literature courses in translation. In such a scenario, we eventually lose the opportunity to learn from scholarship by those fluent in different languages, even if we ourselves are not. Thus, although Fisk argues that the debate for and against world literature is one waged in the hermetic walls of the Anglo-American academy that imposes a set of constraints on world authors, it is frequently also the case that this debate is fundamentally about how to read authors like Pamuk well—or, at least, better—insofar as the material distribution of resources across disciplines and departments shapes these readerly practices. Fisk's monograph is invaluable for highlighting how these practices are imbricated in the institutions we inhabit. If we take the logic of her argument seriously, how to become a good reader of world literature may have less to do with improving the critical methodologies of world literature, and more to do with fighting to ensure that the methodologies of adjacent disciplinary formations can continue to flourish in our institutions of learning, rather than be slowly eclipsed by the allure of the global.

In the 2011 issue of the MLA's Profession, David Porter notes that, following Goethe's call for a new age of Weltliteratur in the early nineteenth century, since the mid-1990s the notion of “world literature” has reemerged “as the most promising rubric for imagining a major paradigm shift in the study and teaching of literature and for thinking beyond the dead ends of traditional comparative study.”1While no consensus has been reached on what it might mean, this recent reemergence of the notion of world literature has become a focus for debate over new possibilities implicit in the idea of global literatures. Porter cites in particular three noteworthy avenues for critical discussion: David Damrosch's What Is World Literature?, Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters, and Franco Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees. Like other contributors to this forum, I find these three works particularly suggestive of the current state of thinking concerning comparative literary studies.In What is World Literature?, Damrosch develops a framework for world literature that is cosmopolitan in terms of a multiplicity not of origins but of trajectories. That is, world literatures are literatures that circulate beyond their cultures of origin and in doing so have an effect on other cultures beyond the linguistic and institutional borders circumscribed by overtly national literatures.2Casanova offers in The World Republic of Letters a sociological account of the world of literature as a rule-bound, hierarchical formation. The “world republic of letters,” she argues, is not the open, liberal, democratic marketplace of ideas but a “rigidly stratified social structure where access to broad markets is tightly controlled by a powerful caste of critics, publishers, and translators, whose authority is legitimized through their association with recognized literary centers such as Paris or New York.”3 This caste of gatekeepers functions across political and linguistic lines and helps create a body of literary works that share metropolitan features, even when they come from outside French or English, the traditional sites of “world literature.”In Graphs, Maps, Trees, Moretti also takes literary circulation and transformation as his starting point but offers a set of more radical methodological alternatives—drawing as models for literary analysis “graphs from quantitative history, maps from geography, and trees from evolutionary theory”—in proposing that literary scholars rethink their dependence on close reading.4 “Distant reading,” distance being understood as “a specific form of knowledge,” reveals what close reading cannot.5 As Porter rightly notes, this attention to the macroscopic patterns and processes that shape the literary landscape works on scales beyond individual texts and authors, and its most obvious benefit is that it includes the 99 percent of literary production typically excluded by any canon from visibility and relevance.6Porter concludes from his survey of the return of “world literature” that what Damrosch, Casanova, and Moretti share is a concept of world literature that “stresses the mobility of texts and the permeability of traditions.”7 Each makes clear that world literature is not the sum of national literatures “but rather a dynamic model of … a constantly shifting field of circulation, transmutation, and contestation.”8 This conclusion is of central concern: what might a field of comparative studies that was not based on national literatures, or even singular canonic examples, look like? How would such a field be organized? And is the MLA structure, indeed any institutional structure, adequate to the study of transnational literary formations?As a scholar who has learned from and adapted these observations to my own main area of comparative study, the hemispheric Americas, I think that the work of this group of literary historians helps us reconsider what Porter identifies as the “relation between the processes of differentiation and diffusion that govern the spread and regeneration of literary forms in a global literary space.”9 In that context, probably the first observation worth making is that a new vocabulary for naming, studying, and comparing the hemispheric Americas and their literatures has emerged over the past twenty years, representing a battery of interesting alternatives to be considered. With the emergence of other approaches, such as diasporic studies, comparative studies in race and ethnicity, studies in globalization and the global South, and the transnational turn in cultural studies, coupled with the resurgence of the very idea of world literature itself, the fundamental terms of analysis and description in the context of contemporary comparative literary study deserve highlighting.Globalization and the vision of the globe implied by that contemporary term of everyday discourse do not just belong to the neocons, neoliberals, or end-of-history triumphalists. The “world” of “world literature” and of diverse cultural studies and changing disciplinary practices is also becoming globalized and “worlded” in a Heideggerian sense that denotes how things become intelligible to human beings by virtue of being part of an interpreted and structured context of meaning.10 This “worlding” of world literature produces alternative expressions of what can count and mean as “literature” that are every bit as powerful as critical terms as the former vocabularies of ideological analysis. These terms emphasize the public impact of the emergence of global systems from disparate critical angles of vision, multiple frameworks, social situations, and knowledge/power field practices that are, as yet, emerging, fluid, and undertheorized. The point of these critical angles of vision is not simply hermeneutical. More powerfully, they carry out social analyses of contemporary ruling structures with the end of formulating the possibility of social justice.The transdisciplinary practices, transnational literacies, and multisited interventions that globalization and the idea of world literature projects require help us envision and shape keener expressions of what contemporary differential, transnational, and borderlands projects can and must do now, moving beyond the postmodern/postcolonial formulations of “comparative world literatures.” What is crucial in all of these formulations is the sense that no process of worlding or globalization is anywhere near over and done with as a historical process of world formation. So how are we going to talk about it even as it continues to change before our very eyes? The goal of programs of study based in attempts to reformulate the goals of comparative literature and comparative cultural studies generally is one of turning emergent forms of theorizing and cultural activist writing into new cultural poetics adequate to dealing with new world realities. I take this project to coincide with the one that Gayatri Spivak described recently as one of “translation”—that is, as a process of poiesis that is not mere imitation of an original but an imaginative creation in another mode, situated in the very differential between copy and original.11Current debates on the meaning of citizenship have refocused attention away from notions of civil rights that depend on the existence of a social contract within the framework of the nation-state and toward ways in which the processes of decolonization and migration, as well as social identities based on ethnicity, race, and sexuality, point to the existence of identities other than national ones for defining citizenship. They offer a direct challenge to the traditional language of citizenship and liberal democratic notions that tie citizenship and liberal democratic rights indissolubly to state affiliation.So, what happens when we move the discussion of citizenship and “rights” away from the idea of the nation state, not toward a mythic postnational state but instead to the realm of the transnation? The fictive entities with subject status that we call corporations have worked imaginatively precisely to create a sense of those transnational rights. One powerful function of aesthetic education in the age of globalization might be then to teach us how to conceive of transnational rights for individual and collective bodies of subjects, represented most saliently by the participants in the massive labor diasporas from south to north in the last decades of the twentieth century. This is the actively creative act of poiesis in translation that Spivak refers to in regard to a rethinking of comparativism, a process that she describes as “an active practice.”12This concern for the active practice of translation as an act of re-creation is acutely visible in the area of comparative work, which is my own—the transnational literatures of the Americas. These literatures, represented most powerfully by such works as Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper, typically draw not only from the grand traditions of the various American national literatures but also from the traditions of vernacular narrative, popular culture, and the literary avant-garde.13 They do so for several reasons, one of which is to show the constant and complete dissonance between the redemptive course of the history of the Americas with its origins in conquest and the psychic façades that bar the way to memories of the traumatic past of the Americas.These are issues I have elaborated more fully in other work.14 In this context, it is worth noting that in Plascencia's and Díaz's writings, as in those of a whole generational cohort of contemporary writers from the transnational American global South, neither literary realism, nor modernist estrangement, nor postmodern play, nor magical realist wonder alone can suffice as formal stand-ins for the concrete content of justice. The representation of social justice is not and should not be taken to be the same thing as its felicitous performance. How, then, can one possibly conceive of a narrativity to still the chaos unleashed by modern political terror? How to create ethnic romance from consciousness colonized by self-hate and self-doubt? What would a literature of political and racial romance, sensation, gothic, marvels, fantasy, and absolute otherness appropriate to transporting us to the margins of the imaginary and the symbolic accomplish that earlier forms of U.S. ethnic literature have not? What would its referential world look like? And most significantly, what could it accomplish as a symbolic representation of real history? In the works of transnational American writers, the representation of social justice requires a new and different formal medium incorporating states of fantasy that occupy and override previous attempts to represent the real. To show how this is accomplished is the task of contemporary comparative literary study.As we move firmly into the second decade of the twenty-first century, what is clear is the need for a new paradigm for broadly global as well as for more local ways of studying culture and literature. This new poiesis of comparative study ought to be based on a new sense of the dynamics of how knowledge is generated and how human resources are used and should recognize the rich reservoir of knowledge that exists in languages and cultures that have in the past not been deemed worthy of study or comparison. The aim of critical work undertaken by comparative studies and comparing literatures worldwide might well be to ensure that the variety of regions that we can for convenience's sake call the global South receive their due on the basis of their own rich heritage in a world of equals that are not classed in the static categories that Casanova decries or the exclusive formulations of cultural political practice to which Moretti's method of “distant reading” offers such a powerful rejoinder. We have an incalculable stake in ensuring the success of the comparative critical projects that points us toward a new, global, sense of world literature.

A Cultural Ambassador East and West: J. Hillis Miller’s <i>Lectures in China</i>

Nuruddin Farah’s life and work at one and the same time exemplify and highlight contradictions in Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters, a book that has had major impact in comparative and world literature circuits. As an author who shows in the extreme most of the hallmarks of the dispossessed writer of the periphery, Farah would appear perfectly to illustrate Casanova’s hierarchical, binary, and highly agonistic world literary systems theory, where Euro-America dominates the world, and Paris dominates Euro-America. However, precisely because of his unique position on the literary periphery of the periphery, Farah’s work itself is the practice of Casanova’s theory, carrying within itself the key precepts, especially in its constitutive and conscious transnationalism. In other words, Farah does not derivatively illustrate the theory, but his career and novels preempt through practice the major insights of the theory. But Farah also signposts transformations in Casanova’s world republic of letters in the twenty-first century. Farah’s career, with consecration through prizes and awards increasingly in peripheral countries, suggests a wider polycentrism of influence than allowed in Casanova’s model. The postcolonial aesthetic of teacherliness, furthermore, clearer in the late realism of Farah’s mature work than in that of most other writers, signals a fundamental rewriting rather than renewal of aesthetic modes at Pascale’s literary Greenwich meridian.

<i>Cultural Capital</i>: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

Ulrich Weisstein is considered one the pillars of comparative literature. He has a Ph.D. in comparative literature (1954) from IU. He was one of the first to do so from the IU Comparative Literature Program. In his famous book, Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, He attempts to draw the line between different concepts like comparative, national, and world literatures. He dedicates long chapters to explain genres throughout histories as well as movements. He belongs the French school of comparative literature in which he believes that there is transference of impact between the influencer and the influenced by. In this article, Weisstein is not only a writer, but also, a historian who traces back concepts like stof, motif, genre, movement, and school. He differentiates, compares and presents his viewpoint of World Literature (WL), National Literature (NL) and Comparative Literature (CL).

Perceptions and Misconceptions of Literary Theories: An Analysis of Pedagogy of Literary Studies

I do not mean to suggest that we cease to be Luso-Brazilianists and become comparatists.—Francis Rogers This epigraph, which comes from a 1953 article by one of the key figures in the rise of lusophone studies in the United States, should strike us as paradoxical: the discipline named already displays a hyphenated identity—encompassing both Lusitania (Portugal) and Brazil—that would seem to make comparative approaches inevitable.1 I should explain that Rogers is referring not to comparison within his discipline, but to the analogy between Portuguese and other “single” languages that have spread to four (or more) continents and become the official and literary languages of vastly different cultures. (In the case of Portuguese, the four continents are Europe, South America, Africa, and Asia, [Portuguese is a co-official language of East Timor and Macau].) Rogers is saying that the comparison of seemingly analogous situations of world languages in postcolonial contexts is intellectually suspect, and in any case more than any one scholar can handle. But I wish to read the quote on its surface, as it were, as pointing out the tension between Lusophonia and Lusutopia. Unlike English, French, and Spanish, the Portuguese language finds no place in the MLA divisional structure but it is rather called forth only in the dash that connects Lusitania with Brazil.The lusophonic approach reads the dash between “Luso” and “Brazilian” as a connector between two vastly different cultures that are related through the fact that they share a language. There are, of course, very pragmatic reasons for this connection: knowing the language is a necessary gateway to both cultures. But the dash can also be read disjunctively, as highlighting the doubleness of the name and the fact that the phonic connection is (Lus)utopian, creating a nonplace where comparison operates. Interestingly, translating “dash” into Portuguese yields “traço” or “tracinho”—the trace. The trace suggests absence and presence at the same time. It reminds us as well of those literatures that are missing from the formulation “Luso-Brazilian,” which are usually referred to as “lusophone African.”The idea of global comparison voiced in the title of this collection of articles invokes the dialectical relation between comparative and world literature, the utopian construction of a topos (the world) through an approach to literature that is nongeographical and supralinguistic. How does such a project fare when it kicks against the pricks of divisional slicing and dicing, such as those practiced by the premier organization in our field, the MLA? Elsewhere in this cluster, Françoise Lionnet provisionally answers this question: “The MLA should reexamine its binary separation of English from so-called foreign languages. The vibrant contemporary presence of many languages right here in the United States makes the MLA's basic structure increasingly irrelevant. Linguistic diversity has always existed on the ground in the United States…. But its role has been invisible to literary scholars who specialize in monolingual traditions reinforced by the MLA's separate domains” (221). Lionnet's statement defines the trace nature of polylingual reality on the ground. Were our episteme to be dominated by topographies of language, then we would need to organize so as to overcome these separate language domains. At its highest levels, however, the MLA is organized phonically, according to languages, then chronologically, and only then topically, that is, either by the topography of place or by topic.So, the “MTA” of my title does not signify the New York public transportation system that faithfully brings the valiant workers of the Manhattan MLA headquarters in to their work and then carries them back to home and family at the end of the day. The MTA in my title alludes to a heterotopical version of the MLA, the Modern Temporal/Topical Association, wherein “topos” is taken both in its basic meaning of “place” and in its metaphorical one of “topic.” My point is that while the “L” in MLA can sign both “language” and “literature,” the way the organizational structure of the MLA addresses its work has as much to do with temporae and topoi as it does with l-words. To repeat what is commonly known, the MLA was founded in 1883 (it is older than the MTA) to support and give voice to the study of modern, “live” languages as opposed to classical ones. It took from the more established and prestigious discipline of classics a philological approach to literature, which largely treated texts as depositories of linguistic data and emphasized commentary and translation over interpretation. Thus, the earliest division of the MLA was into a “phonetic section” and a “pedagogical section.” From the founding of the PMLA, philological and linguistics articles not only appeared alongside ones devoted to literary and cultural analysis but frequently outnumbered them. Tellingly, at the 1890 convention at Vanderbilt University, Professor John Phelps Fruit delivered a paper titled “A Plea for the Study of Literature from the Aesthetic Standpoint.”2As the MLA grew, its sections continued bifurcating until they became divisions. According to its website and judging by the way the program for its annual convention takes place, the MLA insists absolutely on the primacy of its divisional structure as the grounding episteme for scholarly work. The language is totalizing: “MLA divisions encompass the primary scholarly and professional concerns of the association” (emphasis mine).3 It is interesting to compare this epistemology with that of the other two organizations that support comparative and world literature: the International Comparative Literature Association and the American Comparative Literature Association. The latter organization has no divisions of any kind, while the former has research committees on a heterogeneous list of topics, from literary theory to literature and neuroscience.4When we examine the way the division structure as a whole accomplishes its encompassing of MLA scholarly and professional concerns, we find that little has changed since Reed Way Dasenbrock's analysis of “English department geography” in a 1987 issue of the ADE Bulletin.5 Notice, first of all, the “T” (topographical) idea as an organizational principle. Dasenbrock found that professional activity occurred within the limitations of four nested hierarchical structures, beginning with what he calls “us” and “them,” which is the most fundamental. In MLA terms, these are of course the English and the foreign language arms of the association, the Association of Departments of English and the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages, topically situated in the two main hotels of the convention. Next come the specific language areas, such as those of Lusophonia. Then comes the topographic situatedness of nationality. Here Dasenbrock shows his English affiliations when he notes the strong division between American and British in specialization, anthologization, and other regimes of knowledge production. Readers will be familiar with a similar divide within the Spanish language between Peninsular and American specializations, and this divide generally obtains in the study of the Portuguese language as well. Then there is frequently a final, smaller divider, usually a period of time, as one can see in the division structure that prominently features centuries. Only two divisions of the MLA are devoted to single authors: Chaucer and Shakespeare, leading to the former author being exiled from the language he wrote in—“Middle English Language and Literature, Excluding Chaucer.” Read without the comma, as a newspaper headline, this division title acquires a radical poignancy.Despite its nested hierarchies, the divisional structure of the MLA seems on its surface to be more favorable to comparative studies than, for example, funding entities at most universities. (consult the complete listing at the site referenced in endnote 3). There are no less than six divisions under the heading “Comparative Studies,” covering the predictable temporalities of literature from medieval to the twentieth century and also including European literary relations. This rivals the number of American divisions, which is eight. Genre studies, another rubric, seems to encourage and would certainly allow for comparative studies as well—of drama, of the novel, or of literary criticism, for example. Then there are the interdisciplinary divisions that delimit neither with an “L” (language) nor a “T” (topography), adding to the enforced or mandated comparison of the comparative studies divisions the implicit or allowed comparison of these rubrics.Yet in the end, such apparent promotions of comparativism are really fata morgana leading comparatists into the divisional desert to die of thirst. Comparative literature exists in those aporetic interstices that neither belong to nor can exist independently from structure, as Jacques Derrida has exemplified with the statement that the center of a structure is, “paradoxically, within the structure and outside it” (emphasis his).6 To put it another way, comparative literature has no object of study, the way most academic disciplines can be said to have one, or perhaps more accurately, can be said to construct one. Economics studies economy, sociology studies society, anthropology studies anthropoi, English studies English, Spanish studies Spanish, and of course Luso-Brazilian—as is evident from its name—studies Portuguese. But there is no comparative literature to be studied, it is only the studying. Comparative literature is the Humean third term not directly observed betwixt two (or more) objects.7 The statement “I study comparative literature” is a qualitatively different utterance from “I study English literature.” The latter delimits a corpus of texts, while the former gestures towards a methodology.Compared to the alternative isolationism of the major languages that are divided by period, the minor-language status of Lusophonia that allows it only a single division that dare not state its name seems to provide an advantage. The struggle for visibility from underneath the shadow of the major languages could be conducive to a kind of transnational solidarity. An example of how the division on Luso-Brazilian language and literature benefits from its singleton status is a session at the 2011 MLA: entitled “Luso-Brazilian Literatures and the Critical Global Humanities,” it cashed in doubly on the comparative opportunities provided, with presentations on the Angolan Manuel dos Santos Lima, the Brazilian João Guimarães Rosa in his global reception, and a comparison between Rubem Fonseca and the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. Even more promising, then, are the other singleton and doubletons, such as East Asian literatures and African literatures. Rather than being isolated in luxury suites or skyboxes at a football game, as happens with the American and English literature divisions, scholars in these divisions enjoy a forced camaraderie, like travelers in a train compartment on a long journey, perhaps a three-day one from Paris to Lisbon. Such situations can produce a remarkable amount of cultural interchange; they can also result in fistfights and mutual incomprehension. Incomprehension may especially appear when resources are scarce, and other hungry travelers are eyeing your extravagant mortadella sandwich. In the academy, scarcity is measured mostly in FTEs; in the MLA it is mostly gauged in guaranteed paper sessions, and the belief seems to reign that the more papers in your language area that are delivered at the MLA and the better positioned that area is in terms of knowledge production, the larger its footprint on the global map as drawn by the MLA becomes. Admittedly, the attraction of the cozy, big tent of a single division under which all of Lusutopia can fit depends in part on the seeming coordination with other events that may or may not be part of the MLA structure: the number of interviews for Portuguese-language positions, for example, or the number of field-specific offerings at the book exhibit. In any case, however, rather than dividing the field further, I would prefer to see an even larger tent, a topos we can all relate to, or a new divisional episteme corresponding more closely to postcolonial realities I now briefly discuss.As with English, the idea of Lusophonia encompasses both those nations that have evolved independent literatures and relatively strong domestic readerships for those literatures over the course of centuries—Brazil and Portugal—and at the same time also those emergent nations such as Angola, Cape Verde, and Mozambique, whose authors must frequently be published in Portugal or Brazil rather than in their native countries and whose works are heavily marked by an appeal to readers outside national and even regional boundaries. The lack of readership within these nations stems from the distance of the Portuguese language from the majority of their populations, or, to put it inversely, from the polylingual reality on the ground of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, or São Tomé. The name of the single MLA division responsible for all activities, Luso-Brazilian, mirrors that of the most venerable scholarly quarterly in the field, which was founded in 1964, before the wars of independence laid the groundwork for the entry of the literatures of lusophone Africa onto the world stage. The first article to quote an African author in Luso-Brazilian Review was Don Burness's four-page treatment of Nzinga Mbandi and Angolan Independence in 1977.8 (The authors were Agostinho Neto and Manuel Pacavira.) The dash deceives with its implied comparative “and,” when it really means “or”: choose one of the two then-independent nations with Portuguese as an official language. At present, however, the name seems to indicate something more akin to “Lusutopia plus Brazil,” meaning “Brazil and the rest of the lusophone countries.”In contrast, in a survey article on Portuguese-language literature as world literature, Earl Fitz takes care either to pair or differentiate “Luso-Brazilian” and “Luso-African.”9 Writers such as José Eduardo Agualusa (1960–) of Angola and Mia Couto (1955–) of Mozambique function as translators and literary intermediaries on two levels, first, between the largely oral cultures existing in local languages in their nations and their official and literary language of Portuguese, and second, between local, African conditions and a world readership. Couto has said the following about the language situation in Mozambique: “Portuguese is not yet the language of Mozambique, but it is without doubt the language of Mozambiqueness” (“A lingua portuguesa não é, ainda, a lingua de Moçambique, mas é seguramente a lingua da moçambicanidade”).10 Couto notes that only about 5 percent of Mozambicans have Portuguese as a mother tongue, placing the others in a situation whereby they are only exposed to this discourse of nation, this Mozambiqueness, in translation. He has also composed at least one novel on the theme of translation. The unnamed, first-person narrator-protagonist begins by recounting his experiences as a translator and defending himself against the charge of distorting reality: ‘It was I who wrote down, in visible Portuguese, the discourses that follow…. While events were happening, I was translator in the service of the administration of the city of Tizangara…. I was accused of lying, of falsifying proofs of the [soldiers’] murder. I was condemned” (translation mine) (“Fui eu que transcrevi, em português visível, as falas que daqui se seguem…. Na altura dos acontecimentos, eu era tradutor ao serviço da administração de Tizangara…. Fui acusado de mentir, falsear as provas de assassinato. Me condenaram”).11 The narrator is a prosthetic self of the author who condemns himself for his inability to convey the multilingual situation on the ground except through translation.José Eduardo Agualusa, who was born in Angola but who has spent a considerable amount of time in both in Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro, has expressed this situation thus: “African writers are in a curious position: Our readers are not in our own countries but in Europe. We write for foreigners, and it changes the way we write. We, as African authors, are more like translators—always trying to translate our reality for the foreign reader. I see it as a challenge more than an obstacle, however—a challenge that forces us to find literary solutions for our fiction.”12 In this sense, it is interesting to note the name of the official structure of so-called lusophone countries: it is not what I have just said in introducing it but rather “countries with Portuguese as an official language,” thus emphasizing that Lusutopia does not entirely coincide with Lusophonia, and in fact that it exceeds the conceptual space accorded to the lusophone. Conversely, a dominant theme of the prose fiction of Portugal after the end of its empire in the late 1970s has been the memory of Africa and its deferred deployment in the Portuguese psyche. Witness how this plays out in the fiction of António Lobo Antunes, for example, from Fado Alexandrino to Esplendor de Portugal and beyond.13 These novels use stream-of-consciousness technique to construct a u-topian space of narrative in which the reader experiences repeated shocks of temporal and geographical dislocation, as the trauma of Portuguese colonization and colonial warfare replay itself in the psyches and discourse of Lobo Antunes's protagonists. Like veteran roller-coaster riders, readers of Lobo Antunes learn to expect the experience of sudden dislocations between continents in the flow of the protagonists' acts of memory and retelling, in their attempts to recover the trace of their lost experiences in lusophone colonialism.Obviously, the MLA by itself cannot be expected to solve the issues addressed by lusophone African authors. It cannot by itself promote the study of the local languages spoken on the ground of Lusutopia or the study of their relation to the official language of Portuguese. The recent provision allowing for joint sessions might encourage collaboration between the Luso-Brazilian and the one and only division on African literatures. But the MLA should also recognize that there are scholarly and academic concerns related to modern languages that its present divisional structure fails to encompass. And Luso-Brazilianists should indeed be comparatists.

After its heyday from the 1950s until the early 1970s, a crisis in the field of comparative literature was declared present by its practitioners during the 1980s. The effects of the perceived crisis were felt not only during conferences but also through brutal budget cuts and the downsizing of comparative literature departments across the world. In the decades that followed, various attempts to address the crisis were made by critics such as Franco Moretti, Pascale Casanova, Alexander Beecroft, among many others. As a result, methods and concepts such as “distant reading,” “evolutionary literary history,” “literary ecologies,” and “world republic of letters” easily became the theoretical and methodological bulwark of numerous comparative literature departments against the perceived effects of the crisis. Incidentally, in his seminal Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel, Resil Mojares deployed similar ideas and concepts, however, to different ends. This paper, then, is first an attempt to analyze Mojares’ deployment of the said concepts and methods vis-à-vis to that of Beecroft, Casanova, and Moretti’s. Finally, the paper also seeks to identify and elaborate on specific implications and possibilities made visible by Mojares’ methodological interventions in the field and practice of comparative literature in the Philippines.Keywords: Crisis, comparative literature, literary history, Mojares, methodological intervention, Philippines.Cite as: Mendoza III, A.A.G. (2018). Resil Mojares and the crisis of comparative literature in the Philippines. Journal of Nusantara Studies, 3(2), 80-91. http://dx.doi.org/10.24200/jonus.vol3iss2pp80-91

Comparative literature is one of the academic disciplines belonging to the humanities, which has a history of over 100 years. It is also a sub-discipline under the subject category of literary studies in general although it does cover almost all the aspects of literary studies, such as literary history, literary theory, and literary criticism. Comparative literature is characterized by the study of two or more literatures crossing the boundary of languages, nations, religious beliefs, disciplines, and cultural traditions by both dealing with the factual influence of one literature on another and others and comparing and analysing two or more literary phenomena which do not necessarily have any factual relations but which could be observed in a comparative and parallel way. In the contemporary era, comparative literature, influenced by the process of globalization, merges more or less with cultural studies. Its earliest phase is that of world literature, which in the age of globalization has become one of the most cutting-edge theoretical topics. Having close relations with translation studies, comparative literature also interacts with translation studies since it deals with two or more than two languages.

As an outstanding representative of modern Japanese literature, Natsume Soseki has an important position in the history of modern Japanese literature. He is a world-renowned novelist who has written many excellent novels. However, it is far from enough to study Natsume Soseki's literature only from the aspects of novels. Throughout Natsume Soseki's life, he studied Chinese studies since childhood, has great enthusiasm and interest in Chinese literature, and has a high accomplishment in Chinese literature. However, his outstanding ability in Chinese poetry was covered up by his writing ability in novels, which did not get the attention of the academic circle. Natsume Soseki's Chinese poems are in the same vein as Chinese poems, and he draws on and learns from ancient Chinese poems in the aspects of creation techniques and theme emotions. From the perspective of cultural studies, this paper makes an in-depth study of the relationship between Natsume Soseki's Chinese poetry and ancient Chinese poetry by means of comparative study. On the basis of previous studies, this paper expounds Natsume Soseki's Chinese poetry creation and its sinology origin, analyzes and summarizes the Chinese elements in his Chinese poetry works, in order to explore Natsume Soseki's contribution to the cross-communication field of Chinese poetry between China and Japan.

Chinese Narrative Poetry brings a new perspective to some of China's best-loved and most influential poems, including Ts'ai Yen's Poem of Affliction, Po Chu-yi's Song of Everlasting Sorrow, and Wei Chuang's recently discovered Song of the Lady of Ch'in. Composed in the shih form during the Late Han, Six Dynasties, and T'ang periods, these poems stand out as masterworks of narrative art. Yet paradoxically, their narrative qualities have been little recognized or explored in either traditional Chinese or modern Western scholarship. The reason for this neglect is that Western literary traditions acknowledge their origins in epic poetry and thus take narrative for granted, but the Chinese tradition is fundametally based on lyric and does not admit of a separate category for narrative poetry. Drawing on both classical Chinese critical works and the most recent Western contributions to the theory of narrative, Levy shows how narrative elements developed out of the lyrical conventions of shih. In doing so, she accomplishes a double purpose, guiding the modern reader to an understanding of the nature of narrative in Chinese poetry and shedding light on the ways in which Chinese poets adapted the devises of lyric to the needs of a completely different expressive mode. Students of Chinese literature will welcome this pathbreaking study, but Chinese Narrative Poetry will interest other scholars as well because it addresses questions of crucial importance for literary theory and comparative literature, particularly the central issue of the applicability of Western critical concepts to non-Western literature and culture.

Authorship attribution broadly is defined as an analysis of individuals’ writing styles, which has been attracting a lot of interest. Although the problem has been widely explored, no previous studies attempt to identify Chinese classical poetry. In this paper, we presented a public classical poetry corpus in Tang Dynasty for Chinese authorship attribution. As a particular literal form, the theme feature plays a crucial role in Chinese poetry authorship attribution. To integrate the topic feature of the Chinese poem, we employed the latent Dirichlet allocation model to capture the extra theme information. Meanwhile, due to the incoherent expression of poetry text, it is hard to capture incoherence information effectively from Chinese poems. To tackle this problem, we propose a combination model called LDA-Transformer to perform authorship attribution of Chinese poetry. We conduct systematical evaluations for the proposed method on three Chinese poetry datasets. The experimental results suggest that the topic feature can effectively improve the performance of authorship attribution in Chinese poetry. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on related baseline methods.