Discipline Of Comparative Literature Research Articles

Breaking the Boundaries: Reimagining the Comparative Literary Method and Pedagogy in the Philippine Literature Classrooms

At present, the Philippines is the only country that still implements the remote learning setup due to the COVID19 pandemic. This ongoing condition has placed educators to rethink how to scaffold the lessons and hone the demands of the 21st century amidst the current limitations of Filipino teachers and students. The challenge is to commit to a consistent dialogue in the virtual classroom without compromising the necessary skills, content, and learning competencies to hone the students’ literary competence. Even before the pandemic, the discipline of comparative literature has had ongoing debates about its interdisciplinarity, its framework and method as a mode of inquiry in the academia, and its pedagogy in relation to teaching world literature. With the COVID19 pandemic, the compelling issues of the discipline resurface as another layer of challenge is apparent: engaging the students to read and examine the literary texts not just through close reading, but with an eye for parity in online distance learning. This perspective article seeks to showcase how, for now, the only comparative literature program in the country offered at the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the University of the Philippines Diliman can be integrated into teaching literature in universities and classrooms in the Philippines. More importantly, this paper seeks to propose ways to streamline the program in making up for the Philippine comparative literary studies through its method, and pedagogy.

Geopolitics of Comparison: World LiteratureAvant la Lettre

AbstractAccording to a well-known narrative, the concept of Weltliteratur and its academic correlative, the discipline of comparative literature, originated in Germany and France in the early nineteenth century, influenced by the spread of scientism and nationalism. But there is another genesis story that begins in the late eighteenth century in Spain and Italy, countries with histories entangled with the Arab presence in Europe during the medieval period. Emphasizing the role of Arabic in the formation of European literatures, Juan Andrés wrote the first comparative history of “all literature,” before the concepts of Weltliteratur and comparative literature gained currency. The divergence of the two genesis stories is the result of competing geopolitical interests, which determine which literatures enter into the sphere of comparison, on what terms, within which paradigms, and under what ideological and discursive conditions.

Internal Colonialism and the Discipline of Comparative Literature in Iran

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.

Mutant worlds, migrant words: Rabindranath Tagore, Mahasweta Devi and Amitav Ghosh

Drawing upon the insights of Rabindranath Tagore, who coined the term viswasahitya to express his own understanding of comparative literature, this essay resituates translation as the cornerstone for new directions in world literature. While conventional understandings of world literature tend to reconfirm existing power structures and hierarchies, translation opens up the possibility of thinking beyond the national/global binary by interrogating the lines along which such binaries are conceptualized. Translation operates at the borders that are seen to divide cultures, languages, worldviews and geographies. This essay explores the dynamic relationship between translation and world literature within contemporary South Asian writing, through an analysis of heteroglossia, multilingualism and ‘translatedness’ in selected texts by Mahasweta Devi and Amitav Ghosh, opening up larger questions about multilingualism and also about the very discipline of comparative literature. Highlighting the role that translation has historically played in shaping power relations in the world, this paper projects the transformative potential of translation as the key to a radical reconceptualization of a world literature for the future.

Comparative Literature, Variation Theory, and a New Construction of World Literature(s)

Abstract: In "Comparative Literature, Variation Theory, and a New Construction of World Literature(s)" Wang Chao discusses Shunqing Cao’s "variation theory" as a framework in the discipline of comparative literature and its applicability for a new construction of world literature(s). Wang argues that Goethe’s concept of world literature can be expanded and developed for a new construction of the idea of world literature(s). Wang’s principal argument is that comparative literature in today’s heterogeneity and cross-cultural variabilities can be revived with the notions of variation and its connecting aspect of world literature. Both variation theory and perspectives of the concept of "new world literature" are based in recent insights in comparative literature, on variations of literary exchange, on interpretation in crosscivilization literary circulation, translation, and production. Wang proposes that these views broaden and adjust the boundary of comparability, thus injecting much-needed vitality into comparative literature and world literature research.

"النار العاتية التي ذاقت من طعم وهج اللهيب:"

This article offers the first Arabic translation of a praise hymn dedicated to Ramsess II (d. 1213 B.C.E.), with philological and poetic commentaries. The text was carved on the facade of Abū Simbel temple twice because of its exceptional literary nature, as this study demonstrates. I discuss why Euro- American scholars were unable to separate the literary dimensions of the praise hymns from its political framework, and also tackle the pictorial nature of ancient Egyptian writing, providing the Arabic reader with the necessary instruments for understanding the several visual features that were creatively deployed by the writer to enhance the reading process of this particular praise hymn. I then trace the early foundations of premodern Arabic khiṭāba and its close relation to constructing oral/aural arguments in comparison with balāgha that deals with the literary devices of the Qur’ānic text. This study breaks new ground in the discipline of comparative literature by establishing a collation between the two praise hymns of Ramsess II (d. 1213 B.C.E.) and Senwosret III (d. 1839 B.C.E.). This collation makes it possible to rediscover the way each eulogist built unique or similar images to describe the praised king. The article discusses several problematic questions of loanwords to pave the way for further research on ancient Egyptian words that were incorporated inside the classical Arabic dictionary, and the analysis ends with an ancient Egyptian-Arabic lexicon of the hymn under study. It is hoped that this may encourage the new generation of Egyptian Egyptologists to generate a comprehensive dictionary of the ancient Egyptian language based on direct engagement with ancient Egyptian literary texts.

Claudio Guillén en Harvard, génesis del comparatismo español

En el presente trabajo se reconstruye el paso de Claudio Guillén por la Universidad de Harvard, donde se formó como comparatista junto a varios de los mejores estudiosos del momento, y donde ejerció como profesor durante sus últimos años en Estados Unidos. Esta revisión de la trayectoria profesional y personal de Claudio Guillén ayuda a entender la evolución de la disciplina de la Literatura Comparada en la Universidad de Harvard dentro del marco del comparatismo norteamericano de postguerra, los estudios literarios del propio Claudio Guillén y su esfuerzo por impulsar la disciplina de la Literatura Comparada en España, así como la particular circunstancia social de los intelectuales españoles y sus familias en el exilio. Para todos estos asuntos, la documentación administrativa y personal custodiada en los Archivos de Harvard resulta fundamental.

Cross-Cultural Migration and the Academic Boundaries of Comparative Literature

Abstract The increase in global population movements and migration has transformed comparative literature and generated new fields of inquiry, such as the study of diaspora, immigrant, and Chinese literatures. Although both the French and American schools of analysis have historically made important contributions to the discipline of comparative literature, the aforementioned transformations have led some scholars to critique these schools as Eurocentric, Orientalist, or Western-centric. By reviewing and comparing the development of the discipline of comparative literature, this article argues that Chinese scholars' proposals for cross-civilization and variation study of comparative literature have brought new vitality to the discipline, further expanding its academic boundaries, and making it truly open and inclusive.

Literatura nacional e Literatura Comparada: uma perspectiva brasileira

No Brasil, o comparatismo entre culturas e literaturas já estava presente em obras literárias que antecederam a consolidação da Literatura Comparada como disciplina, e professores e pesquisadores de literatura nacional têm sempre recorrido ao comparatismo: comparando escritores e obras, modos de escrever, modos de abordar temas e períodos literários etc. Em outras palavras, o comparatismo não é apenas praticado na disciplina de Literatura Comparada mas também em outras disciplinas de literaturas nacionais. Neste artigo, também argumentarei que "comparáveis" (sempre no plural) não são apenas orientações, como o historiador Marcel Detienne acredita, mas estruturas que contém pelo menos dois objetos diferentes, e teorias ou ideias que os relacionam entre si.

"النار العاتية التي ذاقت من طعم وهج اللهيب:"

This article offers the first Arabic translation of a praise hymn dedicated to Ramsess II (d. 1213 B.C.E.), with philological and poetic commentaries. The text was carved on the facade of Abū Simbel temple twice because of its exceptional literary nature, as this study demonstrates. I discuss why Euro- American scholars were unable to separate the literary dimensions of the praise hymns from its political framework, and also tackle the pictorial nature of ancient Egyptian writing, providing the Arabic reader with the necessary instruments for understanding the several visual features that were creatively deployed by the writer to enhance the reading process of this particular praise hymn. I then trace the early foundations of premodern Arabic khiṭāba and its close relation to constructing oral/aural arguments in comparison with balāgha that deals with the literary devices of the Qur’ānic text. This study breaks new ground in the discipline of comparative literature by establishing a collation between the two praise hymns of Ramsess II (d. 1213 B.C.E.) and Senwosret III (d. 1839 B.C.E.). This collation makes it possible to rediscover the way each eulogist built unique or similar images to describe the praised king. The article discusses several problematic questions of loanwords to pave the way for further research on ancient Egyptian words that were incorporated inside the classical Arabic dictionary, and the analysis ends with an ancient Egyptian-Arabic lexicon of the hymn under study. It is hoped that this may encourage the new generation of Egyptian Egyptologists to generate a comprehensive dictionary of the ancient Egyptian language based on direct engagement with ancient Egyptian literary texts.

World Literature and the Italian Literary Canon: From Elena Ferrante to Natalia Ginzburg

Variously intended as a field of study, a paradigm, and/or a method of literary criticism, World Literature has in the last two decades become a central subject in literary studies. The current debate around World Literature is certainly central to the present and the future of the discipline of Comparative Literature. At the same time, as I show in this paper, a redefinition of World Literature, which would include a deeper understanding of both its risks and its potential benefits, can push us towards a revision of the canon(s) of our national literary traditions. Moving from Tim Park’s assertion that the popularity of Elena Ferrante’s “dull global novel” would contribute to obscuring more deserving authors – among whom he cites Natalia Ginzburg – this paper argues that Ferrante’s literary success could, on the contrary, pave the way for a rediscovery of past writers within the Italian literary tradition. Through a comparison of Ferrante’s L’Amica Geniale and Ginzburg’s La Strada che Va in Citta, the article shows how both works are, in Pheng Cheah’s terms, “literature that worlds and makes a world”, insofar as they foreground a world that is open and unstable, crucially caught between tradition and modernity, as well as the local and the global. Ultimately, both works call for a conception of World Literature that does not need to imply the loss of the local, but that can rather promote what Florian Mussgnug calls “responsible and responsive local sensitivity”.

Chaucer and the future of world literature

AbstractTranslations of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales raise timely questions for World Literature and the discipline of Comparative Literature. Chaucer exemplifies tensions at the heart of literary study under globalization: local particularities are highly valued in a global marketplace even as global circulation demands universal appeal. This afterword explores this tension by assessing Chaucer's place in World Literature anthologies alongside references to the World Literature canon in this cluster of essays about The Canterbury Tales. The conclusion proposes Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's concept of globalectics as a path forward for medieval literature within Comparative Literature.

Review Essay: World Literature

For the past 15 years the rapidly advancing field of World Literature has revitalized comparative literary studies, given rise to a series of on-going debates, and also brought about a noticeable increase in university offerings and publishing ventures focused on that elusive concept. Besides the substantive books that have been steadily coming out ever since David Damrosch dusted off the notion of World Literature – then mostly a preserve of publishers of anthologies – we have also seen several readers, companions and introductions being published to serve what clearly is perceived as a rising and expanding market. In part this has to do with the varying, sometimes conflicting, forms of conceptualizing the field. Even if most still refer back to Goethe’s notions of an idealized Weltliteratur, twenty-first-century interpretations necessarily expand and problematize the basic concept from a variety of comparative and theoretical perspectives. This could not but be considering the claims made in the name of World Literature to reshape literary studies, especially in relation to the discipline of Comparative Literature and the field of Postcolonial Studies.

Legitimizing Empire: Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican Cultural Critique by Faye Caronan

Reviewed by: Legitimizing Empire: Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican Cultural Critique by Faye Caronan Charlie Samuya Veric Faye Caronan Legitimizing Empire: Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican Cultural Critique Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 208 pages. Why compare? And why now? In the wake of the transnational turn in area studies wherein borders that constrain knowledge are opened up, such questions may appear outdated. Their implications, however, remain robust especially for the future of comparison in the Global South. Faye Caronan's Legitimizing Empire: Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican Cultural Critique shows us why. In the West the comparative imagination has a relatively long history. The discipline of comparative literature, for example, flourished in the US after the Second World War, a development that coincided with the escalation of the Cold War, during which the culture of others became an integral part of statecraft and international diplomacy. More recently, American studies—the larger field within which Caronan's work is situated—has seen the rise of transnationalism, expanding the investigation of US history and culture to include those of other state formations in the age of globalization. The literature embodying such developments that put comparison front and center is too broad to be enumerated here. But such breadth cannot be said about Philippine studies, a field that Legitimizing Empire also addresses, whose emergence as an academic domain corresponded with the rise of comparative literature on US shores after the Second World War. It is not unfair to say that comparison has yet to find its rightful place in the study of Philippine society, history, and culture. The late Benedict Anderson, himself a comparatist, gestured toward this possibility in The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (Verso, 2001). The title of his book comes from no less than José Rizal, a point that may suggest the deep roots of comparative imagination in Filipino consciousness. But comparative scholarly studies done by local scholars are still hard to come by in the Philippines. This lack is ironic given the ecological and cultural diversity of the archipelago, a condition that suggests quite the opposite. Given such a diverse ecology and culture, the lay of the Filipino mind should be comparative, so to speak. The reality, however, could not be more untrue. Consider the lack of comparison in literary studies, which is rather bizarre given the fact [End Page 395] that Filipino scholars—Bienvenido Lumbera comes to mind—had been formally trained in comparative literature at American universities as early as the 1960s. Indeed, comparative literary studies remains marginal in Filipino scholarship, especially those that tackle American themes alongside Filipino questions. Since the publication of Lucilla Hosillos's Philippine–American Literary Relations, 1898–1941 (University of the Philippines Press) in 1969, for example, nothing similar has been done by a Filipino scholar on this side of the Pacific. Such a lack is a scandal given the prominence of American influence on Philippine history in the last hundred or so years. Caronan's work is accordingly significant in that it throws open the underlying principles that define cultural relations between the Philippines and the US. What is more, she includes another dimension that expands the scope of comparison—the case of Puerto Rico, a US Commonwealth. The origins of Legitimizing Empire go back to Caronan's undergraduate years at Cornell University, when she heard fellow students in the Latino Studies Resource Center talking about US colonialism in Puerto Rico while she was poring over an article by E. San Juan Jr in the nearby Asian American Resource Center. Caronan would later pursue the connections between the Philippines and Puerto Rico while completing her dissertation at the University of California, San Diego. The final product is Legitimizing Empire, Caronan's first book. Legitimizing Empire argues that US exceptionalism has delegitimized, and therefore neutralized, the critiques that are expressed in cultural texts produced by people of color, primarily Filipino American and US Puerto Rican. Looking comparatively at novels, documentary films, performance poetry, travelogues, and travel guides, Caronan illuminates the workings of US exceptionalism and highlights the deep but concealed connections that not only bind the two diasporic communities with...

Antjie Krog’s <i>Mede-wete/Synapse</i> as a challenge to new ways of comparative reading

This article reads Antjie Krog’s volume of poetry Mede-wete and its English version Synapse (both published in 2014) against the background of Rebecca Walkowitz’s proposal that the future of comparative literature will entail what she calls ‘foreign reading’. In her contribution to the American Association of Comparative Literature’s 2015 report on the state of the discipline of comparative literature (http://stateofthediscipline.acla.org) Walkowitz argues that literary texts increasingly enter the world in different languages and that this requires readings that move away from the idea that literary texts ‘belong’ to a single language, that explore the diverse ways in which they are read in different languages and that acknowledges that literary texts exist in the space created by a language’s relationship to other languages. This article takes Walkowitz’s observations as the vantage point for a discussion of the ways in which Krog’s volume (1) foreignises the Afrikaans language in order to become part of an interconnected whole; (2) urges readers, critics and literary practitioners to move beyond the confines of language-based literary systems; and (3) forces them to engage in a variety of different readings, including partial readings and collaborative readings, in order to become embedded in a larger community

Rabindranath Tagore and World Literature

Courses on world literature in English translations indicate to a new popular trend in the discipline of comparative literature in North American universities. Some scholars like David Damrosch promote the practice as a new way of doing comparative literature, but others like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak think that an encyclopedic survey of world literatures in English translations confirms the logic of globalization. Whether the world literature courses and anthologies in English translation inspire enthusiasm or invite reservation, the question "What is world literature?" has come to the fore as one of the central concerns of the discipline. In 1907, eighty years after German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Germany coined the term Weltliteratur, Rabindranath Tagore in India expressed his views on “comparative literature” translating it as vishwa sahitya, “world literature.” My paper is a reading of Tagore’s lecture on world literature. Tagore envisions world literature as a creative transgression that activates a persistent human struggle for a bonding between aesthetics and alterity.

The Much-Maligned Panegyric:

Abstract This article examines the panegyric across the literary traditions of West, South, and East Asia, concentrating on Arabo-Persian qaṣīda, the Sanskrit praśasti, and the Chinese fu. In radically different albeit analogous ways, these three genres elaborated a political aesthetics of literary form that corresponded to many key features of epideictic rhetoric. All three genres cultivated a metapoetics for praising rulers and patrons that bolstered poetry's political status. All three genres were additionally conditioned by the panegyric's characteristic indirection whereby the object of praise shifts in the course of the text's unfolding. In elucidating a differential politics of literary form, the essay aims to deepen the interface between poetics and power in premodern literary cultures and to stimulate the discipline of comparative literature to move beyond its reliance on more familiar European genres as normative modes of literary expression.

What Do We Do When the Other Speaks Her Own Language: Returning to the Ethics of Comparativism

This article examines the ethical dimensions of the Other, as it is configured in the discipline of Comparative Literature, particularly as it is practiced in the US in the recent proliferation of critical schools that claim to engage alterity in a respectful and inclusive fashion. It begins with a summary of the philosophical employments of the Other dating from the Greeks through Existentialism. It then investigates the role of the Other in the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur and the historiography of Michel de Certeau. Examining how these conceptions of alterity have impacted upon literary studies, attention is then turned to the work of Emmanuel Levinas. How can the thoughts of these various thinkers contribute to and/or reanimate current theoretical approachs to “reading” the Other that appear to have become the goal of literary studies today?

At What Cost “Theory”? An Economics and Poetics of Uptake

At What Cost “Theory”? An Economics and Poetics of Uptake Kay Dickinson (bio) I’ll start with a vignette: a coffee break during some academic event or other. A number of us who teach Arab cinema are discussing our syllabi, sharing tips on readings that have excited our classes. “Have you noticed,” remarks one of our cluster, “how everyone’s using Rancière?” It’s an observation we all corroborate, not just those of us based in the French philosopher’s home continent of Europe or in North American institutions, but also faculty from various Anglo- or Francophone universities in the Middle East. We joke that the critical apparatuses of scholars working in English and French favor Jacques Rancière over and above most Arab writers, or once-resident comrades such as Frantz Fanon. There has been a Rancière reading group in Cairo. While we focus on the histories and cinematic production that hail squarely from one region, the philosophies used to analyze them originate from elsewhere. Mohamed Zayani, one of the few scholars to address this phenomenon in media education, confirms that, “for the most part, the tendency is to use Western media theories and methodologies and to fall back on foreign analytical frameworks to examine internal dynamics, an endeavor which does not sufficiently heed to interpretative challenges posed by various media developments in the Arab world.”1 Speaking from within the discipline of Comparative Literature, Alexander Key observes how, “Even though our current theoretical conversation, with its roots in Europe, is now a creature of the whole world, shaped by global literature, inclusive thereof, and trained to be aware of the problematics of power, core, and periphery therein, Arabists are still in no position to advocate for the inclusion of Arabic thinkers on our departments’ theory reading lists.”2 [End Page 433] The goal of this essay is to look deeper into how and why this has happened. I do not intend to glibly berate any one French thinker—or film theory of the Global North at large—for their unsolicited uptake by Arab cinema scholarship. Instead, my concern is with the economic as well as epistemological ramifications of this centrality. It is less by chance or merit that figures such as Rancière become touchstones, nor, clearly, on account of the incontestable applicability of their ideas. What I hope to make apparent is a set of geopolitical forces at work within the region and its study that favor certain modes of thought to the obfuscation of other, often local, ones. To do so requires an examination of how models of largely privatized and foreign-language education collude not only with foreign policy interests in the region, but also their advance of particular brands of global capitalism. While film theory might aspire to function at metalevels, usefully of service wherever its ambition is sought, it could be argued that this very universalizing aspiration, when delivered from a distinct geographical provenance, unwittingly counteracts the often leftist bids for equality for which theory is so often celebrated. This is not a call for some lonely regress to an impossibly Arab-only body of thought. Media scholar Tarik Sabry wisely warns us against how, “discourses of ta’sseel (authentication) seem to have, unfortunately, overtaken as the main intellectual objective, leaving little space for self-reflection and critique.”3 Such a move would also discredit some of the most stimulating philosophical maneuvers to stem from the nahda (Renaissance) tradition in Arab thought. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the present day, Arab scholars have strategically absorbed, critiqued, and transformed French political philosophy and practice in particular, and with efficacious irony, for the purposes of national liberation.4 Muhammad Kurd ‘Ali, speaking in 1923, summarizes and justifies a long-held respect for France: If we, Eastern peoples, especially the inhabitants of the Near East, say that we have taken from Western civilization, we mean French civilization, and more accurately, the civilization whose rays emanated from Paris . . . When injustice and coercion exhausted you, you turned these lofty palaces into public museums and changed those houses of injustice and darkness into seats of justice, learning and light.5 But just as colonization...

The Digital Humanities and National Security

Umberto Eco has suggested that we imagine a methodological bifurcation in the intellectual culture of late medieval missionary Christianity, a bifurcation presenting two quite distinct responses to the biblical story of Babel and the post-Roman allegory of “Europe” it represents. This essay suggests that we reconsider some of the most important debates in u.s.-based literary and cultural studies during the last two decades and imagine them as genealogically sprung from this bifurcation in responses to linguistic diversity during the formation of the idea of Europe. Over the last twenty years or so, responding to world-historical transitions like those of 1989-91 and 2001, the discipline of comparative literature has reexamined some of its key concepts (world, comparison, translation) as well as what is probably the most distinctive aspect of its method, acquired professional multilingualism. It is only more recently that a nominally newer formation based more exclusively in departments of English studies has re-presented us with comparative literature’s methodological counterpart or other, and with its own intellectual and also ethical challenges. That formation is the digital humanities, understood as what the author calls, adapting a phrase from David Golumbia, a culture of computation—and grasped in its emergence after 2001, alongside a surge of u.s. national security legislation and institution-building.