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Concepts Of World Literature, Comparative Literature, And A Proposal, Marián Gálik
Concepts Of World Literature, Comparative Literature, And A Proposal, Marián Gálik
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "Concepts of World Literature, Comparative Literature, and a Proposal," Marián Gálik surveys the concept of world literature as it occurs within comparative literature based on Goethe's Weltliteratur. Given its recurrent yet problematic occurrence, he proposes a way in which comparatists can acknowledge and address the problems of the concept of a world literature. The concept is surveyed across various texts and studies and is mapped out in accordance with the ways in which it has been defined and discussed. The picture that emerges is the problem of national delimitations within the context of an international setting. Gálik …
Interliterariness As A Concept In Comparative Literature, Marián Gálik
Interliterariness As A Concept In Comparative Literature, Marián Gálik
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "Interliterariness as a Concept in Comparative Literature," Marián Gálik observes that the concept of interliterariness has a relative short history and limited application owing to geo-political reasons. He traces the history of the concept and cites instances of its use within the Central European scholarship of comparative literature. Dionýz Durišin is identified as the most prominent exponent of the concept and Gálik then locates the question of interliterariness within the context of its potential applications. The concept of interliterariness is defended as both a guiding and unifying principle in so far as it is irreducible, relative, and …
Comparative Literature In India, Amiya Dev
Comparative Literature In India, Amiya Dev
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "Comparative Literature in India," Amiya Dev bases his discussion on the fact that India has many languages and literatures thus representing an a priori situation and conditions of diversity. He therefore argues that to speak of an Indian literature in the singular is problematic. Nonetheless, Dev also observes that to speak of Indian literature in the plural is equally problematic. Such a characterization, he urges, either overlooks or obscures manifest interrelations and affinities. His article compares the unity and the diversity thesis, and identifies the relationship between Indian commonality and differences as the prime site of comparative …
Comparative Literature And The Ideology Of Metaphor, East And West, Karl S.Y. Kao
Comparative Literature And The Ideology Of Metaphor, East And West, Karl S.Y. Kao
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "Comparative Literature and the Ideology of Metaphor, East and West," Karl S.Y. Kao offers a comparative reading of the ideological function of metaphor within Eastern and Western thinking. Nietzsche is recognized as the earliest serious challenger to the concepts of meaning and truth within the West, whilst Derrida and de Man are discussed with respect to their conception that figurality is inherent within -- and integral to -- Western philosophical and literary discourse. Parallel to this conception of conceptuality is the Eastern view of language and literature. Kao notes that the Western opposition between logic and rhetoric …
Theory, Period Styles, And Comparative Literature As Discipline, Slobodan Sucur
Theory, Period Styles, And Comparative Literature As Discipline, Slobodan Sucur
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "Theory, Period Styles, and Comparative Literature as Discipline," Slobodan Sucur attempts to answer the following question: Can a rapprochement be brought about between various, often antagonistic, literary-theoretical views and the concept of comparative literature itself, which requires accord, consensus, agreement, etc., for it to function as a concrete body and discipline? Sucur attempts dealing with this question in three parts of the paper: First, he establishes a relationship/link between the theoretical discord of today (humanism, formalism, deconstruction, etc.) and the high theorizing which began during the Jena-Berlin phase of Romanticism (Shelling, Hegel, F. Schlegel, etc.); secondly, he …
Comparative Literature In China, Xiaoyi Zhou, Q. S. Tong
Comparative Literature In China, Xiaoyi Zhou, Q. S. Tong
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In their co-authored article, "Comparative Literature in China," Xiaoyi Zhou and Q.S. Tong present a brief intellectual and institutional history of the discipline. According to Zhou and Tong, main features of the history of comparative literature in China include the fact that as an academic discipline and a mode of intellectual inquiry imported to China from the West in the early twentieth century, the discpline has always been a priori strategically political and the proposition that the development of comparative literature in China is closely related to the formation of China’s literary modernity includes the parallel issue of national identity. …
Comparative Literature As Textual Anthropology, Antony Tatlow
Comparative Literature As Textual Anthropology, Antony Tatlow
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "Comparative Literature as Textual Anthropology," Antony Tatlow proposes textual anthropology as a critic's approach in the comparative study of literature. If anthropology is "behavioural hermeneutics" (Clifford Geertz) with the implication of self-reflexivity, the anthropologist will be disposed to fashion in the object of attention what is neglected and that can therefore be described as the unconscious of his/her own culture. In an application of his framework, Tatlow relates totemic and utopian thought through the use of animal signs. In his article, Tatlow shows how cultural demands both fashion the ethnographer-critic and select the perspectives he/she must transcend. …
Comparative Literature In The United States, Manuela Mourão
Comparative Literature In The United States, Manuela Mourão
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article, "Comparative Literature in the United States," Manuela Mourão offers a historical overview of the debates about comparative literature as a discipline, from the early years of its institutionalization in the United States until the present. Mourão summarizes the most pointed -- and anxious -- interventions of prominent scholars in the field and she discusses the permanent sense of crisis that has typically been part of the discipline. Further, Mourão links the permanent anxiety of the discipline with the prescriptive tendencies that have continued to endure until the present. She then looks at the debates that followed the …
Comparative Literature In Slovenia, Kristof Jacek Kozak
Comparative Literature In Slovenia, Kristof Jacek Kozak
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "Comparative Literature in Slovenia," Kristof Jacek Kozak provides a historical overview of the practice of theory in the discipline of comparative literature in Slovenia. Despite its small size and relative low profile, Slovenia is taken as an exemplar within comparative literature scholarship. Kozak observes that the development of comparative literature in Slovenia may be characterized by an attempt to both arbitrate and mediate between distinct poles. On the one hand, Slovenian scholarship has felt the need to secure or determine itself in accordance with its own interests and concerns. On the other hand, it has recognized the …
Comparative Literature And The Culture Of The Context, Jan Walsh Hokenson
Comparative Literature And The Culture Of The Context, Jan Walsh Hokenson
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Comparative Literature and the Culture of the Context," Jan Walsh Hokenson poses a series of interrogatives around the question of what, as comparatists, we have learned about "literature in the context of the culture it represents" (Mario J. Valdés). She argues that in theoretical terms, culture has become the new vessel for the old wine of sources and influences, and that global intercultural contexts will change the analytical categories for comparatists in the coming millennium. In Hokenson's opinion, if comparative literature is to survive it must regain the panoptic view, and if it is to thrive as …
The Goethean Concept Of World Literature And Comparative Literature, Hendrik Birus
The Goethean Concept Of World Literature And Comparative Literature, Hendrik Birus
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "The Goethean Concept of World Literature and Comparative Literature," Hendrik Birus presents a new reading and understanding of Goethe's famous dictum: "National literature does not mean much at present, it is time for the era of world literature and everybody must endeavour to accelerate this epoch" (Eckermann 198, 31 January 1827). According to Birus, this dictum is not to be taken at face value today and argues that Goethe's concept of world literature ought to be understood in the sense that today it is not the replacement of national literatures by world literature we encounter; rather, it …
Comparative Literature And Cultural Identity, Jola Skulj
Comparative Literature And Cultural Identity, Jola Skulj
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article, "Comparative Literature and Cultural Identity," Jola Skulj proposes a framework inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin's work. Skulj argues that the validity of cultural identity cannot be an equivalent to the measure of originality of an inherent national subjectivity in it. Such an idea of identity concept, quite acceptable in the nineteenth century, is insufficient to the views in literary studies today. From the standpoint of comparative literature, cultural identity exists only through its own deconstruction and permanent multiplication of several cultural relations. The identity principle of individual cultures is in fact established through the principle of otherness or …
The Advantages Of Critical And Systematic Literary Taxonomies: A Review Article Of New Work By Cerquiglini, Juvan, And Zima, Kristof Jacek Kozak
The Advantages Of Critical And Systematic Literary Taxonomies: A Review Article Of New Work By Cerquiglini, Juvan, And Zima, Kristof Jacek Kozak
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
Is Comparative Literature Ready For The Twenty-First Century?, Eva Kushner
Is Comparative Literature Ready For The Twenty-First Century?, Eva Kushner
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article, "Is Comparative Literature Ready for the Twenty-First Century?" Eva Kushner observes that throughout its history, comparative literature has internalized as part of its own objectives and directives a major challenge: The need to renew its problematics and curriculums in response to the inherent diversity of literature within culture. She emphasizes that the vitality of the discipline depends on an authentic pluralism capable of resisting the dominance of unanalyzed hierarchies and universals. Acknowledging that the entire history of world literature remains the potential material of comparative literature studies, Kushner favours an "open system" approach. The concept of an …
A Comparative Post-Colonial Approach To Hedayat's The Blind Owl, Yasamine C. Coulter
A Comparative Post-Colonial Approach To Hedayat's The Blind Owl, Yasamine C. Coulter
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article, "A Comparative Post-Colonial Approach to Hedayat's The Blind Owl," Yasamine C. Coulter discusses post-colonial theories of Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and Jalal ale Ahmad, and relates them to the major themes of Hedayat's novel. For the most part, the fact that the text's narrator is disillusioned with his country's traditional way of life makes him an outsider within his own society. However, he fails to find peace in his other, chosen, mode of being and this implies that he is unable to fully identify with Western traditions, either. It is at this point of the text that …
Is It Time To Return To The Author? Between Omniscient Narrator And Interior Monologue, José Saramago
Is It Time To Return To The Author? Between Omniscient Narrator And Interior Monologue, José Saramago
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Nobel laureate of 1998 José Saramago, in his essay "Is It Time to Return to the Author? Between Omniscient Narrator and Interior Monologue" (trans. from the Portuguese and French by Roumiana Deltcheva), presents a short yet passionate treatise in defense of the "author" both as an individual and as a writer. For Saramago, the literary text as such exists because of the author, his or her thoughts, perceptions, and emotions, which in turn are reflections of the author's external environment and inner world. Saramago goes further to suggest that the reader's attraction to the literary narrative goes beyond the mere …
Naipaul's A Bend In The River And Neo-Colonialism As A Comparative Context, Haidar Eid
Naipaul's A Bend In The River And Neo-Colonialism As A Comparative Context, Haidar Eid
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "Naipaul's A Bend in the River and Neo-colonialism as a Comparative Context," Haidar Eid discusses the dialectical interplay between the political import and aesthetic qualities in Naipaul's novel. It contests Naipaul's conclusion that "Third World" peoples are not genuine and authentic human beings, like Westerners. Further, Naipaul's implication that political and social disorder is the unavoidable product of contemporary liberation movements, and that Africans are nothing and with no place in the world, are challenged and deconstructed. The independence of Third World countries, according to Naipaul, eliminates the last hope of resistance to ignorance, as well as …
East And West Comparative Literature And Culture: A Review Article Of New Work By Lee And Collected Volumes By Lee And Syrokomla-Stefanowska, Xiaoyi Zhou
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
The Hazard Of Hidden Interactions: A Reanalysis Of Designs In Reaction-Time Studies On Metaphor, Johan F. Hoorn
The Hazard Of Hidden Interactions: A Reanalysis Of Designs In Reaction-Time Studies On Metaphor, Johan F. Hoorn
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "The Hazard of Hidden Interactions: A Reanalysis of Designs in Reaction-Time Studies on Metaphor," Johan F. Hoorn argues that research designs in empirical literature and the psychology of aesthetics often include unanalyzed factors. The nature of these factors may be linguistic such as word frequency or lexical ambiguity or technical such as presentation order, repeated measures, etc. By not correctly analyzing an experiment, higher-order interactions may go unnoticed, while interfering with results. Hoorn reviews a sample of reaction-time experiments on metaphors, some of which are considered key studies in the area. Because the quality of an argument …
Thematizing The Subject From Gothicism To Late Romanticism, Slobodan Sucur
Thematizing The Subject From Gothicism To Late Romanticism, Slobodan Sucur
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In "Thematizing the Subject from Gothicism to Late Romanticism," Slobodan Sucur takes Habermas's suggestion that "modern art reveals its essence in Romanticism; and absolute inwardness determines the form and content of Romantic art" and offers an analysis of a spectrum of primary texts in relation to the statement. The texts analysed range from Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto to Odoyevsky’s Russian Nights. The texts are analyzed in chronological fashion, in an attempt to see how the thematization of the subject shifts as the Early Gothic novel (Walpole, Radcliffe) develops into High Romanticism (Hoffmann, Maturin) and finally into Late Romanticism (Poe, …
Analyzing East/West Power Politics In Comparative Cultural Studies, William H. Thornton
Analyzing East/West Power Politics In Comparative Cultural Studies, William H. Thornton
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "Analyzing East/West Power Politics in Comparative Cultural Studies," William H. Thornton acknowledges culture as a central force on the geopolitical map and undertakes at once to preserve the strategic potency of political realism and to move beyond the "billiard ball" externality of both neo- and traditional realisms. Although Huntington and Fukuyama are taken seriously on the question of East/West power politics, Thornton develops a world view by grounding balance-of-power politics in national and local (not just civilizational) social reality. Further, Thornton argues against external democratic teleologies both Huntington and Fukuyama have imposed on the cultural Other. The …
Women Writing World War One: A Review Article Of New Work By Higonnet, Ouditt, And Tylee, Turner, And Cardinal, Katharine Rodier
Women Writing World War One: A Review Article Of New Work By Higonnet, Ouditt, And Tylee, Turner, And Cardinal, Katharine Rodier
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
Comparative Spaces And Seeing Seduction And Horror In Bataille, Benton Jay Komins
Comparative Spaces And Seeing Seduction And Horror In Bataille, Benton Jay Komins
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "Comparative Spaces and Seeing Seduction and Horror in Bataille," Benton Jay Komins explores Bataille's preoccupation with "seeing": The eye holds a preeminently ambiguous position in Georges Bataille's universe of enucleated priests and scatological window scenes. Komins' comparative examination presents several aspects of Bataille's eyes: Existing between fascination and revulsion, this most Bataillean organ moves between subjective vision and objective blindness. The eye both captures and is captured in episodes of seductive horror. Through the denigration of vision, Bataille's dethroned eye exceeds the confines of visuality. Bataille develops an extraordinary notion of ocularity -- as a metaphor, action, …
Nobel Laureate 2000 Gao Xingjian And His Novel Soul Mountain, Mabel Lee
Nobel Laureate 2000 Gao Xingjian And His Novel Soul Mountain, Mabel Lee
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article, "Nobel Laureate 2000 Gao Xingjian and his Novel Soul Mountain," Mabel Lee introduces Gao Xingjian, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature of 2000. Lee is the translator of several of Gao's works from the Chinese into English, including the Nobel's main text of reference, Soul Mountain (first published in Chinese in 1990). Lee's article combines descriptions of Gao's biographical background and its relevance to his work and writing with a brief analysis of literary aspects of Gao's work based on tenets of the comparative literary and cultural studies approach. As is evident in Gao's texts, …
How Is A Genre Created? Five Combinatory Hypotheses, Johan F. Hoorn
How Is A Genre Created? Five Combinatory Hypotheses, Johan F. Hoorn
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "How is a Genre Created? Five Combinatory Hypotheses," Johan F. Hoorn discusses that in genre theory, the creation of a genre is usually envisioned as a complex selection procedure in which several factors play an equivocal role. First, he advances that genre usually is investigated at the level of the phenomenon. For instance, questions may drawn on the effects of social status, education, or "intrinsic values" on forming a genre, on an author's decision with regard to in which genre to express his/her creativity. Second, Hoorn attempts to formulate a general mechanism that explains the forming of …
On Literariness: From Post-Structuralism To Systems Theory, Marko Juvan
On Literariness: From Post-Structuralism To Systems Theory, Marko Juvan
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "On Literariness: From Post-Structuralism to Systems Theory," Marko Juvan argues that the question of literariness concerns the very identity and social existence of not only literature per se but of literary theory as a discipline. A literary theorist is not only an observer of literature; he/she is also a participant who -- at least indirectly, via the a priori systems of science and education -- is engaged in constructing both the notion and the practice of literature as well as the study of literature. Literariness is neither an invariant cluster of "objectively" distinctive properties of all texts …
Bakhtin, Genre Formation, And The Cognitive Turn: Chronotopes As Memory Schemata, Bart Keunen
Bakhtin, Genre Formation, And The Cognitive Turn: Chronotopes As Memory Schemata, Bart Keunen
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "Bakhtin, Genre Formation, and the Cognitive Turn: Chronotopes as Memory Schemata," Bart Keunen proposes a new reading of Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope. Bakhtin is widely taken to be a pioneer of genological thinking, but one of his key concepts -- the chronotope -- is still subject to highly divergent interpretations. Moreover, the epistemological implications of his genology have not yet been fully realized. In this article, a methodological grounding in schema theory is proposed. Bakhtin's concept can be used to study the way in which literary communication functions through what the psychologist Frederic Bartlett first called …
The Culture Of Using Animals In Literature And The Case Of José Emilio Pacheco, Randy Malamud
The Culture Of Using Animals In Literature And The Case Of José Emilio Pacheco, Randy Malamud
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, "The Culture of Using Animals in Literature and the Case of José Emilio Pacheco," Randy Malamud argues that the animal poetry of Mexican writer José Emilio Pacheco, compiled in his 1985 collection Album de zoología (trans. 1993 by Margaret Sayers Peden as An Ark for the Next Millennium) embodies a vast literary account of a range of animals. This book represents one of the most extensive treatments of animals by any modern poet, and one of the most sensitive and ambitious attempts to craft a discourse that facilitates an approach to animals on their own terms -- …
Word, Image, And Sound From Comparative Points Of View: A Review Article Of New Work By Joret And Remael, Lieven Tack
Word, Image, And Sound From Comparative Points Of View: A Review Article Of New Work By Joret And Remael, Lieven Tack
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
Comparative Cultural Studies And Ethnic Minority Writing Today: The Hybridities Of Marlene Nourbese Philip And Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Sabine Milz
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article, "Comparative Cultural Studies and Ethnic Minority Writing Today: The Hybridities of Marlene Nourbese Philip and Emine Sevgi Özdamar," Sabine Milz examines and compares strategies with which the Caribbean-Canadian woman writer Marlene Nourbese Philip and the Turkish-German woman writer Emine Sevgi Özdamar "de-colonise" ethnocentric Canadian and German discourse respectively and thus create their own spaces of hybridity. She argues that both Philip's and Özdamar's writings -- by going beyond cultural-national categories and boundaries -- display vital stimuli for multi-cultural and inter-national dialogue in a manner that facilitates cultural co-existence in spaces of hybridity. Responding to this stimulus, Milz's …