This article offers a reconstruction of the scientific lineage of comparative and world literature. It will be argued that the approaches by Philarète Chasles and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe were influenced by the meaning of ‘comparative’ developed in scientific texts in the long eighteenth century. Building on the assumption that literature may be made into a hard science, a number of nineteenth-century comparatists then sought to elaborate syntheses of literature in the form of universal laws that would hold to all literary texts. I argue that this ‘scientifying’ approach to literature is still at work to this day, and I conclude my intervention by pointing to the epistemological issues that must be considered when the literary is treated scientifically.
本文对比较文学和世界文学的科学谱系进行了重建。有人认为，Philarète Chasles和Johann Wolfgang von Goethe的方法受到了18世纪科学文本中“比较”含义的影响。基于文学可能成为一门硬科学的假设，一些19世纪的比较主义者随后试图以适用于所有文学文本的普遍规律的形式来阐述文学的综合。我认为，这种“科学化”的文学方法至今仍在发挥作用，我在结束我的干预时指出了科学对待文学时必须考虑的认识论问题。
{"title":"The Allure of Synthesis: Science and the Literary in Comparative and World Literature","authors":"Alessio Mattana","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2020.0369","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2020.0369","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers a reconstruction of the scientific lineage of comparative and world literature. It will be argued that the approaches by Philarète Chasles and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe were influenced by the meaning of ‘comparative’ developed in scientific texts in the long eighteenth century. Building on the assumption that literature may be made into a hard science, a number of nineteenth-century comparatists then sought to elaborate syntheses of literature in the form of universal laws that would hold to all literary texts. I argue that this ‘scientifying’ approach to literature is still at work to this day, and I conclude my intervention by pointing to the epistemological issues that must be considered when the literary is treated scientifically.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":"17 1","pages":"351-372"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42002157","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article argues that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's notion of planetarity is premised on a practice of reading. Reading for the planet involves deferring the world in order to participate in the text world and its latent re(-)production of ourselves and our world. To the extent that this ethical attention moves us toward different horizons of thinking and feeling, it may also engender political action in the public realm. Reading for Spivak is therefore an important foundation for revolutionary politics and, ultimately, the production of the planet to which we aspire as readers. I proceed to evaluate the planetary efficacy of Spivak's complementary teaching praxis. I show that the aesthetic education she provides does not enable but rather forecloses the experience of literariness and its associated ethics and politics. In response to the limits of professional reading and the worldliness of Spivak's fieldwork in India, I conclude by thinking about the value of deprofessionalization.
{"title":"Spivak's Planetarity and the Limits of Professional Reading","authors":"Hayley G. Toth","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2020.0374","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2020.0374","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's notion of planetarity is premised on a practice of reading. Reading for the planet involves deferring the world in order to participate in the text world and its latent re(-)production of ourselves and our world. To the extent that this ethical attention moves us toward different horizons of thinking and feeling, it may also engender political action in the public realm. Reading for Spivak is therefore an important foundation for revolutionary politics and, ultimately, the production of the planet to which we aspire as readers. I proceed to evaluate the planetary efficacy of Spivak's complementary teaching praxis. I show that the aesthetic education she provides does not enable but rather forecloses the experience of literariness and its associated ethics and politics. In response to the limits of professional reading and the worldliness of Spivak's fieldwork in India, I conclude by thinking about the value of deprofessionalization.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":"17 1","pages":"459-478"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47489187","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Studies of the Latin tradition played a major role in the formation of Comparative Literature as a discipline. In spite of their shared origins, the disciplines of Neo-Latin studies and Comparative Literature are today rarely brought into dialogue with one another. This article argues that such dialogues can be mutually productive, and that Neo-Latin literature exemplifies, and itself engages with, some of the key problems at issue in the latest dispensations of Comparative Literature. Ideas of cosmopolitanism and transnationalism, of bilingualism and the dynamic interactions between languages, energized Neo-Latin writing (and energize Neo-Latin studies today). Writers in the post-classical Latin tradition devoted great efforts to working through many of the problems and dichotomies that interest comparatists today: from defining the ‘literary’, to asking what it means for literary forms and a literary language to cross historical, cultural, and national borders. Using the classical theme of recusatio (‘refusal’) as a case study, I explore the ways in which Neo-Latin writers thematized in their writing a sense of the continuity and universality of literature which was nevertheless always threatened by rupture and fragmentation.
{"title":"Continuity and Rupture: Comparative Literature and the Latin Tradition","authors":"P. White","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2020.0370","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2020.0370","url":null,"abstract":"Studies of the Latin tradition played a major role in the formation of Comparative Literature as a discipline. In spite of their shared origins, the disciplines of Neo-Latin studies and Comparative Literature are today rarely brought into dialogue with one another. This article argues that such dialogues can be mutually productive, and that Neo-Latin literature exemplifies, and itself engages with, some of the key problems at issue in the latest dispensations of Comparative Literature. Ideas of cosmopolitanism and transnationalism, of bilingualism and the dynamic interactions between languages, energized Neo-Latin writing (and energize Neo-Latin studies today). Writers in the post-classical Latin tradition devoted great efforts to working through many of the problems and dichotomies that interest comparatists today: from defining the ‘literary’, to asking what it means for literary forms and a literary language to cross historical, cultural, and national borders. Using the classical theme of recusatio (‘refusal’) as a case study, I explore the ways in which Neo-Latin writers thematized in their writing a sense of the continuity and universality of literature which was nevertheless always threatened by rupture and fragmentation.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3366/ccs.2020.0370","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49426889","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article is a reflection on the wordy and worldly characters of literary texts that invites us to focus on how their referentiality unfolds in the act of reading. The article focuses in particular on the necessity for world literature to factor in the subjective involvement of the reader entailed by literary communication. It does so by firstly revisiting the old debate about referentiality and contextualization of literary texts in literary studies, and specifically within world literature, which is particularly concerned with understanding the boundaries of literary communication. It then analyses how the worldly and wordy components of literature can be brought together by considering the act of reading as the core of meaning production and as a process of generative construction, which, when based on the interaction between readers and distant texts, like in the specific case of world literature, has the possibility to maximize its potential. Engaging with Iser's and Poulet's phenomenological approaches to the act of reading, the article argues against the vision of literary texts as transparent objects and encourages scholars working on world literature to embrace the translucency and generative potential that literature offers, inviting them to embrace aesthetic and anthropological perspectives so as to understand works of world literature as tools for interpretation both of the world and of ourselves.
{"title":"Reading the World, Reading the Self","authors":"L. Rossi","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2020.0375","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2020.0375","url":null,"abstract":"This article is a reflection on the wordy and worldly characters of literary texts that invites us to focus on how their referentiality unfolds in the act of reading. The article focuses in particular on the necessity for world literature to factor in the subjective involvement of the reader entailed by literary communication. It does so by firstly revisiting the old debate about referentiality and contextualization of literary texts in literary studies, and specifically within world literature, which is particularly concerned with understanding the boundaries of literary communication. It then analyses how the worldly and wordy components of literature can be brought together by considering the act of reading as the core of meaning production and as a process of generative construction, which, when based on the interaction between readers and distant texts, like in the specific case of world literature, has the possibility to maximize its potential. Engaging with Iser's and Poulet's phenomenological approaches to the act of reading, the article argues against the vision of literary texts as transparent objects and encourages scholars working on world literature to embrace the translucency and generative potential that literature offers, inviting them to embrace aesthetic and anthropological perspectives so as to understand works of world literature as tools for interpretation both of the world and of ourselves.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":"17 1","pages":"479-496"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43305863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Franco Moretti has defined form as ‘the repeatable element of literature’. However, without a precise definition of the form(s) analysed in a given study, it is difficult to gauge what has been repeated. Moreover, no matter what guise we consider ‘form’ to take, the following objection remains: just because some element has been (or seems to have been) repeated, this does not mean that its function has been repeated too. In terms of Japanese literary history, perhaps no period better demonstrates this than the Meiji period (1868–1912). The main innovation of this paper is to adapt the text-linguistic notions of acceptability and intertextuality (see de Beaugrande and Dressler) to show that this period's ‘familiar history of rupture’ (cf. Zwicker) is indeed a valid framework for understanding the emergence of modern Japanese prose fiction. In this appeal to local context, I locate an alternative to the temptation to see, as Moretti does, an increasing amount of ‘sameness’ on the global literary stage.
{"title":"Dominant Forms and Marginal Translations: Re-reading the Emergence of the Novel in Nineteenth-Century Japan","authors":"James Garza","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2020.0372","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2020.0372","url":null,"abstract":"Franco Moretti has defined form as ‘the repeatable element of literature’. However, without a precise definition of the form(s) analysed in a given study, it is difficult to gauge what has been repeated. Moreover, no matter what guise we consider ‘form’ to take, the following objection remains: just because some element has been (or seems to have been) repeated, this does not mean that its function has been repeated too. In terms of Japanese literary history, perhaps no period better demonstrates this than the Meiji period (1868–1912). The main innovation of this paper is to adapt the text-linguistic notions of acceptability and intertextuality (see de Beaugrande and Dressler) to show that this period's ‘familiar history of rupture’ (cf. Zwicker) is indeed a valid framework for understanding the emergence of modern Japanese prose fiction. In this appeal to local context, I locate an alternative to the temptation to see, as Moretti does, an increasing amount of ‘sameness’ on the global literary stage.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":"17 1","pages":"413-432"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48977665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In 1909 André Gide published three short articles in the journal La Nouvelle Revue française, subsequently grouped under the title ‘Nationalisme et littérature’ (Nationalism and literature). They were written as his response to a survey by the young French journalist Henri Clouard, ‘Enquête sur la littérature nationale’ (Survey on National Literature), in which contemporary writers and critics answered questions regarding possible definitions of French literature. Gide questions the value of the term ‘national literature’ and objects to the view that haute littérature (good literature) is synonymous with neo-Classical values, arguing instead for a conception of literature that embraces curiosity and innovation. For Gide the term haute littérature is problematic because it implies a hierarchical, regimented and limited view of both literature and culture tout court. The first part of this article argues that Gide's critique of both national literature and haute littérature can be read as a preference for a literariness that is liberated from the constraints of balance and imitation. The second part reads Gide's agronomic metaphor for literary innovation through the lens of Alexander Beecroft's theory of overlapping literary ecologies. Beecroft's model of different ecologies of world literature helps us to locate what I propose to be Gide's own contribution to the world literature debate: an emphasis on literariness that transcends the national-literature ecology and reclaims the notion of haute littérature for a different aesthetic.
1909年，andre Gide在《La Nouvelle Revue franaise》杂志上发表了三篇短文，随后被归类为《民族主义与文学》(Nationalism and literature)。这是他对年轻的法国记者亨利·克劳拉德(Henri Clouard)的一项调查的回应。在这项调查中，当代作家和评论家回答了有关法国文学可能定义的问题。Gide质疑“民族文学”一词的价值，并反对将“优秀文学”等同于新古典主义价值观的观点，相反，他认为文学应该包含好奇心和创新。对于Gide来说，“高级自由主义”这个词是有问题的，因为它暗示了对文学和文化的一种等级森严、严格管制和有限的看法。本文的第一部分认为，纪德对民族文学和高级文化的批判可以被理解为对一种从平衡和模仿的束缚中解放出来的文学性的偏爱。第二部分通过比克罗夫特的重叠文学生态理论来解读纪德对文学创新的农艺隐喻。Beecroft关于世界文学不同生态的模型帮助我们找到了我认为是Gide对世界文学辩论的贡献:强调超越民族文学生态的文学性，并为不同的美学重新提出了高级自然的概念。
{"title":"Against haute littérature? André Gide's Contribution to the World Literature Debate","authors":"Richard Hibbitt","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2020.0371","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2020.0371","url":null,"abstract":"In 1909 André Gide published three short articles in the journal La Nouvelle Revue française, subsequently grouped under the title ‘Nationalisme et littérature’ (Nationalism and literature). They were written as his response to a survey by the young French journalist Henri Clouard, ‘Enquête sur la littérature nationale’ (Survey on National Literature), in which contemporary writers and critics answered questions regarding possible definitions of French literature. Gide questions the value of the term ‘national literature’ and objects to the view that haute littérature (good literature) is synonymous with neo-Classical values, arguing instead for a conception of literature that embraces curiosity and innovation. For Gide the term haute littérature is problematic because it implies a hierarchical, regimented and limited view of both literature and culture tout court. The first part of this article argues that Gide's critique of both national literature and haute littérature can be read as a preference for a literariness that is liberated from the constraints of balance and imitation. The second part reads Gide's agronomic metaphor for literary innovation through the lens of Alexander Beecroft's theory of overlapping literary ecologies. Beecroft's model of different ecologies of world literature helps us to locate what I propose to be Gide's own contribution to the world literature debate: an emphasis on literariness that transcends the national-literature ecology and reclaims the notion of haute littérature for a different aesthetic.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45966859","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Most studies of world literature ignore statistics about the translation, circulation and reception of literary works, since no way exists to find such information on a global scale. Because of this, Western scholars generally assume that certain figures are canonical everywhere in the world, such as Shakespeare and Dante. This paper proposes a new and different approach to the study of literary canonicity, by drawing on an almost completely untapped dataset (the 310 global Wikipedias) and comparing Wikipedia popularity and newly collected data on book translations. By examining diverse measures of global popularity of a corpus of 101 modern Italian poets, I aim both to integrate a new resource (Wikipedia) into the study of world literature as well as to newly problematize the very concept of world literature. I will show how shifting one's criterion of canonicity – whether the number of translations or the number of Wikipedia pageviews of an author – affects our understanding of what makes an author canonical or not. In the end, I argue, we have not yet developed a subtle enough way to determine the canonicity of authors. But this dual strategy of comparing translations and Wikipedia popularity does show us a potential way forward.
{"title":"World Literature According to Wikipedia Popularity and Book Translations: The Case of Modern Italian Poets","authors":"J. Blakesley","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2020.0373","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2020.0373","url":null,"abstract":"Most studies of world literature ignore statistics about the translation, circulation and reception of literary works, since no way exists to find such information on a global scale. Because of this, Western scholars generally assume that certain figures are canonical everywhere in the world, such as Shakespeare and Dante. This paper proposes a new and different approach to the study of literary canonicity, by drawing on an almost completely untapped dataset (the 310 global Wikipedias) and comparing Wikipedia popularity and newly collected data on book translations. By examining diverse measures of global popularity of a corpus of 101 modern Italian poets, I aim both to integrate a new resource (Wikipedia) into the study of world literature as well as to newly problematize the very concept of world literature. I will show how shifting one's criterion of canonicity – whether the number of translations or the number of Wikipedia pageviews of an author – affects our understanding of what makes an author canonical or not. In the end, I argue, we have not yet developed a subtle enough way to determine the canonicity of authors. But this dual strategy of comparing translations and Wikipedia popularity does show us a potential way forward.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46595663","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
‘[I]t has unfortunately become a fashion that people who obviously cannot claim to have any legitimation or any understanding in the field of sinology […], take hold of the sinological works of oth...
{"title":"On the Interplay between Poets’ and Philologists’ Translations of Chinese Poetry into German","authors":"S. Landa","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2020.0361","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2020.0361","url":null,"abstract":"‘[I]t has unfortunately become a fashion that people who obviously cannot claim to have any legitimation or any understanding in the field of sinology […], take hold of the sinological works of oth...","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":"17 1","pages":"245-262"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-08-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49624319","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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