Comparison is predation: a violent severing, a forced fusion, a deadly contest of forces. Or this, at least, seems to be the specter that haunts Comparative Literature. The fraught legacies of Comparative Literature often impel methodological reflection into binaries of bad versus good comparison. This also leads us frequently to connect, maybe too closely, a certain way of doing comparison and its potential political value. This essay starts a reflection on the ethical dilemmas and rhetorical habits of comparison by analyzing one metaphor of good comparison, tied to the concept of friendship, and comparing it with an approach to comparison that embraces predatory structures instead. To think through the trope of friendship, the essay draws on R. Radhakrishnan work in ‘Why Compare?’ with Jacques Derrida's notion of friendship from Politics of Friendship via Gayatri Spivak's Death of a Discipline. For a model for thinking comparison with and through predation, the essay draws on the work of Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro with its focus on predatory relationalities among Amerindian cultures of the Amazon. The essay suggests that we need to leave behind ‘safe’ comparative models as well as critique the tropes that drive reflections on comparison.
比较是一种掠夺:一种暴力的割裂，一种强制的融合，一种致命的力量较量。至少，这似乎是困扰比较文学的幽灵。比较文学令人担忧的遗产常常促使方法论反思陷入好坏比较的二元对立。这也导致我们经常将某种进行比较的方式与其潜在的政治价值联系起来，也许过于紧密。本文通过分析一个与友谊概念相关的良好比较的隐喻，并将其与一种包含掠夺性结构的比较方法进行比较，从而开始反思比较的道德困境和修辞习惯。为了思考友谊的比喻，这篇文章借鉴了R. Radhakrishnan在《为什么比较?》雅克·德里达的友谊概念，从《友谊的政治》到加亚特里·斯皮瓦克的《纪律之死》。这篇文章借鉴了巴西人类学家Eduardo Viveiros de Castro的研究成果，重点研究了亚马逊地区美洲印第安人文化之间的掠夺性关系。这篇文章建议，我们需要抛弃“安全的”比较模型，并批判那些推动比较反思的修辞。
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This essay seeks to contribute to ongoing debates about disciplinary decolonization in Comparative Literature by urging scholars and students to return to the literature and theory of twentieth-century anticolonial liberation struggles. I begin by considering the relationship of Comparative Literature as it is currently practised in the metropolitan academy to earlier projects of cultural decolonization, focusing particularly on the contrast between the depoliticized ‘worlding’ of the discipline and the more radical and purposeful comparative praxis demonstrated by the Afro-Asian Writers' Association's literary journal Lotus (1968–91). I then turn to examples of literary criticism by two major fiction writers, theorists and party activists with ties to Lotus: Ghassan Kanafani (Palestine, 1936–72) and Alex La Guma (South Africa, 1924–85). Putting their work into conversation enables us to challenge the distance from organized struggle that most contemporary criticism maintains, while also developing our understanding of the conditions, principles, and tactics of what Kanafani famously called adab al-muqāwama, or resistance literature, a concept that any attempt to decolonize Comparative Literature cannot do without.
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This article examines the comparative method used by Italian writer Alba de Céspedes in relation to questions of translatability, and in connection to the role of censorship in the production of historical narratives. It draws on two case studies: an article written on the Cuban Revolution for the magazine Epoca in 1959, and a series of poems portraying the Parisian May 1968, and it examines the history of translation of these poems in the Italian and Cuban contexts. Two types of comparisons emerge from the analysis of these texts: ‘vertical comparisons’, that is, comparisons that establish a relation between events positioned at different historical times, and ‘horizontal comparisons’, which connect contemporary, geographically distant events. While horizontal comparisons are necessarily transnational, vertical comparison can involve comparanda based within or beyond the nation. In de Céspedes’ works, transnational comparisons issue a desire for translation, but at the same time prevent the translation from taking place, due, in part, to the contentious relationship between comparison and censorship evoked by the text in the target context. In fact, it is precisely the hyper-comparability of the poems themselves that limits their circulation in translation. In turn, untranslatability makes such texts significant for the comparatist precisely because it prompts a reflection on the socio-political factors that limit comparability.
{"title":"Comparability and Translatability in the Making of Historical Narratives: Alba de Céspedes’ Comparative Method","authors":"Elisa Segnini","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2023.0485","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2023.0485","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the comparative method used by Italian writer Alba de Céspedes in relation to questions of translatability, and in connection to the role of censorship in the production of historical narratives. It draws on two case studies: an article written on the Cuban Revolution for the magazine Epoca in 1959, and a series of poems portraying the Parisian May 1968, and it examines the history of translation of these poems in the Italian and Cuban contexts. Two types of comparisons emerge from the analysis of these texts: ‘vertical comparisons’, that is, comparisons that establish a relation between events positioned at different historical times, and ‘horizontal comparisons’, which connect contemporary, geographically distant events. While horizontal comparisons are necessarily transnational, vertical comparison can involve comparanda based within or beyond the nation. In de Céspedes’ works, transnational comparisons issue a desire for translation, but at the same time prevent the translation from taking place, due, in part, to the contentious relationship between comparison and censorship evoked by the text in the target context. In fact, it is precisely the hyper-comparability of the poems themselves that limits their circulation in translation. In turn, untranslatability makes such texts significant for the comparatist precisely because it prompts a reflection on the socio-political factors that limit comparability.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136160825","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 focuses on the Chinese rendition of Lamb’s prose adaptation of Hamlet, examining the factors affecting the domesticating strategies employed by the anonymous translator of this work. Based on Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystem hypothesis, it not only explores the influence of an intra-literary polysystem on this translation, but also investigates the constraints imposed on it by an extra-literary polysystem. Finally, by taking the market failure of this work as a signal that translation had begun to move from periphery to centre, this article seeks to provide an insight into how changes occurring in the Chinese literary polysystem affected the route to modernization at the turn of the twentieth century.
{"title":"The First Chinese Rendition of the Prose Adaptation of Hamlet: Evidencing Change in Early Twentieth-Century China","authors":"云芳 代","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2023.0462","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2023.0462","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on the Chinese rendition of Lamb’s prose adaptation of Hamlet, examining the factors affecting the domesticating strategies employed by the anonymous translator of this work. Based on Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystem hypothesis, it not only explores the influence of an intra-literary polysystem on this translation, but also investigates the constraints imposed on it by an extra-literary polysystem. Finally, by taking the market failure of this work as a signal that translation had begun to move from periphery to centre, this article seeks to provide an insight into how changes occurring in the Chinese literary polysystem affected the route to modernization at the turn of the twentieth century.","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49621727","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}
{"title":"Mara de Gennaro, Modernism after Postcolonialism: Towards a Nonterritorial Comparative Literature","authors":"Anchit Sathi","doi":"10.3366/ccs.2023.0469","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2023.0469","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42644,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Critical Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43694188","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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