April 18, 2015

Comparative Non-Literature and Everyday Digital Textuality

Scott Kushner

Digital textuality has transitioned from the novel to the banal, provoking an explosion in everyday textual culture in forms such as blogs, social networking platforms, and various genres of short messaging services. These forms of everyday digital textual culture are not literary by most conventional definitions, and this is precisely the point. The opportunity they present to literary studies is not to expand the scope of the literary, but to open the notion of literary studies to literature’s great other: non-literature.

Ideas of the Decade

April 1, 2014

Pseudotranslation

Brigitte Rath

The idea of pseudotranslation sharpens some central concepts of Comparative Literature. “World Literature,” according to David Damrosch, is “always as much about the host culture’s values and needs as it is about a work’s source culture” (283). Foregrounding a text’s imaginary origin in a different culture reads this “double refraction” as already built into a text. It thus stresses the conjecture and transnational imagination that is always involved in reading a text as world literature. Pseudotranslation as a mode of reading has also much to contribute to questions of translatability, representation, voice, authorship, authenticity, and multilingualism.

Practices

March 4, 2014

Creative Reception: Reviving a Comparative Method

Brigitte Le Juez

The language used by writers to discuss the question of their reception of others tends to indicate an emotional response. Their own understanding of what moves them into creative action can be vague or at least difficult to articulate, as countless other examples could show. It is therefore the role of the comparatist to attempt a critical appraisal of such a fundamental, artistic phenomenon as the continuously innovative meeting of artistic minds.

Ideas of the Decade

February 21, 2014

The Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Rita Felski

“The hermeneutics of suspicion” does not just describe the recent history of criticism; it redescribes it, giving us a fresh slant on the state of the field. The phrase signals a shift away from the broad philosophical or political questions associated with “theory” to a new concern with the specifics of method: how and why we read.