March 5, 2015

Syllabus: An Anthropology of Literary Culture

Bernard Bate and Rebecca Gould

Syllabus Yale-NUS College, Spring 2014 Instructors: Bernard Bate (Anthropology) and Rebecca Gould (Literature)

June 24, 2014

Institution, Translation, Nation, Metaphor

Lucas Klein

Comparative Literature is defined in part by anxiety about its institutionality. Approaching translations as works of literary scholarship equivalent to our articles and monographs can address this anxiety and also work against the Herderian assumptions of national literatures. Ultimately, the comparison of comparative literature is a metaphorical process, putting it in the same process of negotiated familiarity and strangeness as translation. In this way, institutionalizing translation might help us de-institutionalize our other institutions.

Futures

March 9, 2014

Comparative Literature: The Next Ten Years

Haun Saussy

We can confidently predict that ten years from now, comparative literature will be in a state of crisis. It is always in crisis. In 2004 I ventured that nothing has ever defined comparative literature so well as the search for its own definition, a search conducted between and against better-established fields. That continued sense of crisis, however, is one we make for ourselves. External conditions impose another shape on comparative literature’s sense of crisis.

Ideas of the Decade

March 3, 2014

Philology

Timothy Brennan

As a term “philology” in comparative literature has been, over the last decade, attacked, extolled, distorted, appropriated, diluted, and wielded as a club. Assumed to be antique, it never goes away, in part because it is at the heart of Marxist literary theory and anticolonial thought.