March 4, 2015

Arabic: Acceptance and Anxiety

Alexander Key

Being an Arabist elicits warm acceptance in Comparative Literature in 2015, but Arabists are still in no position to advocate for the inclusion of Arabic thinkers on our departments’ theory reading lists. Why?

Ideas of the Decade

March 3, 2014

Postcolonial Studies

Sangeeta Ray

To think about postcolonial studies is to think in terms of crisis, death and futurity.

Ideas of the Decade

March 3, 2014

Untranslatability

Shaden Tageldin

Impasse and imposture—if not sheer impossibility—haunt the dream of translatability. If translatability has underpinned “efforts to revive World Literature” within and against the discipline of comparative literature over the last decade (3), as Emily Apter has argued in Against World Literature (2013), surely its obverse—untranslatability—is a ghostwritten word of that decade and a watchword of the next.

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.

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.