December 3, 2014

“World,” “Globe,” “Planet”: Comparative Literature, Planetary Studies, and Cultural Debt after the Global Turn

Christian Moraru

How can we rethink being-in-relation beyond the nationalist, imperialist, and, of late, globalist nexus, beyond the relational logos that, for such a long time, has underlain the main form of mapping and linking up here and there, self and other, ours and theirs? And how are we, artists, critics, humanists, to embark on such a radical rebuilding of our epistemologies and deontologies so as to deal responsibly with the surging availability of the imaginary museum, of the planetary archive, of sites of life and culture suddenly handy, vulnerable, ready to be googled, disembedded and disemboweled, exposed, toured, and sampled, intertextually used and commercially abused? Can we even “stop and think” in the face of the world’s overwhelming and hyperexposed Heideggerian Bestand?

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.

World Famous, Locally: Insights From the Study of International Canonization

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen

Following decades of focus on the impact of globalization, the wave of big data flooding all subjects could be put to good use to acquire a better understanding of the difference between local and international canonization of literature.