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?

Futures

January 30, 2015

Future Reading

Rebecca Walkowitz

How will we read literary works in the future? And how does thinking about the future of literary works change the way we read?

Paradigms

September 14, 2014

Baku, Literary Common

Nergis Ertürk

The First Congress of the Peoples of the East, convened in the Azerbaijani city of Baku in 1920, had to address complex problems of plurilingualism and translation. Comparative Literature might reclaim the history of this congress as an alternative genealogy for the discipline, an experiment in displacing the discipline's other founding stories: Goethe’s invention of Weltliteratur in conversation with Eckermann, Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach’s missed encounter with an Orientalized Istanbul.

Futures

July 3, 2014

The Reign of the Amoeba: Further Thoughts about the Future of Comparative Literature

Gail Finney

Based on recent curricular trends in Comparative Literature, publications in leading online and print journals, and practices implemented by current graduate students and young faculty, this essay suggests that the discipline of Comparative Literature promises to move in increasingly interdisciplinary directions. The metaphor of the amoeba reflects the ability of Comparative Literature to assimilate and nurture itself from other media, such as film and television, and other fields, such as art history, aesthetics, queer theory, gender and sexuality studies, philosophy, theater, ecocriticism, and, notably, Cultural Studies, whose importance for Comparative Literature is exemplified in the online journal CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. The Winter 2014 number of Comparative Literature, examining the concept of remediation from the perspectives of media studies, ecocriticism, the law, disability studies, and education, likewise points to the growing interdisciplinarity of Comparative Literature.

Paradigms

June 28, 2014

Electronic Literature as Comparative Literature

Jessica Pressman

Electronic literature is Comparative Literature. It is born digital; it operates across multiple machine and human languages, and requires translation of these languages before it even reaches the human reader. It is procedural and computational and is processed across multiple platforms, protocols, and technologies in real-time, in accordance with the very real constraints and technical specificities of the hardware, software, and network configuration of the reader’s computer. What is presented onscreen – the artwork and poetic – is multimedia and multimodal. Combining text, image, sound, movement, interactivity, and design, such works challenge traditional disciplinary boundaries as well as genre categories. For these reasons and more, electronic literature requires its reader to read and think comparatively.

Futures

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.

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.

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.

Practices

March 3, 2014

Toward an Ecocritical Approach to Translation: A Conceptual Framework

Daniela Kato & Bruce Allen

Translation's recent growth stems in part from many critics’ efforts to widen the scope of ecocritical research beyond its hitherto disproportionate focus on Anglophone literatures. It also is related to an increased commitment to an environmental world literature canon comprising works “currently being translated and circulated through a variety of languages and cultures as texts whose principal – if not always exclusive – focus is on the ecological crises of the last half-century,” as Ursula Heise has noted. The lack of critical attention paid to translation in ecocriticism comes somewhat as a surprise at this juncture, given that translation is the transnational practice par excellence, embodying intercultural exchange that is vital to the interpenetration of the local and the global.