May 8, 2015

African Languages, Writ Small

Jeanne-Marie Jackson

What is Comparative Literature’s stake in the supposed “resurgence” of African writing, most work on which is being done in monolingual departments? The following remarks sketch out some practical and intellectual challenges that greater emphasis on African language study might pose to the discipline. To take African literatures seriously, world literature in English must become a comparative domain.

Paradigms

February 28, 2015

Arabic and the Paradigms of Comparison

Waïl S. Hassan

The study of Arabic in the age of globalization and terrorism has been subject to two logics: one that sees Arabic as an extension of foreign policy imperatives (an instrumentalist “language plus” approach), and one that broadens the scope of the discipline. The current boom in Arabic studies is largely driven by the instrumentalist imperative. The study of modern Arabic literature within Comparative Literature in the “ages” of multiculturalism and globalization has remained by and large confined to the North-South paradigm, as a small subset of the postcolonial, and studied mainly in relation to English and French. Postcolonial studies has thus had the paradoxical effect of creating a space for Arabic, African, Caribbean, and South Asian literatures by tying them to the center-periphery, or North-South paradigm. The enormously rich area of South-South comparison remains largely unexplored.

Paradigms

February 11, 2015

Comparative Literature and Animal Studies

Mario Ortiz-Robles

The comparative study of literature is intertwined at its origins with the comparative study of animals by virtue of the methodology used to compare members of otherwise very different sets of objects. Whether the method begets the object of study or the object of study the method is not entirely clear since the use of comparison in comparative literature is based on an analogy between literary forms (meters, figures, plots, genres) and biological forms (vertebrae, organs, species, genera) that seems to suspend their differences in “nature.” To compare animals to texts could well advance the cause of literary studies by giving a new purchase on what comparison might signify for students of literature around the world without making its practice archaic, vestigial, or, worse, extinct. We may yet learn something about the nature of the discipline of comparative literature by attending to its constitutive figuration as the literarization (the making literary) of animal comparison. Without a reconsideration of its literariness comparative literature could go the way of comparative zoology: a museum housing the fossilized remains of a discipline.

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.

Ideas of the Decade

April 23, 2014

Areas: Bigger than the Nation, Smaller than the World

Christopher Bush

Surely I was not the only one surprised by Gayatri Spivak’s having become, over the last decade, a kind of defender of a kind of Area Studies.

Paradigms

March 21, 2014

World Literature as Figure and as Ground

David Damrosch

World literature is often thought of as an expansive landscape "out there," extending far beyond the boundaries of any nation or even region, inevitably exceeding anyone’s direct scholarly competence. This perspective has been widely shared both by proponents and by opponents of world literary studies, and yet increasingly it seems to me that this is only half the story. Actual readers usually encounter world literature on their own home territory, within the national market in which books are published, reviewed, and assigned in classes. In a kind of figure/ground reversal, it is the nation that frames most people’s concrete experience of world literature, at least as much as it is world literature that frames any national canon.

world literature

Ideas of the Decade

March 12, 2014

The Vernacular

S. Shankar

The work of critically engaging the vernacular, begun in a somewhat fragmentary way in the decade gone by, promises much if taken up more concertedly in the decade to come.

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.

Practices

March 6, 2014

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.

Practices

March 3, 2014

Comparative Literature, World Literature, and Asia

Karen Thornber

For most of its history the field of comparative literature as practiced in much of the world has focused largely on certain privileged European literatures. In recent years, there has been a blossoming of interest in Western-language writings not only from previously marginalized European literatures but also from former European colonies in Africa, the Americas, the Middle East, Oceania, and South and Southeast Asia. Yet even today, scholars working on non-Western-language literatures – the creative texts of billions of people with thousands of years of literary heritage – remain a disproportionate minority in most comparative literature departments.

Ideas of the Decade

March 3, 2014

Counterinsurgency

Joseph R. Slaughter

Comparative literature has mostly disregarded the weaponization of culture under the counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) crafted for U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, released as Army Field Manual 3-24 and published simultaneously by the University of Chicago Press. However, COIN has not ignored comparative literature. During the “counterinsurgency decade” (General David Petraeus’s words), comparative literature was (like everything else) entangled in the contest between insurgency and counterinsurgency.