Paradigms

Love Stories, or, Multispecies Ethnography, Comparative Literature, and their Entanglements

Mara de Gennaro

“Species interdependence is a well-known fact—except when it comes to humans.” When Anna Tsing writes this in one of a series of essays that look to diverse matsutake mushroom forests around the world to show that “human nature is an interspecies relationship,” she joins a small but growing number of anthropologists and artists for whom the influential interdisciplinary work of animal studies has not yet gone far enough. For these multispecies ethnographers, what is needed is not simply a recognition of nonhuman agents still on the margins of current discourse on animality, whether plants, microorganisms, or less charismatic animals belonging to “unloved species.” What most animates these scholars, from Tsing and her Matsutake Worlds Research Group, to Deborah Bird Rose studying Aboriginals and their wild dingo “kin,” to Eben Kirksey and his Multispecies Salon, is the work of understanding the intricate, continually fluctuating relationships and interdependencies of humans and nonhumans across multiple species, in cultures and ecosystems treated as highly variable.

Paradigms

Comparative Non-Literature and Everyday Digital Textuality

Scott Kushner

Digital textuality has transitioned from the novel to the banal, provoking an explosion in everyday textual culture in forms such as blogs, social networking platforms, and various genres of short messaging services. These forms of everyday digital textual culture are not literary by most conventional definitions, and this is precisely the point. The opportunity they present to literary studies is not to expand the scope of the literary, but to open the notion of literary studies to literature’s great other: non-literature.

Paradigms

Comparatively Lesbian: Queer/Feminist Theory and the Sexuality of History

Susan S. Lanser

Reversing the conventional paradigm, I ask not only what history can tell us about sexuality, but what sexuality can tell us about history. My research relies for its core claims and findings on a comparative approach that has led me to queerer versions of spatiality and periodicity than those I inherited. It has also led me to privilege confluence over the more traditionally comparative project of influence, to engage in “large reading,” and to see the sign “lesbian” as itself a site for comparison. In claiming for female homoeroticism a central place in sexuality studies as an unmarked case, I argue that modernity itself can be read as the emergence of the sapphic—or what I call the logic of woman + woman—as an epistemic possibility.

Paradigms

Queer Double Cross: Doing (It with) Comp Lit

Jarrod Hayes

The crossing of borders in both ways becomes a double-crossing in the sense of a treason in both the literal and figurative sense of the expression, of which the latter refers to bisexuality. So whereas the colloquial expression “comparatively queer” can mean queerer than some, but nonetheless not too queer, we proceeded as if there could be no such as thing as too queer. “Comparatively Queer” thus became for us a way of naming our project of queering comparative studies and making comparatist strategies central to queer studies. This particular example of going both ways was inseparable in our minds from converting (or shall I say inverting) the subject of comparison into its object. Paradoxically, this becoming-object double crosses his objectivity. Comparatively queer studies should queer the comparatist as well.

Paradigms

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

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.

Paradigms

Aesthetic Humanity and the Great World Community: Kant and Kang Youwei

Ban Wang

Can we speak of an aesthetic that matters both to Kant and Kang Youwei and that makes sense to China and the West? Can we speak about a common culture while attending to specific traditions? In the current talk of a world literary republic, distinctive cultural difference is to be superseded in order to attain to an overview or superstructure that transcends national and historical distinctions. Although the aspiration to a worldwide culture may go beyond the boundaries of a national tradition, the quest for the universal has to work through the particularity of a specific culture in order to access a common ground. While access to the common world seems more dream than reality, the road to the commons must begin from home: it is to engage one’s native culture reflectively and creatively.

Paradigms

Paradigm Shift in Comparative Humanities: Digital Humanities, Pedagogy with New Media Technology, and Publishing Scholarship Online

Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Graciela Boruszko

Many faculty members feel overwhelmed by technological challenges as they try to incorporate them into their pedagogical routines. There is a crucial need for facilitators and for a more open communication between all constituents of higher learning and research, to combine academic disciplines with their practice in pedagogy. Faculty need to be more involved in the design and adoption processes of digital texts for pedagogical practice. The digital text is here to stay, and even if this is an area that is not at the core of current faculty interest at too many institutions of higher learning, it is to the faculty's benefit to express their need of support and involvement in new media technology. The world wide web is the natural venue in which to find, to interact with, and to get to know "the other."

Paradigms

“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?

Paradigms

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.

Paradigms

Digital Displacement

Dennis Tenen

The digital humanities take literary studies from the fertile age of speculative thought and model building to a time of instrumental reason and robust empiricism. At the same time, academic interest in material contexts of all kind has grown: in labs and maker spaces, in book history, in sociology of literature, in physical computing, in problems of regional inequities of access to information, in the future of books, presses, and libraries, in free culture, in the praxes of remix and remediation, and in the actual labor conditions at the base of our academic practice. The way of comparative literature has always been to advance through axes of contrast and correlation, by period and geography. The digital humanities offer yet another axis that bisects familiar concepts along a methodological divide. At its worst, the methodology devolves into shallow futurism and blunt instrumental reasoning. At its best, DH is a force of iconoclasm, used to question and to refine prevailing orthodoxies.

Paradigms

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.

Paradigms

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.

Paradigms

Comparative Literature and the Environmental Humanities

Ursula K. Heise

Environmental literary studies have become increasingly international and comparatist over the last decade. But telling the story of ecocriticism as the victory of comparatism and transnational collaboration over anglo parochialism can take on overtones of disciplinary turf war and triumphalism as easily as of deepened knowledge. There are more interesting stories to tell about the encounter of comparative literature with ecocriticism – stories that challenge literary studies in their usual form: most importantly, the challenge of nonfiction, the challenge of the environmental humanities as a transdisciplinary matrix, and the challenge of the Anthropocene in its tension with posthumanism.