Lost in Lit-Terra Incognita, or What Is and to What End Do We Study World Literature?Weninger, Robert
2010 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-2010-020
In our era of ever accelerating globalization, scholars of Comparative Literature are increasingly required to study texts from cultures they do not know and written in languages in which they are not proficient. As a result more and more comparatists find themselves called upon to pass academic judgment on texts from literatures they are not sufficiently equipped to handle linguistically, culturally, and historically. Against the backdrop of the recent spate of publications on world literature, especially the monographs by David Damrosch and the various multi-volume anthologies of world literature in English translation now available for classroom use (Norton, Bedford, Longman), this essay explores the possible pitfalls comparatists face as general readers of world literature no less than as scholars when they study texts in languages they do not speak. The author, a professor of modern German literature, sets out to attempt a reading of a poem by the medieval Japanese writer Fujiwara no Teika, only to discover that what remains when linguistic barriers cannot be overcome and cultural specificity cannot be recognized is an interpretation that is constricted by the quality of the existing translations and that rests uncomfortably and problematically on thematic universals. This problem necessitates a critical examination of the fraught legacy of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Eurocentric critics who unthinkingly assigned universal value to their local parameters of interpretation. But in light of the fact that no future scholar will be able to escape reading texts of world literature in translation, this essay simultaneously calls for a renewed discussion of the contested status of so-called universals within the discourse of Comparative Literature today.
The Globalization of the Novel and the Novelization of the Global. A Critique of World LiteratureSiskind, Mariano
2010 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-2010-021
In this essay I propose two different but complementary models with which to think about the relation between the novel and the historical process of globalization. The first— the globalization of the novel —works not with particular textual formations, but with the historical expansion of the novel form hand-in-hand with the colonial enterprise of Western Europe. With this interpretative concept, I review the historical and theoretical parameters that have been used to study both the historical spread of the novel from Europe to the peripheries and the constitution, at the end of the nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century, of a global system of production, reception, and translation of novels. The second model— the novelization of the global —focuses on the production of images of a globalized world as they are constructed in specific novels. My examples are novels by Jules Verne and Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg. While both writers create images of travelers spreading modern bourgeois culture throughout the world and beyond, as might be expected, Verne's images differ significantly from Holmberg's. My claim here is that the particular geopolitical determinations that marked each of these writers produced dissimilar imaginaries of the global reach of their bourgeois characters and plots. Finally, in a coda to this double hypothesis, I connect the interpretative models of the globalization of the novel and the novelization of the global with the rentrée of the concept of world literature. Recently re-introduced to academic debate by Franco Moretti, Pascale Casanova, and David Damrosch, among others, this restored notion of world literature can be understood as an attempt to conceptualize the global ubiquity of the novel since the mid-twentieth century. Here I analyze what could be called the cultural politics of world literature and the critical and pedagogical practices that are derived from this concept. I also examine its underlying claim to address, in academic practices, cosmopolitan expectations related to the production of a discourse about the world based on respect for cultural difference. In other words, my question is whether world literature, as a concept and as a practice, is capable of becoming an effective cosmopolitan discourse.
"A sane balance of values": The Cantos as World LiteratureStasi, Paul
2010 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-2010-022
Ezra Pound argued that it was impossible to think in only one language in the contemporary world. To this end he worked in The Cantos to create a world culture built on the comparison of works of "great value" from a variety of cultures. Pound's epic poem serves to displace the English language that is its ostensible ground, while at the same time arguing, through a specific theory of the art object, against the stability of the perceiving subject. The poem thus critiques the concentric circles of identity, nation, and culture by positing a transnational world literature built upon the objectivity of the work of art. At the same time, Pound's work is an affront to the contemporary regime of "multicultural formalism," which preserves cultural differences without engaging in any meaningful dialogue about the content of those differences, thus paradoxically supporting both the reification of the nation and the flattening out of cultural difference by making difference a purely "formal" category. In contrast, difference for Pound becomes a mark of the cultural object's historicity. By preserving the specificity of his cultural objects and highlighting the historical routes by which they travel, Pound resists the homogenizing drive of imperial culture as well as the reification of national borders perpetuated in the study of national literatures.
The Flaneur in ExileEdmond, Jacob
2010 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-2010-023
In this essay, I argue that the flâneur in exile addresses and offers an alternative to the endless oscillation between sameness and difference that bedevils contemporary approaches to comparative literature. I use the phrase flâneur in exile to refer to the encounter between a paradigmatic figure of European modernity, the flâneur , and contemporary Chinese poetry, in particular the poetic prose cycle "Guihua" ("Ghost Speech/Lies") written by Chinese poet Yang Lian during his exile in Auckland, New Zealand, after June Fourth 1989. Emerging out of the relationship between Europe and non-Europe and associated with Walter Benjamin's dialectical image, the figure of the flâneur furnishes a comparative approach based on collision, encounter, and touch, rather than the mimetic, vision-based models of comparison that claim equivalence or commensurability. I detect a similar comparative poetics in the mythologized encounter between Chinese poet Duoduo and Charles Baudelaire's "Le soleil" in the early 1970s. This encounter underscores the double movement of a text towards and beyond its engagement with the particularities of its own space and time and suggests the flâneur as a figure for this movement. I extend this implicit comparative poetics by superimposing Baudelaire and Benjamin onto contemporary Chinese poetry to explore the subsequent elaboration and negation of the figure in 1980s xungen , or "root seeking," writing and especially in Yang's work in exile. Reading Yang's walker in the city in relation to the figure of the flâneur , I show how his exilic writing dramatizes the problem of spatial, temporal, and linguistic dislocation in exile, modernity, and comparison. Whether in Benjamin's reading of Baudelaire, Duoduo's encounter with Baudelaire, Yang's exilic writing, or my reading of each through the flâneur , touch stands as a figure for, and embodiment of, a comparative poetics that deploys a flâneur -like hypersensitivity to the duality of language to bring places and times into encounter, acknowledging their mutually constituting and irreconcilable, mutually eclipsing otherness. The flâneur in exile thus embodies a comparative poetics resistant to generalizing thinking but insistent on bringing places and times into contact and acknowledging the constitutive role that such moments of encounter play in modern and contemporary literature and in modernity at large.
Toward World Literary Knowledges: Theory in the Age of GlobalizationKrishnaswamy, Revathi
2010 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-2010-024
While the literatures of the (third) world are being rapidly curricularized in revamped Comparative/World or Postcolonial literature classes, the theories and methodologies used to interpret and evaluate these texts are still drawn primarily from the Western tradition. The field of literary theory remains a resolutely Eurocentric high ground relatively untouched by the rising tide of globalization reshaping American academia. Neither the marginalized subdiscipline of Comparative Poetics nor the more influential field of Postcolonial Studies has managed to challenge effectively the assumption that theory is the product of a uniquely Western philosophical tradition. This essay argues for the need to globalize the field of literary theory beyond inducting a few non-Western greats into theory's hall of fame toward radically redefining theory itself in ways that include not only dominant, formal, explicit high textual traditions of poetics, but also subaltern and popular epistemologies that may be "emergent" or "latent" in praxis. Toward this end, the essay proposes an alternative in the form of "world literary knowledges" and presents three examples of "literary knowledge" from the (pre- and post-colonial) Indian context.