Unit 2:
4) Susan Bassnett, “What is Comparative Literature Today?” Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction. 1993.
1) Abstract
Sooner or later, anyone who claims to be working in comparative literature has to try and answer the inevitable question: What is it? The simplest answer is that comparative literature involves the study of texts across cultures, that it is interdisciplinary, and that it is concerned with patterns of connection in literature across both time and space.
Susan Bassnett gives a critical understanding of Comparative literature. She says that there is no particular object for studying comparative literature. Another thing is, we cannot give a definite term for comparative literature.
Different authors of literature give various perspectives about comparative literature. The popular understanding of comparative literature means different cultures across the world, expressed in the history of literature.
2) Key Arguments
Critics at the end of the twentieth century, in the age of postmodernism, still wrestle with the same questions that were posed more than a century ago:
“What is the object of the study in comparative literature? How can a comparison be the objective of anything? If individual literature has a canon, what might a comparative canon be? How can be comparatist select what to compare? Is comparative literature a discipline? Or is it simply a field of study ?”
Susan Bassnett argues that there are different terms used by different scholars for comparative literature studies. Therefore, we cannot put in a single compartment for comparative literature.
The second thing she argues is that the west students of 1960 claimed that comparative literature could be put in single boundaries for comparative literature study, but she says that there is no particular method used for claiming.
3) Main Analysis
The comparative literature has been developed through the progress of the world and through various cultures of different continents.
Different cultures of the continents have played a vital role in comparative literature studies, be it European, African, American and Eastern so on.
Matthew Arnold in his Inaugural lecture at Oxford in 1857 when said :
“Everywhere there is a connection, everywhere there is an illustration.
No single event, no single literature is adequately
comprehend except about other events, to other literature.”
Goethe termed Weltliteratur.Goethe noted that he liked to “keep informed about foreign productions’ and advised anyone else to do the same. It is becoming more and more obvious to me,” he remarked, “that poetry is the common property of all mankind.”
Benedetto Croce argued that comparative literature was a non-subject, contemptuously dismissing the suggestion that it might be seen as a separate discipline.
Wellek and Warren in their Theory of Literature, a book that was enormously significant in comparative literature when it first appeared in 1949, suggest that :
“Comparative Literature …will make high demands on the linguistic proficiencies of our scholars. It asks for a widening of perspectives,
suppression of local and provincial sentiments, not easy to achieve.”
4) Conclusion
The comparative literature could not be brought under one umbrella unless it becomes a particular branch of the discipline of literature. There are a lot of efforts are being taken to study comparative literature through a common language that is done in translation, which is understood by all people.
Comparative Literature has traditionally claimed translation as a sub-category, but this assumption is now being questioned. The work of scholars such as Toury, Lefevere, Hermans, Lembert, and many others has shown that translation is especially at moments of great cultural change.
Evan Zohar argued that extensive translation activity takes place when a culture is in a period of translation: when it is expanding, when it needs renewal, when it is in a pre-revolutionary phase, then translation plays a vital part.
5) Todd Presner, ‘Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline’ in Ali Behdad and Thomas eds. A Companion to Comparative Literature’ 2011, 193- 207
1) Abstract
This article focuses on the questions like it is essential that humanists assert and insert themselves into the twenty-first-century cultural wars, which are largely being defined, fought, and won by corporate interests.
After five hundred years of print and the massive transformations in society and culture that it unleashed, we are in the midst of another watershed moment in human history that is on par with the invention of the printing press or perhaps the discovery of the New World.
2) Key Arguments
Paul Gilroy analyzed in his study of “ the fatal junction of the concept of nationality with the concept of culture ” along the “ Black Atlantic, ” voyages of discovery, enlightenment, and progress also meant, at every moment, voyages of conquest, enslavement, and destruction. Indeed, this is why many discussions of technology cannot be separated from a discussion about formations of power and instrumentalized authority.
N. Katherine Hayles, I find myself wondering – as we ponder various possible futures for Comparative Literature in the second decade of the twenty-first century – how to rouse ourselves from the “ somnolence [of] five hundred years of print ” (Hayles, 2002: p. 29). Of course, there is nothing neutral, objective, or necessary about the medium of print; rather it is a medium that has a long and complex history connected to the formation of academic disciplines, institutions, epistemologies, and ideologies, not to mention conceptions of authorship and scholarly research.
Nicholas Negroponte once asserted in his wildly optimistic book Being Digital (Negroponte, 1995 ), for they always have an underbelly: mobile phones, social networking technologies, and perhaps even the hundred-dollar computer, will not only be used to enhance education, spread democracy, and enable global communication but will likely be used to perpetrate violence and even orchestrate genocide in much the same way that the radio and the railway did in the last century (despite the belief that both would somehow liberate humanity and join us all together in a happy, interconnected world that never existed before)
3) Main Analysis
Comparative Media Studies
Comparative Data Studies
Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies
4) Conclusion
It focuses on this twenty-first century in terms of digital humanities how we are doing comparative studies. After discussing various arguments, we come to know that to date, it has more than three million content pages, more than three hundred million edits, over ten million registered users, and articles in forty - seven languages (Wikipedia Statistics). This is a massive achievement for eight years of work. Wikipedia represents a dynamic, flexible, and open-ended network for knowledge creation and distribution that underscores process, collaboration, access, interactivity, and creativity, with an editing model and versioning system that documents every contingent decision made by every contributing author. At this moment in its short life, Wikipedia is already the most comprehensive, representative, and pervasive participatory platform for knowledge production ever created by humankind. In my opinion, that is worth some pause and reflection, perhaps even by scholars in a future disciplinary incarnation of Comparative Literature.
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