Hello friends
I am Bhavna Sosa from the Department of English MKBU. Welcome to my blog. In our syllabus of M.A. Sem- 4. We had one paper on Contemporary literature and Translation Studies. Dilip Barad assigned us this article in the Group presentations Task as well as the Thinking Activity task.
Article -4 : What is Comparative Literature Today ? -Susan Bassnett
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 says that most of the people do not start with comparative literature but they end up with it in some way or other. Generally, we first start reading the text and then we arrive at a comparison. I mean to say, we start comparing that text with another that has similarities and dissimilarities. Comparative Literature emerged in the 19th century. Comparative Literature is different from national literature, general literature and world literature. It was begun as “Literature Compare” in 1860 in Germany. Comparative literature got recognition as a study in 1897. In 1848, Matthew Arnold had used this term “Comparative Literature “for the first time in English. He defines this term. He says...
“Everywhere there is connection. Everywhere there is illustration. No single event, no single literature is adequately comprehended except in relation to other events, to other literatures.”
Goethe gave the term “World Literature (Weltliteratur) to Comparative literature because by comparing them, the comparatists compare one literature to another one. In a way, comparative literature removes all borders and brings nearer to all literatures and spreads harmony. What is common in different literature? That is the main function of comparative literature.
What is the object of study in comparative literature? How can comparison be the object of anything? If individual literatures have a canon what might a comparative canon be? How does the comparative select what to compare? Is comparative literature a discipline? Or is it simply a field of study? All these questions can be raised. Rene Wellek defined as “the crisis of comparative literature.”
Benedetto Croce argued that comparative literature was a non- subject, contemptuously dismissing the suggestion that it might be seen as a separate discipline. He discussed the definition of Comparative literature as the exploration of “the vicissitudes, alterations, developments and reciprocal difference” of themes and literary ideas across literatures, and concluded that ‘there is no study more arisen than research of this sort. This kind of work, Croce maintained, is to be classified, in the category of erudition purely and simply. Instead of something called comparative literature, he suggested that the proper object of study should be literary history.
“ the comparative history of literature is history understood in its true sense a s complete explanation of the literary work, encompassed in all its relationships, disposed in the composite whole of universal literary history (where else could it ever be placed ?), seen in those connections and preparations that are its raison d’être.”
Croce’s argument was that the term “Comparative Literature” was obfuscator, disguising the obvious, that is, the fact that the true object of study was literary history. Here, we can see Croce’s different views regarding comparative literature that he is against the concept of comparative literature. This shows various comparative literatures. All cultural differences disappear when readers take up great works; art is seen as an instrument of universal harmony and the comparator is one who facilitates the spread of that harmony. Moreover, the corporatist must possess special skills; 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 type of linguistic proficiencies of our scholars. It asks for a widening of perspectives, a suppression of local and provincial sentiments, not easy to achieve.”
West comparative literature began to gain ground in the rest of the world. New programmes in comparative literature began to emerged in China, in Taiwan, in Japan, and other Asian countries, based, however, nor on any ideal of Universalism but on the very aspect of literary study that many Western comparison had sought to deny: the specificity of national literatures, Swapan Majumdar puts it:
“It is because of this prediction for National Literature- much developed by the Anglo-American critics as a methodology- that comparative Literature has struck roots in the Third World nations and in India in particular.”
Conclusion:
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 changes. 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. When a culture is solidity established, when it is in an imperialist stage, when it believes itself to be dominant, then translation is less important.
Comparative Literature have always claimed that translation as a sub-category,but as translation studies establishes itself firmly as a subject based in inter-cultural study and offering a methodology of some rigour, both in terms of theoretical and descriptive work, so comparative literature appears less like a discipline and more like a branch of something else. Seenin this way, the problem of the crisis could then be put into perspective,and the long,unresolved debate on whether comparative literature is or is not a discipline in its own right could finally and definitely be shelved.
Article- 5 : Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline by Todd Presner.
Abstract :
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. With the invention of the printing press, communication, literacy and the state of knowledge completely changed, providing the conditions of possibility for the reformation, the Enlightenment, the age of humanism, and the rise of mass media.
Key points and analysis :
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) (Presner, 2007 ).
Paul Gilroy analysed 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 iany discussion 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.
Darnton ’s assessment seriously that we are now in the fifth decade of the fourth information age in the history of humankind, it seems to me that we ought to try to understand not only the contours of the discipline of Comparative Literature – and for that matter, the Humanities as a whole – from the perspective of an information - and media - specific analysis, but that we also ought to come to terms with the epistemic disjunction between our digital age and everything that came before it.
Walter Benjamin did in The Arcades Project (1928 – 40; 1999), it is necessary, I believe, to interrogate both the media and methodologies for the study of literature, culture, and society. The “ problem ” of Comparative Literature is to figure out how to take seriously the range of new authoring, annotation, and sharing platforms that have transformed global cultural production.
Comparative Media Studies
Comparative Data Studies
Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies
1)Comparative Media Studies :
Digital media are always already hypermedia and hypertextual.For Nelson, a hypertext is a Body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper [ … ] Such a system could grow indefinitely, gradually including more and more of the world ’ s written knowledge.
2)Comparative Data Studies:
Spurred by the work of Lev Manovich and Noah Wardrip - Fruin, the field of “ cultural analytics ” has emerged over the past five years to bring the tools of high - end computational analysis and data visualisation to dissect large - scale cultural datasets. Jerome McGann argues with regard to the first in his elegant analysis of “ radiant textuality, ” the differences between the codex and the electronic versions of the Oxford English Dictionary. The data of comparative data studies is constantly expanding in terms of volume, datatype, production and reception Platform and analytic strategy.
3)Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies :
Just browse and passively consume predigested contenbut are actively engaged in the production and evaluation of digital media and software thanks to the open source movement. James Boyle points out, there are many corporate entities eager to regulate the public domain and control the “ commons of the mind. ” 10 For Boyle, the real danger is not unauthorised file sharing but “ failed sharing ” due to enclosures and strictures placed upon the world of the creative commons (Boyle, 2008 : p. 182).Scholars such as McKenzie Wark and Kathleen Fitzpatrick have even “ published ” early versions of their entire books on Commentpress.
Conclusion :
This article mainly 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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