Hello, I am Himanshi Parmar, student of MK Bhavnagar University. This blog i have written as a response to Thinking Activity, Which is a Part of my academic Work. Which we get after each unit. In this blog, i am going to discuss briefly about Two articles, 1) Susan Bassnett, “What is Comparative Literature Today?” Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction. 1993, and 2) 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.
What is Comparative Studies?
The studies which reveal similarities or differences between different markets, countries, aspects of companies, etc. They help to illustrate links and dissimilarities between these different elements. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary,
"Comparative Literature is the study of the interrelationship of the literature of two or more national cultures usually of differing languages and especially of the influences of one upon the other."
In another words Comparative Literature is traditionally known as the study of two or more literatures in comparison (English and German, for example) and their multi-dimensional components which may encompass aspects such as the historical, gender, economic, cultural, social, philosophical, religious, and linguistic factors of the distinct cultures being analyzed.
Comparative Literature focuses on the study of literature from different cultures, nations, and genres, and explores relationships between literature and other forms of cultural expression. Comparative Literature poses such questions as, What is the place of literature in society? How does literature as a form change over time, and in relation to other forms of making art? How does literature shape and respond to values, social movements, or political contexts? Read more.
1] Susan Bassnett, “What is Comparative Literature Today?”
About Susan Bassnett
Susan Edna Bassnett, FRSL (born 21 October 1945) is a translation theorist and scholar of comparative literature. She served as pro-vice-chancellor at the University of Warwick for ten years and taught in its Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies, which closed in 2009. As of 2016, she is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Universities of Glasgow and Warwick. Educated around Europe, she began her career in Italy and has lectured at universities in the United States. In 2007, she was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.Among her more than twenty books, several have become mainstays in the field of literary criticism, especially Translation Studies (1980) and Comparative Literature (1993). A book on Ted Hughes was published in 2009. Another book edited by Bassnett is Knives and Angels: Women Writers in Latin America.Bassnett's collaboration with several intellectuals in a series of book projects has been received well. In 2006, she co-edited with Peter Bush the book The Translator as Writer. In addition to her scholarly works, Bassnett writes poetry which was published as Exchanging Lives: Poems and Translations (2002). Click to read more.
Article - 1
1]Susan Bassnett, “What is Comparative Literature Today?
The article begin with the simple question : What is Comparative Literature? And the answer given 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 literatures across both time and space. The journey of comparative literature begins with a desire to move beyond the boundaries of a single subject area that might appear to be too constraining, at other times a reader may be impelled to follow up what appear to be similarities between texts or authors from different cultural context.
Matthew Arnold in his Inaugural Lecture at Oxford in 1857 said that :
"Everywhere there is connection, everywhere there is illustration. No single event, no single lecture is adequately comprehended except in relation to other events, to other lectures."
As per Susan Bassnett it might be argued that anyone who has an interest in books embarks on the road towards what might be termed comparative literature ; Reading Chaucer, we come across Boccaccio ; we can trace Shakespeare's source materials through Latin, French, Spanish and Italian; We can study the way Romanticism developed across Europe at a similar moment in time, follow the process through which Baudelaire's fascination with Edgar Allan Poe enriched his own writing, consider how many English novelists learned from the great nineteenth - Century Russian writers, compare how James Joyce borrowed from and loaned to Italo Svevo, When we read Clarice Lispector we are reminded of Jean Rhys, who in turn recalls Djuna Barnes and Anais Nin. There is no limit to the list of examples we could device.
Critics at the end of the twentieth century, in the age of post - modernism,still wrestle with the same questions that were posed more than a century ago :
• What is object of study in comparative literature?
• How can comparison be the objective of anything?
• If individual literatures have canon, what might a comparative canon be?
•How can a comparatist select what to compare ?
• Is comparative literature a discipline? Or is it simply a field of study ?
• Or is it simply a field of study?
Since the 1950s we have been hearing all too frequently about what Rene Wellek defined as 'The Crisis of Comparative Literature'.
Further Susan says that Comparative literature as a term seems to arouse strong passions, both for and against. As early as 1903, Benedetto Croce argued that comparative literature was a non - subject, contemptuously dismissing the suggestion that it might be seen as a separate discipline. But Croce's argument was totally different, the argument was that the term 'Comparative Literature' was obfuscatory, disguising the obvious, that is, the fact that the true object of study was literary history. Max Koch, founded and edited the two German Comparative Journals, Zeitschrift fiir uergleichende Literatur (1887-1910) and, studien zur uergleichenden Literaturgeschichte (1901-9).
Croce claimed he could not distinguish between literary history pure and simple and comparative literary history. The term, 'Comparative Literature', he maintained, had no substance to it. But other scholars made grandiose claims for comparative literature. Charles Mills Gayley said that the working premise of the student of Comparative Literature was :
"Literature as a distinct and integral medium of thought, a common institutional expression of humanity; differentiated, to be sure, by the social conditions of the individual, by racial, historical, cultural and linguistic influences, opportunities, and restrictions, but, irrespective of age or guise, prompted by the common needs and aspirations of man, sprung from common faculties,psychological and physiological, and obeying common laws of material and mode, of the individual and social humanity."
François Jost in 1974 claimed that 'national literature' cannot constitute an intelligible field of study because of its 'arbitrarily limited perspective'.
Jost, like Gayley and others before him, are proposing comparative literature as some kind of world religion. The underlying suggestion is that all cultural differences disappear when readers take up great works; art is seen as an instrument of universal harmony. Moreover, the comparatist 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,
Comparative Literature... will make high demands on the linguistic proficiencies of our scholars. It asks for a widening of perspectives, a suppression of local and provincial sentiments, not easy to achieve.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, high-flying graduate students in the West turned to comparative literature as a radical subject, because at that time it appeared to be transgressive, moving as it claimed to do across the boundaries of single literature study.
In 1969, Harry Levis urging more practical work and less agonizing about the theory. But Levis proposal was out of date. By the late 1970s a new generation of high-flying graduate students in the West had turned to Literary Theory, Women's Studies, Semiotics, Film and Media Studies and Cultural Studies as the radical subject choices, abandoning Comparative Literature to what were increasingly seen as dinosaurs from liberal - humanist prehistory.
comparative literature began to gain ground in the rest of the world. New programmes in comparative literature began to emerge in China, in Taiwan, in Japan and other countries. However not on any ideal of universalism but on the very aspect of literary study that many western comparatists had sought to deny: the specificity of national literatures.
According to Swapan Majumdar -
‘It is because of this predilection for National Literature - much
deplored by the Anglo-American critics as a methodology - that Comparative Literature has struck roots in the Third World nations and in India in particular.’
Ganesh Devi goes further, and suggests that, comparative literature in India is directly linked to the rise of modern Indian Nationalism. Comparative literature has been 'used to assert the national cultural identity' in 1993.
Majumdar points out that, what Indian scholars call western literature, regardless of geographical precision, includes those literatures which derive from Graeco - Roman matrices via Christianity, and he termed English, French, German, etc, as 'sub - national literatures'.
Homi Bhabha sums up the new emphasis in an essay discussing the ambivalence of post- colonial culture, suggesting that:
‘Instead of cross-referencing there is an effective, productive cross- cutting across sites of social significance, that erases the dialectical, disciplinary sense of 'Cultural' reference and relevance’.
Wole Soyinka and a whole range of African critics have exposed the pervasive influence of Hegel, who argued that African culture was 'weak' in contrast to what he claimed were higher, more developed cultures, and who effectively denied African history.
Caribbean critics have challenged the refusal of a great deal of Western literary criticism to accept the implications of their literary and cultural policy.Terry Eagleton has argued that 'literature, in the meaning of the word we have inherited, is an ideology.Terry Eagleton's explanation of the rise of English ties in with the aspirations of many of the early comparatists for a subject that would transcend cultural boundaries and unite the human race through the civilizing power of great literature.
Work of Edward Said, pioneer of the notion of 'Orientalism', has provided many critics with a new Vocabulary. Said's thesis, that,
The Orient was a word which later accrued to it a wide field of meanings, associations and connotations, and that these did not necessarily refer to the real Orient but to the field surrounding the word.
Zhang Longxi's 'The myth of the other: China in the Eyes of the West'. In which it is argued that for the west, China as a land in the Far East becomes traditionally the images of ultimate other'.
The growth of national consciousness and awareness of the need to move beyond the colonial legacy has led significantly to the development of comparative literature in many parts of the world, even as the subject enters a period of crisis and decay in the West.
Ganesh Devy's argument that comparative literature in India coincides with the rise of modern Indian nationalism is important, because it serves to remind us of the origins of the term 'Comparative Literature' in Europe, a term that first appeared in an age of national struggles, when new boundaries were being erected and the whole question of national culture and national identity was under discussion throughout Europe and the expanding United States of America.
The rush of books on post - colonial literature at the start of the 1990s reflects a new intrest in this hitherto neglected area of study. The opening statements of
'The empire writes Back in clude the following phrase: 'the term "Post - Colonial"... is most appropriate as the term for the new cross - Cultural criticism which has merged in recent years and for the discourse through which this constituted'. What is this but comparative literature under another name?
Another rapidly expanding development in literary studies, and one which has profound implications for the future of comparative literature, is 'translation studies. 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, Lambert and many others has shown that translation is especially significant at moments of great cultural change.
Evan Zohar argues that extensive translation activity takes place when a culture is in a period of transition: when it is expanding, when it needs renewal, when it is in a pre-revolutionary phase, then translation plays a vital part. In contrast, when a culture is solidly established, when it is in an imperialist stage, when it believes itself to be dominant, then translation is less important. As English became the language of international diplomacy in the twentieth century (and also the dominant world commercial language), there was little need to translate, hence the relative poverty of twentieth-century translations into English compared with the proliferation of translations in many other languages. When translation is neither required nor wanted, it tends to become a low status activity, poorly paid and disregarded, and the implications of this process have come and increasingly to be studied by people working in the field of translation studies.
Thus to conclude Susan says that Comparative literature has always claimed 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 rigor, both in terms of theoretical and descriptive work, so comparative literature appears less like a discipline and more like a branch of something else. Seen in 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.
I hope my blog will be helpful to you, Thank you.
