Hello Readers!!
Here is my blog on Comparative Literature and Translation Studies. I've tried to elaborate article written by S.Bassnet and Todd Presener on Digital Humanity as the Future of Comparative Literature.
This article is the introduction to the book 'Comparative Literature' 'A Critical Introduction.' Which is by Susan Bassnett and it took place around 1993. As she is asking the question so by that we can say that there is a problem that's why she is asking.
The reasons are there why she has put the special concern here related to it. 'National Consciousness' during the time of WW1 and WW2. There was the concern about it in western. In the nineteens, it comes to India about the nationality. In 1991, India was changing its policy at a national level. The rise of nationalism was because people were afraid of the past and how east India company came and owned the country.
Introduction:
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 literatures across both time and space.
Matthew Arnold in his Inaugural Lecture at Oxford in 1857 when said, Everywhere there is connection, everywhere there is an illustration. No single piece of literature is adequately comprehended except in relation to other events, to other literatures.
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'.
At the end of the twentieth century during postmodernism, there were several questions like: What is the object of study in comparative literature? How can comparison be the object of anything? If individual literature has a canon be it? How does the comparist select what to compare? Is comparative literature a discipline? Or is it simply a field of study?
In the year of 1903, Benedetto Croce, he suggested proper object of study should be literary history : the comparative history of literature is history understood in its true sense as a complete explanation of the literary work, encompassed in all its relationships, disposed in the composite whole of inversal literary history, seen in those connections and preparations that are its raison d'etre.
Croce claimed that he could not distinguish between Literary history pure and simple and comparative Literary History.
Charles Mills Gayle :
“Literature as a distinct and integral medium of thought, a common
the 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."
Francois Jost: 'national literature' cannot constitute an intelligible field of study because of its 'arbitrarily limited perspective'
Jost, like Gayley and others before him, is 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 and the comparatist is one who facilitates the spread of that harmony.
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, and 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.
Levin's proposal was already 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 was increasingly seen as dinosaurs from a liberal - humanist prehistory.
As Swapan Majumdar puts it:
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 Devy goes further, and suggests that comparative literature in India is directly linked to the rise of modern Indian nationalism, noting that comparative literature has been 'used to assert the national cultural identity'."
Homi Bhabha sums up the new emphasis in an essay discussing the ambivalence of colonial culture, suggesting that: post 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 Africa a history.
James Snead, in an essay attacking Hegel, points out that:
The outstanding fact of late twentieth-century European culture is its ongoing reconciliation with black culture. The mystery may be that it took so long to discern the elements of black culture already there in latent form and to realize that the separation between the cultures was perhaps all along not one of nature, but one of force.
Terry Eagleton has argued that literature, in the meaning of the word we have 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. But just as English has itself entered a crisis (what, after all, is English today? Literature produced within the geographical boundaries of England? Of the United Kingdom? Or literatures are written in English from all parts of the world? And where does the boundary line between 'literature' on the one hand and 'popular' or 'mass' culture on the other hand lie? The old days when English meant texts from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf are long gone, and the question of what to include and exclude from an English syllabus is a very vexing one); so also has Comparative Literature been called into question by the emergence of alternative schools of thought.
The 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 that 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 provides the basis for essays such as 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 image of the ultimate Other'."
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.
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 the 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 a translation is neither required nor wanted, it tends to become a low-status activity, poorly paid, and disregarded.
Comparative literature has always claimed translation as a sub-category, but as translation studies establish itself firmly as a subject based on the inter-cultural study and offer 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.
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