This blog is about Thinking Activity on. articles presentations about comparative literature and Translation studies. This task is assigned by Prof. Dr. Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University (MKBU). As a part of the syllabus, students of English department are learning the paper called Comparative literature and translation studies.
Unit 2 ; Article 1
Introduction : what is comparative literature Today?
Fourth Article presenter by me and Nidhi Dave susan Bassnet book Comparative Literature A critical Introduction (1993). i put here SlideShare ppt or youtube video based this article. same critic is not include in presentation so i am put here in bolg.
other scholars made grandiose claims for comparative literature. Charles Gay, one of the founders of North American comparative literature, proclaimed in the same year as Croce's attack 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.
Remarkably similar sentiments to those expressed in 1974 by François Jost, when he claimed that 'national literature cannot constitute an intelligible field of study because of its arbitrarily limited perspective', and that comparative literature.
And as each new wave broke oyer the preceding one, notions of single, harmonious readings were.
We spend far too much of our energy talking... about Comparative Literature and not enough of it comparing the literature, complained Harry Levin in 1969, urging more practical work and less agonizing about the theory." But Levin's proposal was already out of date; by the late 1970s a new generation of high-flying graduate students in the West had turned to Literary Theory, Women's Studies, Semiotics, Film and Media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 were increasingly seen as dinosaurs from a liberal - humanist prehistory.
Yet even as that process was underway in the West, 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 Asian countries, based, 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.
Terry Eagleton has argued that literature, in the meaning of the word we have inherited, is an ideology," and he discusses the way in which the emergence of English as an academic subject in the nineteenth century had quite clear political implications. The establishment of the subject in the universities, he maintains, followed the vast social changes brought about in the aftermath of the first World War:
The Great War, with its carnage of ruling class rhetoric, put paid to some of the more strident forms of chauvinism on which English had previously thrived... English Literature rode to power on the back of wartime nationalism; but it also represented a search for spiritual solutions on the part of the English ruling class whose sense of identity had been profoundly shaken... Literature would be at once solace and reaffirmation, a familiar ground on which Englishmen could regroup both to explore, and to find some alternative to, the nightmare of history,15
Hence the exed question of Shakespeare in India, for example, a canonical water hailed in the nineteenth century as the epitome of English greatness, Indian students have the problem therefore of dealing with Shakespeare not only as a great figure in European literature, but also as a representative of colonial values two Shakespeares, in effect, and in conflict with one another. One way of tackling this problem is to treat Shakespeare comparatively, to study the advent of Shakespeare in Indian cultural life and to compare his work with that of Indian writers.
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 the subjecrenters a period of crisis and decay in the West. The way in which comparative literature is used, in places such as China, Brazil, India or many African nations, is constructive in that it is employed to explore both indigenous traditions and imported (or imposed) traditions, throwing open the whole vexed problem of the canon. There is no sense of crisis in this form of comparative literature, no quibbling about the terms from which to start comparing, because those terms are already laid down. What is being studied is the way in which national culture has been affected by importation, and the focus is that national culture.
Article : 2
Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities : On Possible Futures for a Discipline
Todd Presner
Abstract
While the invention of the printing press, communication, literacy, and the state of knowledge completely changed providing the condition of possibility for reformation and the Enlightenment of the Age Humanism and the rise of mass media.
The impact of print and the " Discovery" of the new world was predicted by networking technologies, which not only enabled the dissemination of knowledge and new culture and social spheres.
The invention of the electric telegraph, the heyday of colonization, the exploitation of the natural world, the electrification of cities, the rise of transnational finance, the internet, and "New" media of the radio, film, and television.
Explosion of real-time social networking on hand-held devices. these technologies have a common thing a contraction of time and space through the control of regulation of knowledge information and bodies.
• In this regard, every technology has a dialectical underbelly, facilitating the
potential democratization of information and exchange on the one hand and the ability to exercise exclusionary control and violence on the other.
Key Arguments
Nicholas Negroponte in his book Being Digital says perhaps even hundred dollar computer will not only be used to enhance education, spread democracy, and enable global communication but will not 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.
• Paul Gilroy analyzed in his study the fatal junction of the concept of nationality with the concept of culture along with "Black Atlantic" voyages of discovery enlightenment, and progress also meant, at the very moment, voyages of conquest, enslavement, and destruction.
• New communication technologies including but hardly limited to web-based media forms. locative technologies, digital archives, cloud computing, social networking, and mixed realities.
• N. Katherine Hayles ponders 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".
Key points
- "Materiality as the interplay between a text's physical characteristics and its signifying practices", as Hayles argues allows us to consider the text as "embodied entities" and still foreground interpretative practices.
- Walter Benjamin did in "The Arcades Project" both the media and methodologies for the study of literature, culture and society. Just as Benjamin sought to employ the montage form to transform historical scholarship by refocusing attention on what it means to "write" history, digital media enable us to refocus on the media, methodologies, and affordances of print culture in the practice of Comparative Literature.
- What happens when the print is no longer the normative or exclusive medium for producing literature and undertaking literary studies?
- While electronic literature offers a significant and multivalent possibility for exploring the future of Comparative Literature.
Nicholas Negroponte
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
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 iany discussion of technology cannot be separated from a discussion about formations of power and instrumentalized authority.
N. Katherine Hayles
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
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.
Why, for example, were humanists, foundations, and universities conspicuously – even scandalously – silent when Google won its book search lawsuit and, effectively, won the right to transfer copyright of orphaned books to itself? Why were they silent when the likes of Sony and Disney essentially engineered the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, radically restricting intellectual property, copyright, and sharing? The Manifesto is a call to Humanists for a much deeper engagement with digital culture production, publishing, access, and ownership. If new technologies are dominated and controlled by corporate and entertainment inter ests, how will our cultural legacy be rendered in new media formats? By whom and for whom?
1.Comparative Media Studies
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 indefi nitely, gradually including more and more of the world ’ s written knowledge. (Nelson, 2004: pp. 134 – 145)
Comparative Media Studies also implies that the output or scholarly “ work ” is not uni - medial and, for that matter, might not even be textual. It draws attention to the design and interrelationship of every unit of the argument, whether a page, a folio, a database fi eld, XML metadata, a map, a fi lm still, or something else. It does so in order to interrogate the spatio - temporal elements of the layout, its look and feel, its visual organization, the curatorial pathways, the user or reader ’ s interface, the indexing and access system, and the processes of enabling legibility through selection and assembly. Delivery platforms, interface designs, layout and navigation systems, authoring processes, and even mechanisms of reproduction, dissemination, and preservation all make arguments and assumptions, instantiate knowledge in particular ways, and betray certain world views. Prompted by digital media, Comparative Media Studies thus enables us to return to some of the most fundamental questions of our fi eld with new urgency: Who is an author? What is a work? What constitutes a text, particularly in an environment in which any text is readerly and writerly by potentially anyone? (Barthes, 1986 )
2.Comparative Data Studies
In addition to performing “ close ” and “ distant ” analyses of data, Comparative Data Studies also radically broadens the canon of objects and cultural material under consideration: On the one hand, cultural objects originally constituted as singular objects in one medium are now digitized, marked - up, accessible, and shareable in multiple formats and on a variety of platforms. And on the other hand, “ born digital ” objects – whether blogs, videos, web pages, music, maps, photographs, or hypermedia artifacts that combine many different media types – provide data for analysis and instantiate new forms of knowledge creation and curation. As Jerome McGann argues with regard to the fi rst in his elegant analysis of “ radiant textuality, ” the differences between the codex and the electronic versions of the Oxford English Dictionary , for example, illustrate that the electronic OED is “ a metabook [that has] consumed everything that the codex OED provides and reorganized it at a higher level ” (McGann, 2001 : p. 55), adding value through new indexing and search mechanisms, hyperlinks, editing and annotation tools, and even reading strategies. Such digital books exist in what he calls “ N - Dimensional Space ” since the archive of digital objects and exchanges “ can be radically expanded in both spatial and temporal terms, ” involving scholars, institutions, interpretations, and datasets from potentially anyone anywhere (McGann, 2001 : p. 169). The “ data ” of Comparative Data Studies is constantly expanding in terms of volume, data type, production and reception platform, and analytic strategy.
3. Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies
Wikipedia, I believe, represents a truly innovative, global, multilingual, collaborative knowledge - generating community and platform for authoring, editing, distributing, and versioning knowledge
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, fl exible, 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 refl ection, perhaps even by scholars in a future disciplinary incarnation of Comparative Literature.
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