Comparative Literature and the Question of Theory

In the long-standing and divisive debate on Comparative Literature, comparatist scholars from both the Great European Tradition and the Southern Hemisphere agree on the importance of two elements: first , the definition of Comparative Literature and the historical role it has with regard to the Human Sciences; secondly, the position of theory in this essentially Eurocentric discipline, and the impact that recent cross-cultural scholarship on Postcolonialism,Women Studies, Translation and Cultural Studies may have on the project of its re-conceptualisation. The present paper deals briefly with the first element, providing elements of focus rather than a finished portrait; then, it takes up the significant moments of the theoretical debate in Comparative Literature between Literary Studies on the one hand and Translation and Cultural Studies on the other. Through the comparative scholarly research extending from the 1990's to the first decade of the 21 st century, I describe the shifts of focus in literary studies that emerged in the 1990's, and which resulted in the creation of a new, more politicised Cultural Studies, as well as new configurations of main vs. subsidiary between Comparative Literature and the disciplines contiguous to it: Translation and Cultural studies. With these realignments, I argue, Comparative Literature has been faced with the challenge to restructure itself and its agenda. In this, I finally maintain, it gives 21st century lessons to the other Human Sciences on the commensurability of angst, survival and regeneration.

New Academia: An International Journal of English Language, Literature and Literary Theory , 2023

My paper addresses the paradox of the marginalized position of translation despite serving as a theoretical fulcrum for comparative and world literature(s) since their birth. The scholars from comparative/world literature and translation studies have come up with very different and contradictory answers to the question of translation. While some valorize it as a creative or reading practice, others undermine it due to the linguistic complexities that challenge the fidelity of the translation with the source text. Despite differences, they agree on one point that literary history is written from national perspective and fails to account for the trajectory of a translated work in different cultures and times. The paper will use selected articles of Susan Bassnett from the discipline of Translation Studies as the theoretical framework to address the problematic of translation as well as to propose a literary history written from a translational perspective as a bridge to ford the rifts between comparative and world literature(s).The paper will use dialectical approach to study the problematic of translation starting with Apter's thesis of "Untranslatability" juxtaposing it with Walkowitz's antithesis of "Born-translated works" to finally postulate a synthesis of comparative and world literature(s) with translation studies.

International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation

Modern comparative literature with globalization phenomenon extends linguistic and political boundaries, even for conserving and revitalizing languages particularly minor languages with cultural and ethnic exchanges. Such this emergence of comparative literature might return from contemporary translational and cultural studies as crucial and effective factors in the study of comparative literature. The role, relationship, and impact of translation and cultural studies on modern comparative literature are explored via a descriptive analysis. Translational and cultural studies in current comparative literature studies facilitate the relevant studies and they play a supplementary role for literary study. This study confirms a significant relationship exists among contemporary translational, cultural, and literary works intangibly and inevitably that helps to study comparative literary works. The findings report cultural and translational studies can be fruity informing literary studie...

Fu Jen Studies, vol. 45, 2012

This paper examines the changing relationship between comparative literature and translation since the middle of the twentieth century. During the early period of comparative literature, translation was merely a poor relation assigned to do various uneasy roles. This relationship gradually changed over the years as reflected in the ACLA Levin Report down to the Bernheimer Report. Translation has always played second-fiddle owing to a common mistrust by comparatists when it came to its ability to fully represent an original work. In this paper, the thorny issue of equivalence is therefore discussed from the perspectives of comparative literature and translation studies, as well as from the more fundamental hermeneutic ideas of reading and interpretation, language asymmetry, untranslatability, cultural difference, etc. Lastly, the new role of translation in this age of interdisciplinarity and multiculturalism is discussed following ACLA President Sandra Bermann's recent call for an And Zone, where the work of translation and comparative literature will engage in greater dialogue and translation will be accepted as a partner in the comparative practice. Instead of the decades-old demands for translation to deliver in terms of equivalence, Bermann's proposal views translation from a different, more favorable angle.

University of Bucharest Review, 2011

This article examines some recent comparative studies of literature against the background of global cultural and political markets. It finds that the positioning of Eastern (European) and Western literatures is constantly asymmetric, as is scholarship of the two regions itself. In spite of all efforts to redress this a priori inequality and of the new international dynamics of globalization, there is a huge disparity between the attention given to translations from Western literatures (especially in English) as compared to those from Eastern (European) ones. This can only increase and modulate the hegemonic position of the West in both literature and the academe. As a result, comparisons and evaluations are generally rigged by nationalist agendas just as attempts at neutrality in comparative studies are thwarted by the metaphors of origin and originality or of modernity and progress as a race. Relying on insights from such postcommunist critics as Maria Todorova and Alexander Kiossev, the paper suggests that figurative representations of world literature contaminate the study of transnational cultural phenomena and that a new historical and comparative framework needs to be used to avoid nationalistic and hegemonic images in present-day scholarship.

Cumplicidades comparatistas : origens, influências, resistências . Comparatist complicities : origins, influences, resistence / VI Congresso Nacional Associação Portuguesa de Literatura Comparada, X Colóquio de Outono Comemorativo das Vanguardas , 2009

The first question upon which we would like to briefly reflect, and which we would also like to address in regard to the orientation and purpose of our experience as a teacher of literature, is: what is the usefulness and function of a discipline of Comparative Literature when considering the present level of knowledge and the present context of academic teaching of human sciences? The arguments that can be put forward here should touch on the difficulties and the perplexities that are today found in the teaching of literature, at a time when the general notion of literature seems to be affected by a crisis that is not circumstantial, national or local, but, according to the diagnosis of thinkers like Theodor Adorno and George Steiner, comes from its foundations and permeates the forms of contemporary culture of Western civilisation. Their arguments, in different interpretative contexts and logic, seem to coincide with the thesis that verbal language, stripped of its vitality by bureaucratic applications and discredited by the brutality of violence, racism and the anti-humanism of its use in the experience of war, the holocaust and the totalitarianism of the 20 th century lost its communicative trustworthiness and became ontologically suspect. Steiner, in particular, with the authority that comes from being a professor of Comparative Literature, does not need to occupy himself with reflections on strategies, trends and limits on the pedagogy of the literary phenomenon in order to lucidly diagnose the crisis hitting the teaching of literature which is causing its progressive institutional demise and the loss of its central role in the processes of social acculturation and of the aesthetic formation of historically situated human experience. In some ways, the indicators supplied by

Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, 2024

Translation has been a major bone of contention in comparative literature studies. For the longest time it was looked down upon by bona fide comparatists, who insisted on studying literary works in the original. World literature scholars, on the contrary, have from the beginning acknowledged that, given the multiplicity of the world's languages and their literatures, it was inevitable that one resort to translation to access all but a handful of literatures. The final decades of the 20th century saw the rise of translation studies. Adopting insights and methods from descriptive translation studies might help bridge any putative gap between comparative and world literature studies, also when it comes to transcultural studies.

Neohelicon, 2001

Translation has largely been dismissed by the field of comparative literature as being considered a mere mediator and an unnecessary tool for the true comparatist. But it is the comparatist who should master the languages in which the works to be compared are written. In recent decades, following the "cultural turn", scholars have come to study translation from a cultural and comparative perspective in increasing numbers. This chapter further develops this orientation by addressing the issue of reflexivity as essential to comparative literature qua multilingual research. Furthermore, comparative literature is here considered from the perspective of translation, with a special focus on the fact that comparative literature in the age of globalization is increasingly characterized by world literature.

The Journal of Social Science Studies, 2018

As it is a widely known fact, comparative literature as a discipline acts as a wi-de umbrella in the fields of literary studies that embraces different literary works and genres from various nations and languages. However, for a couple of years, there has been a rising question amongst scholars and literary critics: is comparative literature be-coming extinct? or is it turning into a dead discipline? Actually, it is not completely true, and it is not totally becoming extinct, but it seems to some critics that it is getting old fashioned in the literary world. And, again according to some scholars and cri-tics,‚renovation‛ of comparative literature is absolutely required. In other words, saving comparative literature from being old fashioned or being extinct completely depends on adding new changes and renovations to its field by embracing all types of literary works and genres from all across the nations and languages that exist in the universe. In order to achieve this kind of renovation, the definition of comparative literature should go un-der a certain type of transformation. The role of comparative literature should not be li-mited with only as the study of European nations or literary works, it should be ‚multi-cultural‛, and it should also deal with multicultural works and nations.