Hello, I am Emisha Ravani, writing this blog for the thinking activity which is assigned by Dilip Barad sir for the comparative Literature & Translation Studies. Here, I will discuss the three essays by various writers. There are two articles in this unit. 1. What is comparative literature? by Susan Bassnett 2. Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities : On Possible Futures for a Discipline by Todd Presner.
1. What is comparative literature? by Susan Bassnett
This article is the introduction of the book 'Comparative Literature' 'A Critical Introduction.' Which is by Susan Bassnett and it took place around the 1993. As she is asking the question so by that we can say that there is 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 of 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 because people were afraid of past that 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 he said, Everywhere there is connection, everywhere there is illustration. No single 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 the 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 literatures have a canon be? 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
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'
For 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 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, 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.
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.
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 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 vexed 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 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 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 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.
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.
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. Innovations in print technology became the very instrument for producing, sharing, and transforming humanistic and scientific knowledge. we should take a long View in historicizing these technologies, one which spans the history of seafaring and voyages of discovery, the building and spread of railways, the development of the worldwide postal system, the invention of the electric telegraph, the systematization of world standard time, the heyday of colonization, the massive exploitation of the natural world, the electrification of cities, the development of highways and car culture, the rise of transnational fi nance and technology aggregates, the development of the “ new ” media of radio, fi lm, and television, the construction of the infrastructure of the Internet, the posting of the first web pages, and the explosion of real - time social networking on handheld devices.
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.
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 any 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 ”. 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.
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. 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. At the same time, we must ask ourselves: What happens when print is no longer the normative or exclusive medium for producing literature and undertaking literary studies?
Digital Humanities is an umbrella term for a wide array of interdisciplinary practices for creating, applying, interpreting, interrogating, and hacking both new and old information technologies.
Jeffrey Schnapp and I articulated in various instantiations of the “ Digital Humanities Manifesto, ” it is essential that humanists assert and insert themselves into the twenty - first century cultural wars, which are largely being defined, fought, and won by corporate interests. 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 interests, how will our cultural legacy be rendered in new media formats? By whom and for whom? These are questions that Humanists must urgently ask and answer.
Taking Robert Darnton’s assessment seriously that we are now in the fifth decade of the fourth information age in the history of humankind. Although the Internet is barely forty years old and the World Wide Web is barely two decades old, it is striking to ponder the sheer volume of “ data ” already produced. It is evident that we are producing, sharing, consuming, and archiving exponentially more cultural material, particularly textual and visual data, than ever before in the history of our species. While much of this data is not “ literature ” and may not be studied under the conventional academic rubric of “ Comparative Literature, ” it brings into stark relief the constitution of the tiny canon of print artifacts with which the field currently engages.
Presner's point, following on Franco Moretti’s provocation, is to consider Comparative Literature as a “ problem ” that “ asks for a new critical method ” to analyze both the print world in the digital age and the digital world in the post - print age. 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.
The central issue is the fact that the artifacts constituted by the world of print are comparatively different – in terms of material composition, authorship, meaning - making, circulation, reading practices, viewing habits, navigation features, embodiment, interactivity, and expressivity – from those artifacts constituted by digital technologies and which “ live ” in various digital environments.
It is to insist on the multiplicity of media and the varied processes of mediation and remediation in the formation of cultural knowledge and the idea of the literary. Just “ studying ” the technologies and their impact, Presner believes that we must actively engage with, design, create, critique, and finally hack the environments and technologies that facilitate this research, render this world as a world, and produce knowledge about who we are, where we live, and what that means.
We will have to design and employ new tools to thoughtfully sift through, analyze, map, and evaluate the unfathomably large deluge of data and cultural material that the digital age has already unleashed.
Moretti has already indicated one possible way of doing this in his articulation of “ distant reading, ” a specific form of analysis that focuses on larger units and fewer elements in order to reveal “ their overall interconnection [through] shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models. ”
Hayles points out in her recent study on the transforming power of digital humanities, even if we were to read a book a day for our entire adult life, the upper end of the number of books that can be read is about twenty - five thousand, and this does not even take into consideration the reading and composition of digital forms of data and cultural material.
The question that we need to confront in the fourth information age concerns the specificity of the digital medium vis - à - vis other media formats, the various kind of cultural knowledge produced, the ways of analyzing it, the various platforms that support it, and, finally, the modes of authorship and reception that facilitate new architectures of participation and new architectures of power.
Presner discusses the three futures for “ Comparative Literature ” in the Digital Age.
Comparative Media Studies
Theodor Nelson, in his early articulations of the conceptual infrastructure for the
World Wide Web. 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.
Comparative Literature be practiced when literature and scholarly work are created, exchanged, and critiqued in a multimodal environment such as the Web? And, at the same time, how do we as scholars develop methodologies that appreciate and evaluate the media - specifi city of every literary or cultural artifact, including print? Comparative Literature as Comparative Media Studies foregrounds the formal material qualities of the surface structures upon which inscriptions are made, the technical processes of reproduction and circulation, the institutional mechanisms of dissemination and authorization, the reading and navigation practices enabled by the media form, and the broad cultural and social implications for literacy and knowledge production. It investigates all media as information and knowledge systems that are bound up with histories of power, institutions, and governing and regulatory bodies which legitimate and authorize certain utterances, while screening out and dismissing other.
Comparative Media Studies also implies that the output or scholarly “ work ” is not uni - medial and 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 field, XML metadata, a map, a film still, or something else. Comparative Media Studies enables us to return to some of the most fundamental questions of our field with new urgency: Who is an author? What is work? What constitutes a text, particularly in an environment in which any text is readerly and writerly by potentially anyone?
Comparative Data Studies
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 visualization to dissect large - scale cultural datasets.
Comparative Data Studies allows us to use the computational tools of cultural analytics to enhance literary scholarship precisely by creating models, visualizations, maps, and semantic webs of data that are simply too large to read or comprehend using unaided human faculties. performing “ close ” and “ distant ” analyses of data, Comparative Data Studies also radically broadens the canon of objects and cultural material.
As Jerome McGann argues with 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 code OED provides and reorganized it at a higher level ” adding value through new indexing and search mechanisms, hyperlinks, editing and annotation tools, and even reading strategies.
The “ data ” of Comparative Data Studies is constantly expanding in terms of volume, data type, production and reception platform, and analytic strategy.
Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies
While the radically “ democratizing ” claims of the web and information technologies should certainly be critically interrogated, I think that it is incontestable that the barriers for voicing participation, creating and sharing content, and even developing software have been significantly lowered when compared to the world of print. And more than that, collaborative authorship, peer - to - peer sharing of content, and crowdsourced evaluation of data are the hallmarks of the participatory web known as the world of Web 2.0. We no longer just “ browse ” and passively consume predigested content but are actively engaged in the production, annotation, and evaluation of digital media and software thanks to the open - source movement. This is an economy based on abundance, creative commons, open access, and the proliferation of copies, not one based on scarcity, property, trade secrets, and the sanctity of originals, although, as James Boyle points out, there are many corporate entities eager to regulate the public domain and control the “ commons of the mind.
Presner believes-
Wikipedia 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.
Conclusion :
Michael Gorman, former President of the American Library Association (qtd. in Stothart), 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, 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.
Thank you!
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