Companion to Comparative Literature, World Literatures, and Comparative Cultural Studies
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Companion to Comparative Literature, World Literatures, and Comparative Cultural Studies Edited by Steven TÖTÖSY de ZEPETNEK and Tutun MUKHERJEE BANGALORE • CHENNAI • DELHI • HYDERABAD • KOLKATA • MUMBAI • PUNE • THIRUVANANTHAPURAM Published by Cambridge University Press India Pvt. Ltd. under the imprint of Foundation Books CAMBRIDGE HOUSE 4381/4, Ansari Road, Daryaganj New Delhi – 110002 C-22, C-Block, Brigade M.M., K.R. Road, Jayanagar, Bangalore 560 070 Plot No. 80, Service Industries, Shirvane, Sector-1, Nerul, Navi Mumbai 400 706 10 Raja Subodh Mullick Square, 2nd Floor, Kolkata 700013 21/1 (New No. 49), 1st Floor, Model School Road, Thousand Lights, Chennai 600 006 House No. 3-5-874/6/4, (Near Fernandez Hospital, OP Block), Hyderguda, Hyderabad 500 029 Agarwal Pride, ‘A’ Wing, 1308 Kasba Peth, Near Surya Hospital, Pune 411 011 T.C. 25/ 2732 Lukes Lane, Ambujavilasam Road, Thiruvananthapuram 695 001 Every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material included in this book. The publishers would be grateful for any omissions brought to their notice for acknowledgement in future editions of the book. © Cambridge University Press India Pvt. Ltd. First published 2013 All rights reserved. No reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press India Pvt. Ltd., subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements. ISBN 978-93-82993-80-3 Typeset by Techastra Solutions Pvt. Ltd., Hyderabad Contents Introduction to the Companion to Comparative Literature, World Literatures, and Comparative Cultural Studies vii Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Tutun Mukherjee PART 1: Theories of Comparative Literature, World Literatures, and Comparative Cultural Studies The Contextual Study of Literature and Culture, Globalization, and Digital Humanities 3 Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Louise O. Vasvári Comparative Literature and Ex-centricity 36 Tutun Mukherjee Possibilities and Limits of Comparative Literature Today 49 Darío Villanueva Comparative Cultural Studies and Pedagogy 63 Ronald Soetaert and Kris Rutten Teaching World Literatures 75 John D. Pizer Comparative Literature and the History of Literature 88 Slobodan Sucur Meltzl de Lomnitz, Comparative Literature, and Philosophy 100 David Marno Comparative Cultural Studies and Cultural Anthropology 112 Rik Pinxten Comparative Literature and Interart Studies 124 Anke Finger Gender and Genre in Comparative Literature and (Comparative) Cultural Studies 137 Ana Lozano de la Pola Comparative Cultural Studies and Translation Studies 148 Paolo Bartoloni iv Companion to Comparative Literature, World Literatures, and Comparative Cultural Studies Comparative Cultural Studies and the Study of Medieval Literature 162 Roberta Capelli Comparative Cultural Studies and Linguistic Hybridities in Literature 178 Elke Sturm-Trigonakis Comparison and Postcoloniality 192 Natalie Melas (Inter)mediality and the Study of Literature 205 Werner Wolf PART 2: Comparative Literature in World Languages African Literatures as World Literatures 219 Isaiah Ilo Comparative Literature in Arabic 231 Marie-Thérèse Abdel-Messih Comparative Poetics in Chinese 239 Xiaolu Wang and Yan Liu Comparative Literature in French 254 Anne Tomiche Comparative Literature in German 269 Oliver Lubrich Comparative Literature in Iberian Spanish and Portuguese 284 María Teresa Vilariño Picos and Anxo Abuín González Comparative Literature in Indian Languages 299 Anand Balwant Patil Comparative Literature in Italian 311 Mauro Pala Comparative Literature in Latin American Studies 324 Sophia A. McClennen Comparative Literature in Russian and in Central and East Europe 337 Alexandra Berlina and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek Comparative Literature in the United States 353 Gerald Gillespie Contents v PART 3: Examples of New Work in Comparative Literature, World Literatures, and Comparative Cultural Studies African Literatures and Cultures and the Universal of Motherhood 371 Remi Akujobi World literatures and the Case of Joyce, Rao, and Borges 382 Bhavya Tiwari Abject Spaces and the Hinterland in Bolaño’s Work 397 Stacey Balkan The Motif of Fleeing in Gao’s Work 411 Mabel Lee Arab Fiction and Migration in the Work of Haqqi and Salih 423 Ikram Masmoudi Sexual Identity and Translation in Prime-Stevenson’s Work 434 Margaret S. Breen The Notion of Life in the Work of Agamben 447 Carlo Salzani Aesthetics, Opera, and Alterity in Herzog’s Work 460 Jacob-Ivan Eidt An Intermedial Reading of Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues 472 Ipshita Chanda Painting and Representation in Teaching Balzac 484 Janet Moser PART 4: Multilingual Bibliography of Books in Comparative Literature, World Literatures, and Comparative Cultural Studies Multilingual Bibliography of Books in Comparative Literature, World Literatures, and Comparative Cultural Studies 499 Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek Index 522 Introduction to the Companion to Comparative Literature, World Literatures, and Comparative Cultural Studies Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Tutun Mukherjee To make connections both tangible and virtual is a powerful motivator in scholarship. A tensile filament stretches towards another filament to create the spoke for yet another filament until electronic communication and the world wide web has spread worldwide. This is the figurative environment of knowledge and the transmission of knowledge of our borderless world in the twenty-first century. Linking texts and contexts, cultural products, and the economies of their production, authors, audiences, languages and literacies, politics, and the circulation of power creates the complex texture of interrelated knowledge systems and human relationships that encompass the planet. As Rabindranath Tagore’s song goes, “your net spans the world, how can one escape/I’m a half- captive already, the other half eagerly waits,” being trapped within the fluid play of meaning-making, its construction and deconstruction, is the ideal location for negotiating the tangled semantic and cultural interdependence of our time because texts without texture would just be a group of isolated entities, diminished in themselves when unrelated to one another and the world at large. The negotiation of the network of relationships in the rapidly transforming “glocal” milieu requires more than appropriate pedagogies: importantly, it requires a major shift in cultural and aesthetic paradigms and attitudes and a re-orientation towards being more inclusive globally. Contributors to the Companion to Comparative Literature, World Literatures, and Comparative Cultural Studies address the current state of affairs of scholarship in comparative humanities with focus on the discipline of comparative literature and the fields of world literature and comparative cultural studies. While the discipline of comparative literature in the West (i.e., in Anglophone North America and in most of Europe) appears to be losing ground in its institutional presence, in other parts of the world—including Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East—it is flourishing both in scholarship and in its institutional presence and pedagogical vitality. While in the West there is (often) a dividing line between comparative literature and cultural studies, in other places comparative literature viii Companion to Comparative Literature, World Literatures, and Comparative Cultural Studies is being revived by making use of tenets of cultural studies including but not limited to the field of comparative cultural studies. Comparative cultural studies is a combination of tenets of comparative literature and cultural studies—minus the former’s Eurocentrism and the national approach—and including the ideological orientation of cultural studies. We note that the field of world literatures—a perspective also in comparative literature and comparative cultural studies—is gaining increasing interest in the U.S. and in some other places as an intellectual framework of “global reading” and in pedagogy, its institutional presence remains at present limited. Scholarship presented in the volume provides innovative perspectives for understanding recent developments in comparative humanities and a distinct feature of the volume is that instead of work on the specifics of either comparative literature, world literatures, cultural studies, or comparative cultural studies—as many books in these fields of study are published and more often than not excluding scholarship in related fields—the volume presents new work covering all said areas of the study of literature and culture understood as comparative. Thus, the Companion is intended for a readership—students, faculty, and general readers— interested in the current state of affairs of comparative humanities. Articles in the volume are presented in four thematic parts: Part 1 concerns theories of comparative literature, world literatures, cultural studies, and comparative cultural studies; Part 2 concerns the histories and the current situation of comparative literature in various languages; Part 3 contains examples where tenets of approaches in comparative literature, world literatures, and comparative cultural studies are applied in diaspora, gender, genre, interart, language, (inter)media, etc., studies; and Part 4 is a multilingual bibliography of books in comparative literature, world literatures, and comparative cultural studies Note that in-text in languages where the sequence of names is surname first name (e.g., Chinese, Hungarian, etc.), the Western sequence of first name surname is