Comparative Literature - A Critical Introduction

Hello everyone,

This blog is a response to the task assigned by professor Dilip Barad sir as part of a thinking activity. In this blog I am going to share the idea of Comparative Literature - A Critical Introduction.

Introduction of Article:-

This article is by Susan Bassnett as a book written in 1993. This article carries some key arguments and references about what is in this book.

Basically article talk about how comparative literature starts and where it is reached today. In the starting of the book she put a question, What is Comparative Literature today?  When you have questions then there is some problem regarding this and that's why there is need of question and question never came out from nothingness. She also says that Comparison is not for who is superior and who is inferior but about what makes difference between both. For example the way people look at India from history to today. How historians look at India.

What is Comparative Literature?

The simplest answer is that comparative study involves the study of texts across cultures, that it is interdisciplinary and that it is concerned with patterns of connection in literature across both time and space.

Benedetto Croce argued that comparative literature was a non- subject, contemptuously dismissing the suggestion that it might be seen as a separate discipline. He discussed the definition of comparative literature as the exploration of  'the vicissitudes, alterations, developments and  reciprocal differences' of themes and literary ideas across literatures, and concluded that 'there is no study more arid than researches of this sort'. This kind of work, Croce maintained, is to be classified "in the category of erudition purely and simply'. Instead of something called comparative literature, he suggested that the proper object of study should be literary history. 

But other scholars made grandiose claims for comparative literature. Charles Mills Gayley, 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'.

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'. There is no sense here of national literature and comparative literature being incompatible. The work of Indian comparatists is characterised by a shift of perspective.

Comparative literature started with West- ern literature and looked outwards, now what is happening is that the West is being scrutinised from without. Majumdar points out that what Indian scholars call western literature, regardless of geographical precision, includes those literatures which derive from Graeco-Roman matrices via Christianity, and he terms English, French, German, etc. 

Developments in comparative literature beyond Europe and North America do indeed cut through and across all kinds of assumptions about literature that have come increasingly to be seen as Eurocentric. 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 realise 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 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.

How people read one book in different time and space in different ways, then it became an important work. Text across interdisciplinary suggests that the text not only carries the idea of literature but also about other disciplines like feminism, Marxism , marketing, globalisation and all. If any work uses the English language then it becomes global as English is a global language.

Comparative literature has always claimed translation as a subcategory, but as translation studies establishes itself firmly as a subject based in inter-cultural study and offering a methodology of some rigour, 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.

Comparative Literature in Age of Digital Humanities:- On possible futures for a Discipline.  By Todd Presner

We are in the digital era but we can't avoid print based knowledge. With 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 of 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 colonisation, 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 democratisation of information and exchange on the one hand and the ability to exercise exclusionary control and violence on the other.

Nicholas Negroponte once asserted in his book Being Digital-  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. all together in a happy, interconnected world that never existed before. Or as Paul Gilroy analysed 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. Hayles argues, allows us to consider texts as "embodied entities" and still foreground interpretative practices. 

While electronic literature offers a significant and multivalent possibility for exploring the future of Comparative Literature. The Humanities of the twenty-first century, he argues here, has the potential to generate, legitimate, and disseminate knowledge in radically new ways, on a scale never before released, involving technologies and communities that rarely if ever were engaged in a global knowledge-creation enterprise. The purpose of this chapter is to provide some preliminary signposts for figuring out what this means for the Humanities generally and for Comparative Literature more specifically. 

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. These prac- tices - whether conservative, subversive, or somewhere in between - are not limited to conventional humanities departments and disciplines.

Digital Humanities projects are almost always collaborative, engaging humanists, technologists, librarians, social scientists, artists, architects, information scientists, and computer scientists in 

conceptualising problems, designing interfaces, analysing data, sharing knowledge, and engaging with a significantly broader public than traditional academic research in the Humanities. At the same time, Digital Humanities is an outgrowth and expansion of the traditional scope of the Humanities, not a replacement or rejection of humanistic inquiry. He firmly believes that the role of the humanist is more critical at this historic moment than perhaps ever before, as our cultural legacy as a species migrates to digital formats and our relation to knowledge, cultural material, technology, and society at large is radically reconceptualized.  Role of digital humanities is to, 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? These are questions that Humanists must urgently ask and answer.

Franco Moretti's provocation is to consider Comparative Literature as a "problem" not a canon of objects, a theoretical position, or a particular medium that "asks for a new critical method" to analyse 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.

He discussed three futures for 'comparative literature' in the digital age. 

1)Comparative Media Studies

2)Comparative Data Studies

3)Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies 

1) Comparative Media Studies:-

Digital media are always already hypermedia and hypertextual. Both The foregoing terms were originally coined in 1965 by the visionary media theorist, Theodor Nelson, in his early articulations of the conceptual infrastructure for the World Wide Web. According to 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 Media Studies thus 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:-

In today's time intelligence of technology is growing and they have more data than human beings. And we can say that now machines beat human intelligence. 

For example there is one website name - chat.openai.com  which gives us a universal answer to every question. Once we started doing and practising it we came to know more about that.

But we can't ignore the fact that through digital data Studies we get a general idea but we can't conclude anything based on that. 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:-

James Boyle points out, there are many corporate entities eager to regulate the public domain and control the "commons of the mind." For Boyle, the real danger is not unauthorised file sharing or "failed sharing" due to enclosures and strictures placed upon the world of the creative commons. In fact, this was one of the central arguments of the Digital Humanities Manifesto, which sought to perform collaborative authorship by utilising the blogging engine, Commentpress. While Comparative Literature scholarship has not generally concerned itself with design, interactivity, navigation strategies, and collaboration, these issues are a decisive part of the domain of Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies. This emphasis on openness and collaboration is, of course, nowhere more apparent than with Wikipedia, a revolutionary knowledge production and editing platform. While it is easy to dismiss Wikipedia as amateurish and unreliable or to scoff at its lack of scholarly rigour, he conclude by suggesting that it is actually a model for rethinking collaborative research and the dissemination of knowledge in the Humanities and at institutions of higher learning, which are all-too-often fixated on individual training, discrete disciplines, and isolated achievement and

accomplishment.

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