Creativity is a design feature of human language.This paper presents a cognitive model of verbal creativity that draws on insights from the psychological research into creativity-particularly Glaveanu's 5A model t...Creativity is a design feature of human language.This paper presents a cognitive model of verbal creativity that draws on insights from the psychological research into creativity-particularly Glaveanu's 5A model that distinguishes five crucial perspectives on a creative act(actors,audience,artefacts,actions and affordances).The paper will outline a linguistic version of this model that adopts Construction Grammar as its theoretical foundation.The resulting"5C model of constructional creativity"argues that the central elements of linguistic creativity are constructors,co-constructors,constructs,constructional blending and the constructional network.展开更多
The present essay examines two moments from the evolution of the modern Malayalam novel,in relation to the reception of two classics in world literature,namely Victor Hugo's Les Miserables translated into Malayala...The present essay examines two moments from the evolution of the modern Malayalam novel,in relation to the reception of two classics in world literature,namely Victor Hugo's Les Miserables translated into Malayalam between 1925 and 1927 and Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude translated in 1984.The translation of Hugo's novel energized the scene of Malayalam fiction by infusing new modes of representation and widening the intellectual horizons of writers in general,and novelists in particular.The echoes of Les Miserables could be heard in Malayalam fiction well into the 1950s.The struggles against colonial and feudal authorities in Kerala,provided a fertile context for the imaginative interpretation of Hugo's humanist vision.The paper illustrates this point through close readings of critical essays,autobiographical narratives and debates on the nature of translation.The fascination of Malayali readers with Garcia Marquez has resulted in the translation of his entire corpus into Malayalam.Magic realism as pioneered by Garcia Marquez liberated the Malayalam novelistic narrative from social realist and modernist dogmas.The colonial disruption of oral narratives,the consequent cultural amnesia and the struggle to reclaim one's forgotten past are themes that struck a chord in Malayalam writers of fiction.Through a detailed discussion of the novel,Moustache by S.Hareesh,the interface between novelistic discourse and world literature is mapped in the latter part of the essay.展开更多
This article focuses on novels that,located on the boundary between biography,autobiography and fiction,between detailed archival historical research and imagination,between the documentary and the speculative,seek to...This article focuses on novels that,located on the boundary between biography,autobiography and fiction,between detailed archival historical research and imagination,between the documentary and the speculative,seek to reconstruct the life of an ancestor of the writer-narrator to reflect on the traumas,exploitation,hopes,and desires of generations who,in their diasporas,also helped create their modern nations,or whose story challenges the exclusions on which the concept of the nation has been built.The texts discussed are Melania Mazzucco's Vita,Vona Groarke's Hereafter:The Telling Life of Ellen O'Hara,Wu Ming 2 and Antar Mohamed's Timira:Romanzo Meticcio,and Maryse Conde's Victoire,les saveurs et les mots.At their center is the negotiation between the individual truth and the relational story across generations on the one hand,and,on the other hand,the tracing of collective histories such as those of nation,of colonization,of diaspora,of internal and external displacement,of rights and emancipation(the downtrodden,the poor,women,the migrant,the refugees),of the origins of dispossession and the permanence of its effects.At the core of the narratives is also the ghostliness of the erased(from history,from memory,from citizenship),the departed(in the sense of being dead and of having traveled away),and the in-between(generic:between the historical and documentary on the one hand,and the novelistic,the fable,fantasy on the other;geographical:between countries,between places,nationalities,national affiliations;historical:across generations;racial:the mestizo,the mulatto).It is,specifically,the biofictional imagination that enables these diasporic,transnational,transracial accounts to open up the possibility of a different,liberating future,by offering the space to imagine such a future,but also by recognizing,through its explicit acknowledgement of its recourse to fictionality,that it does not aim to construct a new myth to replace historical fact,but that it invites all of us to imagine,and strive to bring into existence,a different reality.展开更多
This article discusses the impact of the Post-Impressionist Exhibition that Roger Fry organized in London in 1910 on Virginia Woolf's ideas on the novel.Her dissatisfaction with the state of the genre finds expres...This article discusses the impact of the Post-Impressionist Exhibition that Roger Fry organized in London in 1910 on Virginia Woolf's ideas on the novel.Her dissatisfaction with the state of the genre finds expression in her diary and in her criticism of the work of the Edwardian novelists.Jacob's Room(1922),her first truly experimental novel,deploys some of the painterly techniques that the post-impressionist painters and vanguard movements of the 1910s effected.It represents a decisive step in her search for a new form for a new novel.展开更多
With remarkable force,"decolonization"re-entered the academic agenda some ten years ago.Having been an ambivalent historical experience undergirding postcolonial studies in its emergence in the 1980s,"d...With remarkable force,"decolonization"re-entered the academic agenda some ten years ago.Having been an ambivalent historical experience undergirding postcolonial studies in its emergence in the 1980s,"decolonization"today is wielded as a concept and a rallying call.One of its rhetorical purposes is to set up an opposition between morally objectionable and morally progressive ways of constructing and sharing knowledge,yet the content of the term is often vague.In this context,world literature has much to contribute,both methodologically and critically.If,on the one hand,there is a decolonizing potential in the very ambition to make the world's literary cultures visible,the critical dimension of world literature scholarship makes us aware of its colonial genealogy.Taking Mazisi Kunene's epic poem from South Africa,Emperor Shaka the Great,as its key example,this article discusses how the dual potential of world literature might contribute to a"decolonized"'mode of literary reading.展开更多
The Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy cannot explain the difference in relativizability between Chinese and Korean in authentic discourse.Korean exhibits a higher preference for relativization compared to Chinese an...The Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy cannot explain the difference in relativizability between Chinese and Korean in authentic discourse.Korean exhibits a higher preference for relativization compared to Chinese and this article aims to account for this difference from the perspective of topic continuity.Specifically,the continuity of head nouns within relative clauses is stronger in Korean than in Chinese.By analyzing the parameters of referential distance and potential interference,this study finds that the head nouns in Korean relative clauses display a broader range on the continuum of continuity compared to those in Chinese relative clauses.Furthermore,the difference in the strength of continuity of head nouns between Chinese and Korean relative clauses is attributed to the typological distinction between the Component-Integral Languages and Component-Metonymic Languages postulated within the framework of the Event-Domain Cognitive Model.展开更多
In retrospect of foreign literature studies in China from 1949 to 2019,we have to acknowledge two fundamental facts.Firstly,although in the initial 30 years of this period foreign literature studies in China largely f...In retrospect of foreign literature studies in China from 1949 to 2019,we have to acknowledge two fundamental facts.Firstly,although in the initial 30 years of this period foreign literature studies in China largely followed the Soviet model,neglecting Western literary and cultural traditions to some extentwith over a decade under the influence of extreme"leftist"trendsit was during this time that the groundwork for the academic framework of foreign literature studies was painstakingly laid.Secondly,with the influx of Western ideas,foreign literature studies during the subsequent 40 years underwent a complete paradigm shift,providing the spiritual nourishment for and playing a pioneering role in liberating thought and rectifying disorders.However,this period saw a conspicuous adoption of Western paradigms in foreign literature studies,thereby somewhat abandoning certain valuable traditions and academic stances that ought to have been upheld.Meanwhile,foreign literature studies in this period also experienced an undiscriminating acceptance and hasty integration of ideas,leading to a mixture of the good and the bad.This essay provides an important overview of 70 years of foreign literature studies in China,though the specific situations are much more complex.In recent years,as the ideas of cultural confidence and a community of shared future for mankind deeply resonate with the public,the principles of serving the Chinese people and Chinese socialist cause are increasingly becoming significant recognitions within China's foreign literature scholarly community.展开更多
As one considers the concept of comparative world literature,one may ponder on how widening the perspective from an all-English area of studies to other languages promotes different worldviews and descriptions of the ...As one considers the concept of comparative world literature,one may ponder on how widening the perspective from an all-English area of studies to other languages promotes different worldviews and descriptions of the status quo.In this article,we take into consideration the perspective of literature written in Portuguese,be it European,Brazilian,African of even Asian,in order to demonstrate how rich such other points of view are for the discipline.We also engage the concept of defamiliarization(ostranenie),proposed by Russian Formalist,Viktor Shklovsky,as a central tool to consider cosmopolitanism and the dialogue between different literatures.展开更多
A large number of transcultural fictions appeared in the 18th century,providing us with an important entry into discussing the task of comparative literature today.The 18th-century Oriental tales,stories authored by E...A large number of transcultural fictions appeared in the 18th century,providing us with an important entry into discussing the task of comparative literature today.The 18th-century Oriental tales,stories authored by European writers that adapted from or modeled themselves after loose translations of folk tales from the East,practiced a kind of mental shapeshifting,blurring the boundaries between East and West.The same kind of cross-cultural identification is visible in many other literary narratives from the same period,indicative of a fluid,universalist politics regarding Europe's relations with the Orient that requires reevaluation.18th-century transcultural fictions suggest a few tactics for mediating between the necessity of establishing grounds of comparison and the need to draw distinctions.In its search for ways of breaking through the stronghold of cultural nationalism,comparative literature in its contemporary incarnation does well to rethink Enlightenment universalism as encoded in the literary landscape of 18th century Europe.展开更多
The dawn of the 21st century saw images of intellectuals in novels change in a drastic way.Intellectuals,and those in the humanities in particular,are no longer portrayed as privileged Enlightenment thinkers or sages ...The dawn of the 21st century saw images of intellectuals in novels change in a drastic way.Intellectuals,and those in the humanities in particular,are no longer portrayed as privileged Enlightenment thinkers or sages with Confucian ideas of salvation.In the novels that take intellectuals as their subject matters,such characters often end up involved in betrayal,self-exile,or spiritual/mortal death.This is not a historical process,nor an inevitable course for intellectuals to be sure,but it remains a legitimate question to ask why these fictional intellectuals are becoming,more often than not,new tragic heroes.Why are they becoming misfits in their society and ending up in exile,abandonment,and even death?The present paper examines different images of intellectuals and the makings of their destinies.展开更多
In the last twenty-five years or so,the study of world literature has invigorated literary studies in general,and comparative literature in particular.World literature offers an excellent opportunity for non-Western a...In the last twenty-five years or so,the study of world literature has invigorated literary studies in general,and comparative literature in particular.World literature offers an excellent opportunity for non-Western and even"minor"European literary traditions to have their best works translated,introduced,and known beyond their cultures of origin to become part of world literature.The scope of literary studies has expanded to include more works from the world's different literary traditions and bring them to theoretically sophisticated and insightful discussions.In this issue of the Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures,we are happy to have several fine essays written by some of the leading scholars as well as younger scholars on a variety of topics in comparative and world literature that demonstrate the rich opportunities of literary studies in a global context.展开更多
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 li...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.展开更多
Lucia BOLDRIN is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths,University of London,where she directs the Centre for Comparative Literature.She holds doctorates from the University of Pisa(Italy)and th...Lucia BOLDRIN is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths,University of London,where she directs the Centre for Comparative Literature.She holds doctorates from the University of Pisa(Italy)and the University of Leicester(UK).Among her books are Autobiographies ofOthers:Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction(2012),Joyce,Dante,and the Poetics of Literary Relations(2001),and,as editor,Experiments in Life-Writing:Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction,with Julia Novak(2017)and Medieval Joyce(2002).She is currently co-editing the Routledge Companion to Biofiction with Laura Cernat,Alexandre Gefen and Michael Lackey,and is the General Editor of Bloomsbury's Biofiction book series with Michael Lackey and Monica Latham.She is an elected member of the Academia Europaea,and currently serves as President of the International Comparative Literature Association(2022-2025).展开更多
Cecily Swanson argues that“modernism's Gurdjieff craze in fact played a surprising role in the development of an overlooked canon of popular autobiographies:Muriel Draper's memoir,Music at Midnight;Margaret A...Cecily Swanson argues that“modernism's Gurdjieff craze in fact played a surprising role in the development of an overlooked canon of popular autobiographies:Muriel Draper's memoir,Music at Midnight;Margaret Anderson's memoir,My Thirty Years'War;and Kathryn Hulme's autobiographical novel,We Lived As Children.”Swanson reads Draper,Anderson,and Hulme because they wrote as esotericists,while she divorces the memoirs from any overt esoteric influences,contents,or aesthetics.There is no need to search further for the source of the mode of the popular autobiographies by Anderson and Draper than what of Loos's novel comes through the Peggy Hopkins Joyce/Zora Neale Hurston memoir.Marriage,Men,and Me appears near the commencement of a line of esoteric memoirs that becomes visible in the best-selling works by Draper and Anderson but then continues expansively.展开更多
This essay examines Raymond Williams's autobiographical novel Border Country,the first novel of his ambitious"Welsh Trilogy."The aim of the essay is twofold.Firstly,it analyzes the unsettling issue of ho...This essay examines Raymond Williams's autobiographical novel Border Country,the first novel of his ambitious"Welsh Trilogy."The aim of the essay is twofold.Firstly,it analyzes the unsettling issue of how a bio-regional place(native place)shapes polyvalent identities in a historically changing environment and how the boundary that crisscrosses the passages of life is redrawn through narrative re-circumscription and optical revision.Secondly,the essay calls this trope of internalizing"border-crossing"into question in the context of global diaspora and critically problematizes Williams's identity politics as schizophrenic split from British post-colonial empire.展开更多
In this interview,David Damrosch ties the ends of his prolific and relevant contribution to literary studies.From the modern development of the concept of world literature to the organization of ambitious projects of ...In this interview,David Damrosch ties the ends of his prolific and relevant contribution to literary studies.From the modern development of the concept of world literature to the organization of ambitious projects of World Literature anthologies;from the embracing of many worlds of world literary scholarship to the consideration of the emergence of A.I.and its possible consequences for the literary experience.展开更多
This paper will present and discuss a few questions raised in David Damrosch's Comparing the Literatures:Literary Studies in a Global Age,a book that,divided into chapters based on some selected keywords,develops ...This paper will present and discuss a few questions raised in David Damrosch's Comparing the Literatures:Literary Studies in a Global Age,a book that,divided into chapters based on some selected keywords,develops relevant thematic nuclei,bringing to the fore literary authors,critics,and theorists.展开更多
Clarice Lispector is one of the most important Brazilian writers of the 20th century.In her writings,she explores the limits of the Portuguese language and creates her own literary style.The article will map some of h...Clarice Lispector is one of the most important Brazilian writers of the 20th century.In her writings,she explores the limits of the Portuguese language and creates her own literary style.The article will map some of her aesthetic searches that are,at the same time,vital.The article is organized through two moments:a biographical one,in which relevant aspects of her life that will have an echo in her work are indicated;and another focused on her fiction writing,in which the aesthetic commitment of her books is highlighted.The Hour of the Star is the title of her latest novel,a title read by Helene Cixous as an anticipatory metaphor for her own death.We return to it as a trope,no longer to refer to its finiteness but to celebrate its opportune rereading outside Latin America.展开更多
In the Post-Independence era,the prolific playwrights of India started using the aesthetic form of theater to contest authoritarian structures,and to voice their antiestablishment dissent.Utpal Dutt,a pioneering figur...In the Post-Independence era,the prolific playwrights of India started using the aesthetic form of theater to contest authoritarian structures,and to voice their antiestablishment dissent.Utpal Dutt,a pioneering figure in Modern Indian Theater,used the medium of drama for propaganda and political conscientization of the oppressed.The indefatigable thespian contributed significantly towards the formation of modern Bengali theater,as his plays voiced his intransigent protest against the authoritarian government and concurrently,showed his impressive experimentation with different dramatic techniques,theatrical devices and theatrical genres.Dutt's anti-establishment play,Nightmare City presents a fastidious account of the turbulent years of late-1960s and early-1970s Bengal gripped by Naxalite violence and police brutalism.Set against the backdrop of Naxalite insurgency,the play savagely exposes the ideological hypocrisy of the autocratic government leaders of the time and their violent hooliganism.However,the playwright,in sync with his earlier plays,has not only portrayed the tumultuous sociopolitical ambiance of the 70s Calcutta,but has also constructed a soul-shattering voice of resistance to the political oppressions perpetuated by the state apparatuses.The objective of this paper is to study the revolutionary propaganda of Dutt and redefine his concept of"political theater"with special reference to his intricately structured political satire,Nightmare City.展开更多
In this interview,Helena Carvalhao Buescu develops her unique approach to comparative world literature,as she has proposed to reframe the concept.Within the scope of her approach,translation is given a new place in co...In this interview,Helena Carvalhao Buescu develops her unique approach to comparative world literature,as she has proposed to reframe the concept.Within the scope of her approach,translation is given a new place in comparative literature,widening the horizons of literary experience.展开更多
文摘Creativity is a design feature of human language.This paper presents a cognitive model of verbal creativity that draws on insights from the psychological research into creativity-particularly Glaveanu's 5A model that distinguishes five crucial perspectives on a creative act(actors,audience,artefacts,actions and affordances).The paper will outline a linguistic version of this model that adopts Construction Grammar as its theoretical foundation.The resulting"5C model of constructional creativity"argues that the central elements of linguistic creativity are constructors,co-constructors,constructs,constructional blending and the constructional network.
文摘The present essay examines two moments from the evolution of the modern Malayalam novel,in relation to the reception of two classics in world literature,namely Victor Hugo's Les Miserables translated into Malayalam between 1925 and 1927 and Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude translated in 1984.The translation of Hugo's novel energized the scene of Malayalam fiction by infusing new modes of representation and widening the intellectual horizons of writers in general,and novelists in particular.The echoes of Les Miserables could be heard in Malayalam fiction well into the 1950s.The struggles against colonial and feudal authorities in Kerala,provided a fertile context for the imaginative interpretation of Hugo's humanist vision.The paper illustrates this point through close readings of critical essays,autobiographical narratives and debates on the nature of translation.The fascination of Malayali readers with Garcia Marquez has resulted in the translation of his entire corpus into Malayalam.Magic realism as pioneered by Garcia Marquez liberated the Malayalam novelistic narrative from social realist and modernist dogmas.The colonial disruption of oral narratives,the consequent cultural amnesia and the struggle to reclaim one's forgotten past are themes that struck a chord in Malayalam writers of fiction.Through a detailed discussion of the novel,Moustache by S.Hareesh,the interface between novelistic discourse and world literature is mapped in the latter part of the essay.
文摘This article focuses on novels that,located on the boundary between biography,autobiography and fiction,between detailed archival historical research and imagination,between the documentary and the speculative,seek to reconstruct the life of an ancestor of the writer-narrator to reflect on the traumas,exploitation,hopes,and desires of generations who,in their diasporas,also helped create their modern nations,or whose story challenges the exclusions on which the concept of the nation has been built.The texts discussed are Melania Mazzucco's Vita,Vona Groarke's Hereafter:The Telling Life of Ellen O'Hara,Wu Ming 2 and Antar Mohamed's Timira:Romanzo Meticcio,and Maryse Conde's Victoire,les saveurs et les mots.At their center is the negotiation between the individual truth and the relational story across generations on the one hand,and,on the other hand,the tracing of collective histories such as those of nation,of colonization,of diaspora,of internal and external displacement,of rights and emancipation(the downtrodden,the poor,women,the migrant,the refugees),of the origins of dispossession and the permanence of its effects.At the core of the narratives is also the ghostliness of the erased(from history,from memory,from citizenship),the departed(in the sense of being dead and of having traveled away),and the in-between(generic:between the historical and documentary on the one hand,and the novelistic,the fable,fantasy on the other;geographical:between countries,between places,nationalities,national affiliations;historical:across generations;racial:the mestizo,the mulatto).It is,specifically,the biofictional imagination that enables these diasporic,transnational,transracial accounts to open up the possibility of a different,liberating future,by offering the space to imagine such a future,but also by recognizing,through its explicit acknowledgement of its recourse to fictionality,that it does not aim to construct a new myth to replace historical fact,but that it invites all of us to imagine,and strive to bring into existence,a different reality.
文摘This article discusses the impact of the Post-Impressionist Exhibition that Roger Fry organized in London in 1910 on Virginia Woolf's ideas on the novel.Her dissatisfaction with the state of the genre finds expression in her diary and in her criticism of the work of the Edwardian novelists.Jacob's Room(1922),her first truly experimental novel,deploys some of the painterly techniques that the post-impressionist painters and vanguard movements of the 1910s effected.It represents a decisive step in her search for a new form for a new novel.
文摘With remarkable force,"decolonization"re-entered the academic agenda some ten years ago.Having been an ambivalent historical experience undergirding postcolonial studies in its emergence in the 1980s,"decolonization"today is wielded as a concept and a rallying call.One of its rhetorical purposes is to set up an opposition between morally objectionable and morally progressive ways of constructing and sharing knowledge,yet the content of the term is often vague.In this context,world literature has much to contribute,both methodologically and critically.If,on the one hand,there is a decolonizing potential in the very ambition to make the world's literary cultures visible,the critical dimension of world literature scholarship makes us aware of its colonial genealogy.Taking Mazisi Kunene's epic poem from South Africa,Emperor Shaka the Great,as its key example,this article discusses how the dual potential of world literature might contribute to a"decolonized"'mode of literary reading.
文摘The Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy cannot explain the difference in relativizability between Chinese and Korean in authentic discourse.Korean exhibits a higher preference for relativization compared to Chinese and this article aims to account for this difference from the perspective of topic continuity.Specifically,the continuity of head nouns within relative clauses is stronger in Korean than in Chinese.By analyzing the parameters of referential distance and potential interference,this study finds that the head nouns in Korean relative clauses display a broader range on the continuum of continuity compared to those in Chinese relative clauses.Furthermore,the difference in the strength of continuity of head nouns between Chinese and Korean relative clauses is attributed to the typological distinction between the Component-Integral Languages and Component-Metonymic Languages postulated within the framework of the Event-Domain Cognitive Model.
文摘In retrospect of foreign literature studies in China from 1949 to 2019,we have to acknowledge two fundamental facts.Firstly,although in the initial 30 years of this period foreign literature studies in China largely followed the Soviet model,neglecting Western literary and cultural traditions to some extentwith over a decade under the influence of extreme"leftist"trendsit was during this time that the groundwork for the academic framework of foreign literature studies was painstakingly laid.Secondly,with the influx of Western ideas,foreign literature studies during the subsequent 40 years underwent a complete paradigm shift,providing the spiritual nourishment for and playing a pioneering role in liberating thought and rectifying disorders.However,this period saw a conspicuous adoption of Western paradigms in foreign literature studies,thereby somewhat abandoning certain valuable traditions and academic stances that ought to have been upheld.Meanwhile,foreign literature studies in this period also experienced an undiscriminating acceptance and hasty integration of ideas,leading to a mixture of the good and the bad.This essay provides an important overview of 70 years of foreign literature studies in China,though the specific situations are much more complex.In recent years,as the ideas of cultural confidence and a community of shared future for mankind deeply resonate with the public,the principles of serving the Chinese people and Chinese socialist cause are increasingly becoming significant recognitions within China's foreign literature scholarly community.
文摘As one considers the concept of comparative world literature,one may ponder on how widening the perspective from an all-English area of studies to other languages promotes different worldviews and descriptions of the status quo.In this article,we take into consideration the perspective of literature written in Portuguese,be it European,Brazilian,African of even Asian,in order to demonstrate how rich such other points of view are for the discipline.We also engage the concept of defamiliarization(ostranenie),proposed by Russian Formalist,Viktor Shklovsky,as a central tool to consider cosmopolitanism and the dialogue between different literatures.
文摘A large number of transcultural fictions appeared in the 18th century,providing us with an important entry into discussing the task of comparative literature today.The 18th-century Oriental tales,stories authored by European writers that adapted from or modeled themselves after loose translations of folk tales from the East,practiced a kind of mental shapeshifting,blurring the boundaries between East and West.The same kind of cross-cultural identification is visible in many other literary narratives from the same period,indicative of a fluid,universalist politics regarding Europe's relations with the Orient that requires reevaluation.18th-century transcultural fictions suggest a few tactics for mediating between the necessity of establishing grounds of comparison and the need to draw distinctions.In its search for ways of breaking through the stronghold of cultural nationalism,comparative literature in its contemporary incarnation does well to rethink Enlightenment universalism as encoded in the literary landscape of 18th century Europe.
文摘The dawn of the 21st century saw images of intellectuals in novels change in a drastic way.Intellectuals,and those in the humanities in particular,are no longer portrayed as privileged Enlightenment thinkers or sages with Confucian ideas of salvation.In the novels that take intellectuals as their subject matters,such characters often end up involved in betrayal,self-exile,or spiritual/mortal death.This is not a historical process,nor an inevitable course for intellectuals to be sure,but it remains a legitimate question to ask why these fictional intellectuals are becoming,more often than not,new tragic heroes.Why are they becoming misfits in their society and ending up in exile,abandonment,and even death?The present paper examines different images of intellectuals and the makings of their destinies.
文摘In the last twenty-five years or so,the study of world literature has invigorated literary studies in general,and comparative literature in particular.World literature offers an excellent opportunity for non-Western and even"minor"European literary traditions to have their best works translated,introduced,and known beyond their cultures of origin to become part of world literature.The scope of literary studies has expanded to include more works from the world's different literary traditions and bring them to theoretically sophisticated and insightful discussions.In this issue of the Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures,we are happy to have several fine essays written by some of the leading scholars as well as younger scholars on a variety of topics in comparative and world literature that demonstrate the rich opportunities of literary studies in a global context.
文摘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.
文摘Lucia BOLDRIN is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths,University of London,where she directs the Centre for Comparative Literature.She holds doctorates from the University of Pisa(Italy)and the University of Leicester(UK).Among her books are Autobiographies ofOthers:Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction(2012),Joyce,Dante,and the Poetics of Literary Relations(2001),and,as editor,Experiments in Life-Writing:Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction,with Julia Novak(2017)and Medieval Joyce(2002).She is currently co-editing the Routledge Companion to Biofiction with Laura Cernat,Alexandre Gefen and Michael Lackey,and is the General Editor of Bloomsbury's Biofiction book series with Michael Lackey and Monica Latham.She is an elected member of the Academia Europaea,and currently serves as President of the International Comparative Literature Association(2022-2025).
文摘Cecily Swanson argues that“modernism's Gurdjieff craze in fact played a surprising role in the development of an overlooked canon of popular autobiographies:Muriel Draper's memoir,Music at Midnight;Margaret Anderson's memoir,My Thirty Years'War;and Kathryn Hulme's autobiographical novel,We Lived As Children.”Swanson reads Draper,Anderson,and Hulme because they wrote as esotericists,while she divorces the memoirs from any overt esoteric influences,contents,or aesthetics.There is no need to search further for the source of the mode of the popular autobiographies by Anderson and Draper than what of Loos's novel comes through the Peggy Hopkins Joyce/Zora Neale Hurston memoir.Marriage,Men,and Me appears near the commencement of a line of esoteric memoirs that becomes visible in the best-selling works by Draper and Anderson but then continues expansively.
文摘This essay examines Raymond Williams's autobiographical novel Border Country,the first novel of his ambitious"Welsh Trilogy."The aim of the essay is twofold.Firstly,it analyzes the unsettling issue of how a bio-regional place(native place)shapes polyvalent identities in a historically changing environment and how the boundary that crisscrosses the passages of life is redrawn through narrative re-circumscription and optical revision.Secondly,the essay calls this trope of internalizing"border-crossing"into question in the context of global diaspora and critically problematizes Williams's identity politics as schizophrenic split from British post-colonial empire.
文摘In this interview,David Damrosch ties the ends of his prolific and relevant contribution to literary studies.From the modern development of the concept of world literature to the organization of ambitious projects of World Literature anthologies;from the embracing of many worlds of world literary scholarship to the consideration of the emergence of A.I.and its possible consequences for the literary experience.
文摘This paper will present and discuss a few questions raised in David Damrosch's Comparing the Literatures:Literary Studies in a Global Age,a book that,divided into chapters based on some selected keywords,develops relevant thematic nuclei,bringing to the fore literary authors,critics,and theorists.
文摘Clarice Lispector is one of the most important Brazilian writers of the 20th century.In her writings,she explores the limits of the Portuguese language and creates her own literary style.The article will map some of her aesthetic searches that are,at the same time,vital.The article is organized through two moments:a biographical one,in which relevant aspects of her life that will have an echo in her work are indicated;and another focused on her fiction writing,in which the aesthetic commitment of her books is highlighted.The Hour of the Star is the title of her latest novel,a title read by Helene Cixous as an anticipatory metaphor for her own death.We return to it as a trope,no longer to refer to its finiteness but to celebrate its opportune rereading outside Latin America.
文摘In the Post-Independence era,the prolific playwrights of India started using the aesthetic form of theater to contest authoritarian structures,and to voice their antiestablishment dissent.Utpal Dutt,a pioneering figure in Modern Indian Theater,used the medium of drama for propaganda and political conscientization of the oppressed.The indefatigable thespian contributed significantly towards the formation of modern Bengali theater,as his plays voiced his intransigent protest against the authoritarian government and concurrently,showed his impressive experimentation with different dramatic techniques,theatrical devices and theatrical genres.Dutt's anti-establishment play,Nightmare City presents a fastidious account of the turbulent years of late-1960s and early-1970s Bengal gripped by Naxalite violence and police brutalism.Set against the backdrop of Naxalite insurgency,the play savagely exposes the ideological hypocrisy of the autocratic government leaders of the time and their violent hooliganism.However,the playwright,in sync with his earlier plays,has not only portrayed the tumultuous sociopolitical ambiance of the 70s Calcutta,but has also constructed a soul-shattering voice of resistance to the political oppressions perpetuated by the state apparatuses.The objective of this paper is to study the revolutionary propaganda of Dutt and redefine his concept of"political theater"with special reference to his intricately structured political satire,Nightmare City.
文摘In this interview,Helena Carvalhao Buescu develops her unique approach to comparative world literature,as she has proposed to reframe the concept.Within the scope of her approach,translation is given a new place in comparative literature,widening the horizons of literary experience.
