Showing papers in "Comparative Literature in 2015"

The Multilingual Local in World Literature

Abstract: This essay questions the geographical categories used to underpin current theoretical and methodological approaches to “world literature,” which end up making nine-tenths of the world, and of literature produced in the world, drop off the world map or appear “peripheral.” Focusing on the multilingual north Indian region of Awadh in the early modern period, it argues that an approach to literature and space that takes multilingualism within society and literary culture as a structuring and generative principle and holds both local and cosmopolitan perspectives in view is more productive for world literature than approaches based only on cosmopolitan perspectives of circulation and recognition.

Tracking Ecophobia: The Utility of Empirical and Systems Studies for Ecocriticism

Abstract: IN A COMPELLING ARGUMENT that centers on the relationship between pedagogy and activism, Nicholas Hengen Fox wonders “what good [it] is interpreting the world if we are not changing it in material ways” (15), a concern that might just as well have been asked by an ecocritic. Fox goes on to explain that in his activist-centered pedagogy, “rather than focusing on what a text says, students focus on how it has been — and could be — used in the world beyond the classroom” (15). It is curious that Fox does not reference empirical and systems studies, since, as Steven Totosy de Zepetnek maintains, “the object of study of the empirical study of literature is not only the text in itself, but the roles of action within the literary system, namely, production, distribution, reception, and the processing of texts” (“Systems Theories” 5; translation of Van Gorp et al.). This is surely an endeavor that ought to concern ecocritics. At the outset of ecocritical scholarship, Cheryll Glotfelty noted that “all ecological criticism shares the fundamental premise that human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it. Ecocriticism takes as its subject the interconnectedness between nature and culture” (xix). Since ecocriticism seeks to effect social change by commenting on how texts talk (or fail to talk) about the natural environment and since such texts are produced within a literary system that also produces and sustains countervailing ideologies, the obvious utility of a systemic and empirical approach for ecocriticism is that it makes available a framework through which to generate empirically viable comments about how representations of nature (or non-representations of it) function within the system Totosy de Zepetnek describes. In what follows, I examine the mutually related terms “biophilia” and “ecophobia,” arguing for systemic and empirical studies of the latter and for the possibilities for how such a study — one that would be contextualized (geographically, culturally, temporally) rather than

World literature, postcolonial studies, and coolie odysseys: J.-M.G. le Clézio's and Amitav Ghosh's Indian ocean novels

Abstract: Comparative Literature FRANCOISE LIONNET World Literature, Postcolonial Studies, and Coolie Odysseys: J.-M.G. Le Clezio’s and Amitav Ghosh’s Indian Ocean Novels How are we to conceive of, precisely, a world where we only find a globe, an astral universe, or an earth without a sky (or to cite Rimbaud and reversing him, a sea without a sun)? The unity of a world is not one: it is made of diversity, including disparity and opposition. . . . The unity of a world is nothing other than its diversity, and its diversity is, in turn, a diversity of worlds. A world is a multiplicity of worlds, the world is a multiplicity of worlds, and its unity is the sharing out [partage] and the mutual exposure in this world of all its worlds. —Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization 47, 109 Celui qui connait bien le ciel ne peut rien craindre de la mer (He who knows the sky has nothing to fear from the sea, 40; trans. modified) —Le Clezio, Le chercheur d’or 48 It was impossible to think of this as water at all — ​for water surely needed a boundary, a rim, a shore, to give it shape and hold it in place? This was a firmament, like the night sky, holding the vessel aloft as if it were a planet or a star. —Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies 363 I N THE INDIAN OCEAN, an ancient region of multipolar exchanges, bound- aries are always being blurred. Landmasses dissolve into archipelagoes. Rivers flow into saltwater marshes. Islands are hyphens between continents, and identi- ties are not what they seem. Africa meets Asia across the Arabian Sea. Europe and the Middle East come down the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf to the Seychelles and the Mascarenes. The labyrinth of the Sundarbans forms the seaward fringe of the Ganges. Currents in the Bay of Bengal link the Subcontinent to Indonesia, Comparative Literature 67:3 DOI 10.1215/00104124-3137225 © 2015 by University of Oregon Published by Duke University Press