Comparative literature

About: Comparative literature is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 3118 publications have been published within this topic receiving 27734 citations.

Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

Abstract: A half-century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach's "Mimesis" still stands as a monumental achievement in literary criticism. A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. This new expanded edition includes a substantial essay in introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay, never before translated into English, in which Auerbach responds to his critics.A German Jew, Auerbach was forced out of his professorship at the University of Marburg in 1935. He left for Turkey, where he taught at the state university in Istanbul. There he wrote "Mimesis," publishing it in German after the end of the war. Displaced as he was, Auerbach produced a work of great erudition that contains no footnotes, basing his arguments instead on searching, illuminating readings of key passages from his primary texts. His aim was to show how from antiquity to the twentieth century literature progressed toward ever more naturalistic and democratic forms of representation. This essentially optimistic view of European history now appears as a defensive--and impassioned--response to the inhumanity he saw in the Third Reich. Ranging over works in Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English, Auerbach used his remarkable skills in philology and comparative literature to refute any narrow form of nationalism or chauvinism, in his own day and ours. For many readers, both inside and outside the academy, "Mimesis" is among the finest works of literary criticism ever written.

The Historical Novel

Abstract: Georg Lukacs (1885-1971) is now recognized as one of the most innovative and best-informed literary critics of the twentieth century Trained in the German philosophic tradition of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, he escaped Nazi persecution by fleeing to the Soviet Union in 1933 There he faced a new set of problems: Stalinist dogmatism about literature and literary criticism Maneuvering between the obstacles of censorship, he wrote and published his longest work of literary criticism, "The Historical Novel", in 1937 Beginning with the novels of Sir Walter Scott, "The Historical Novel" documents the evolution of a genre that came to dominate European fiction in the years after Napoleon The novel had reached a point at which it could be socially and politically critical as well as psychologically insightfulLukacs devotes his final chapter to the anti-Nazi fiction of Germany and Austria Georg Lukacs' works include "The Theory of the Novel" (1920), "The History of Class Consciousness" (1923), "Studies in European Realism" (1948), and "The Young Hegel" (revised edition, 1954) Fredric Jameson is William A Lane Professor of Comparative Literature, Director of the Graduate Program in Literature, and Director of the Duke Center for Critical Theory at Duke University He is the author of many articles and books, including "Marxism and Form" (1971), "The Prison-House of Language" (1972), "The Political Unconscious" (1981), and "Postmodernism", or, the "Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" (1991)

Selected Subaltern studies

Abstract: This book collects ten essays from the five volumes of Subaltern Studies that have so far appeared. The aim of the studies is to 'promote a systematic and informed discussion of subaltern themes in the field of South Asian studies, and thus help to rectify the elitist bias characteristic of much research and academic work in this particular area. The contributors...focus attention on what Gramsci called the subaltern classes and their condition, and also re-examine well-known events and themes in the new, more rounded perspective. The contributors encompass history, politics, economics and sociology; attitudes, ideologies, and belief systems.' Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's essay 'Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography' introduces the volume and Edward Said, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia has provided a foreword.

The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature

Abstract: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii TWENTY THESES ON TRANSLATION xi INTRODUCTION 1 Introduction 3 CHAPTER 1: Translation after 9/11: Mistranslating the Art of War 12 PART ONE: TRANSLATING HUMANISM 23 CHAPTER 2: The Human in the Humanities 25 CHAPTER 3: Global Translatio: The "Invention" of Comparative Literature, Istanbul, 1933 41 CHAPTER 4: Saidian Humanism 65 PART TWO: THE POLITICS OF UNTRANSLATABILITY 83 CHAPTER 5: Nothing Is Translatable 85 CHAPTER 6: "Untranslatable" Algeria: The Politics of Linguicide 94 CHAPTER 7: Plurilingual Dogma: Translation by Numbers 109 PART THREE :LANGUAGE WARS 127 CHAPTER 8: Balkan Babel: Language Zones, Military Zones 129 CHAPTER 9: War and Speech 139 CHAPTER 10: The Language of Damaged Experience 149 CHAPTER 11: CNN Creole: Trademark Literacy and Global Language Travel 160 CHAPTER 12: Conde's Creolite in Literary History 178 PART FOUR: TECHNOLOGIES OF TRANSLATION 191 CHAPTER 13: Nature into Data 193 CHAPTER 14: Translation with No Original: Scandals of Textual Reproduction 210 CHAPTER 15: Everything Is Translatable 226 CONCLUSION 241 CHAPTER 16: A New Comparative Literature 243 NOTES 253 INDEX 287

The Singularity of Literature

Abstract: Winner of the ESSE (European Society for the Study of English) Book Award for Literature 2006 Literature and the literary have proved singularly resistant to definition. Derek Attridge argues that such resistance represents not a dead end, but a crucial starting point from which to explore anew the power and practices of Western art. In this lively, original volume, the author: * considers the implications of regarding the literary work as an innovative cultural event, both in its time and for later generations; * provides a rich new vocabulary for discussions of literature, rethinking such terms as invention, singularity, otherness, alterity, performance and form; * returns literature to the realm of ethics, and argues the ethical importance of the literary institution to a culture; * demonstrates how a new understanding of the literary might be put to work in a 'responsible,' creative mode of reading. *The Singularity of Literature is not only a major contribution to the theory of literature, but also a celebration of the extraordinary pleasure of the literary, for reader, writer, student or critic.