New Horizons In International Comparative Literature

Bringing together 16 articles by renowned scholars from around the globe, this volume offers a multi-dimensional view of comparative and world literature. Drawing on the scope of these scholars' collective intellects and insights, it connects disparate research contexts to illuminate the multi-dimensional views of related areas as we step into the third decade of the 21st century. The book will be of particular interest to scholars working in comparative literary and cultural studies, and to readers interested in the future of literary studies in a cross-culturized world.

Bringing together 16 articles by renowned scholars from around the globe, this volume offers a multi-dimensional view of comparative and world literature. Drawing on the scope of these scholars’ collective intellects and insights, it connects disparate research contexts to illuminate the multi-dimensional views of related areas as we step into the third decade of the 21st century. The book will be of particular interest to scholars working in comparative literary and cultural studies, and to readers interested in the future of literary studies in a cross-culturized world.

Bringing together 17 articles by renowned scholars from around the globe, this volume offers a multi-dimensional view of comparative and world literature. Drawing on the scope of these scholars’ collective intellects and insights, it connects disparate research contexts to illuminate the multi-dimensional views of related areas as we step into the third decade of the 21st century. The book will be of particular interest to scholars working in comparative literary and cultural studies and to readers interested in the future of literary studies in a cross-culturized world.

Translation, before 9/11, was deemed primarily an instrument of international relations, business, education, and culture. Today it seems, more than ever, a matter of war and peace. In The Translation Zone, Emily Apter argues that the field of translation studies, habitually confined to a framework of linguistic fidelity to an original, is ripe for expansion as the basis for a new comparative literature. Organized around a series of propositions that range from the idea that nothing is translatable to the idea that everything is translatable, The Translation Zone examines the vital role of translation studies in the "invention" of comparative literature as a discipline. Apter emphasizes "language wars" (including the role of mistranslation in the art of war), linguistic incommensurability in translation studies, the tension between textual and cultural translation, the role of translation in shaping a global literary canon, the resistance to Anglophone dominance, and the impact of translation technologies on the very notion of how translation is defined. The book speaks to a range of disciplines and spans the globe. Ultimately, The Translation Zone maintains that a new comparative literature must take stock of the political impact of translation technologies on the definition of foreign or symbolic languages in the humanities, while recognizing the complexity of language politics in a world at once more monolingual and more multilingual.

On the Horizon of World Literature compares literary texts from asynchronous periods of incipient literary modernity in different parts of the world: Romantic England and Republican China. These moments were oriented alike by “world literature” as a discursive framework of classifications that connected and re-organized local articulations of literary histories and literary modernities. World literature thus provided—and continues to provide—a condition of possibility for conversation between cultures as well as for their mutual provincialization. The book offers readings of a selection of literary forms that serve also as textual sites for the enactment of new socio-political forms of life. The literary manifesto, the tale collection, the familiar essay, and the domestic novel function as testing grounds for questions of both literary-aesthetic and socio-political importance: What does it mean to attain a voice? What is a common reader? How does one dwell in the ordinary? What is a woman? In different languages and activating heterogeneous literary and philosophical traditions, works by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lu Xun, Charles and Mary Lamb, Lin Shu, Zhou Zuoren, Jane Austen, and Eileen Chang explore the far-from-settled problem of what it means to be modern in different lifeworlds. Sun’s book brings to light the disciplinary-historical impact world literature has had in shaping literary traditions and practices around the world. The book renews the practice of close reading by offering the model of a deprovincialized close reading loosened from confinement within monocultural hermeneutic circles. By means of its own focus on England and China, the book provides methods useful for comparatists working between other Western and non-Western languages. It establishes the critical significance of Romanticism for the discipline of literary studies and opens up new paths of research in global Romanticism and global nineteenth-century studies. And it offers a new approach to analyzing the cosmopolitan character of the literary and cultural transformations of early twentieth-century China.

Volume 8 of the proceedings of the XVth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association "Literature as Cultural Memory", Leiden 16-22 August 1997.