Hello readers:)
This blog is on Thinking activity given by Dr. Dilip Barad sir on Comparative Literature and Translation studies.
In this paper our teacher gave a task to present a partner presentation on every article it is divided by the teacher.
In unit 2 there are two articles: first is Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction by Susan Bassnett and second is Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Future For a Discipline by Todd Presner.
Article 1 Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction by Susan Bassnett
Abstract
Comparative literature has to try and answer the inevitable question: What is it? The simplest answer is that comparative literature 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.
Most people do not start with comparative literature, they end up with it in some way or other, travelling towards it from different points of departure. Sometimes the journey begins with a desire to move beyond the boundaries of a single subject area that might appear to be too constraining, at other times a reader may be impelled to follow up what appear to be similarities between texts or authors from different cultural contexts. And some readers may simply be following the view propounded by Matthew Arnold in his Inaugural Lecture at Oxford in 1857 when he said:
Everywhere there is connection, everywhere there is illustration. No single event, no single literature is adequately comprehended except in relation to other events, to other literatures.1
Key Argument
At this juncture, one could be forgiven for assuming that comparative literature is nothing more than common sense, an inevitable stage in reading, made increasingly easier by international market- ing of books and by the availability of translations. But if we shift perspective slightly and look again at the term 'Comparative Literature', what we find instead is a history of violent debate that goes right back to the earliest usage of the term at the beginning of the nineteenth century and continues still today.
Comparative literature as a term seems to arouse strong passions, both for and against. As early as 1903, Benedetto Croce argued that comparative literature was a non-subject, contemptuously dismissing the suggestion that it might be seen as a separate discipline.
Croce claimed he could not distinguish between literary history pure and simple and comparative literary history.
Jost, like Gayley and others before him, are proposing lying suggestion is that all cultural differences disappear when readers take up great works; art is seen as an instrument of universal harmony and the comparatist is one who facilitates the spread of that harmony.
Wellek and Warren in their Theory of Literature, a book that was enormously significant in comparative literature when it first appeared in 1949
In the 1950s and early 1960s, high-flying graduate students in the West turned to comparative literature as a radical subject, because at that time it appeared to be transgressive, moving as it claimed to do across the boundaries of single literature study.
Then it was emerged in third world countries
Eagleton rise question
English has itself entered a crisis (what, after all, is English today?
Literature produced within the geographical boundaries of England? Of the United Kingdom?
Or literatures written in English from all parts of the world?
And where does the boundary line between 'literature' on the one hand and 'popular' or 'mass' culture on the other hand lie? The old days when English meant texts from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf are long gone, and the question of what to include and exclude from an English syllabus is a very vexed one); so also has Comparative Literature been called into question by the emergence of alternative schools of thought. The work of Edward Said, pioneer of the notion of 'orientalism', has provided many critics with a new vocabulary. Said's thesis, that
the Orient was a word which later accrued to it a wide field of meanings, associations and connotations, and that these did not necessarily refer to the real Orient but to the field surrounding the word
The growth of national consciousness and awareness of the need to move beyond the colonial legacy has led significantly to the development of comparative literature in many parts of the world, even as the subject enters a period of crisis and decay in the West.
Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures) in- clude the following phrases: 'the term "post-colonial"...is most appropriate as the term for the new cross-cultural criticism which has merged in recent years and for the discourse through which this is constituted. '18 What is this but comparative literature under another name?
What distinguishes translation studies from translation as traditionally thought of, is its derivation from the polysystems theory developed by Itamar Evan- Zohar and later by Gideon Toury in Tel Aviv.
Comparative literature has traditionally claimed translation as a sub-category, but this assumption is now being questioned. The work of scholars such as Toury, Lefevere, Hermans, Lambert and many others has shown that translation is especially significant at moments of great cultural change. Evan-Zohar argues that extensive transla- tion activity takes place when a culture is in a period of transi- tion: when it is expanding, when it needs renewal, when it is in a pre-revolutionary phase, then translation plays a vital part. In contrast, when a culture is solidly established, when it is in an imperialist stage, when it believes itself to be dominant, then translation is less important.
Conclusion
In West the idea of Comparison is raise and than crises and down fall then started in the third world countries, the idea of nation is emerged from world War for the Western Comparison is not narrow but while the for the eastern it was the idea of modern india given by Ganesh Devy and it was about time and space and translation is the sub branch of Comparison.
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