Comparative literature Unit 2

Article 2 Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Future For a Discipline by Todd Presner. 

Abstract

After five hundred years of print and the massive transformations in society and  culture that it unleashed, we are in the midst of another watershed moment in human  history that is on par with the invention of the printing press or perhaps the discovery  of the New World. With the invention of the printing press, communication, literacy,  and the state of knowledge completely changed, providing the conditions of possibility for the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the age of Humanism, and the rise of  mass media. Innovations in print technology became the very instrument for produc ing, sharing, and transforming humanistic and scientifi c knowledge. Analogously,  with the opening up of the New World, not only were the profound limitations of  conventional knowledge and epistemologies exposed, but the “ discovery ” reconfigured   – for better and for worse – the entire surface of the earth, enabled the ascendancy of  rationality (and it's deep link to barbarism), gave rise to new economies, provided the  seedbed for colonialism, and was the prerequisite of the modern nation - state.

Both the impact of print and the “ discovery ” of the New World were predicated  on networking technologies, which not only enabled the dissemination of knowledge  into new cultural and social spheres, but also brought together people, nations, cul tures, and languages that were previously separated. 

Key Argument

In this regard, every technology has a dialectical underbelly, facilitating a potential  democratization of information and exchange, on the one hand, and the ability to  exercise exclusionary control and violence on the other. This, I would suggest, is the  persistent dialectic of any technology, ranging from communications technologies  (print, radio, the telephone, television, the web) to technologies of mobility and  exchange (ships, railways, highways, and the Internet). These technologies of networking and connection do not necessarily bring about the ever - greater liberation of  humankind, as Nicholas Negroponte once asserted in his wildly optimistic book Being  Digital (Negroponte, 1995 ), for they always have an underbelly: mobile phones, social  networking technologies, and perhaps even the hundred - dollar computer, will not  only be used to enhance education, spread democracy, and enable global communication but will likely be used to perpetrate violence and even orchestrate genocide in  much the same way that the radio and the railway did in the last century (despite the  belief that both would somehow liberate humanity and join us all together in a happy,  interconnected world that never existed before)

Paul Gilroy  analysed in his study of 

“ the fatal junction of the concept of nationality with the  concept of culture ” along the 

“ Black Atlantic, ” voyages of discovery, enlightenment,  and progress also meant, at every moment, voyages of conquest, enslavement, and  destruction. Indeed, this is why any discussion of technology cannot be separated from  a discussion about formations of power and instrumental authority.

 N. Katherine Hayles, I find myself wondering – as we  ponder various possible futures for Comparative Literature in the second decade of the  twenty - first century – how to rouse ourselves from the "somnolence [of] five hundred  years of print"

While the materiality of the vast majority of artifacts that we study as  professors of Comparative Literature has been (and, to a large extent, still is) print,  the burgeoning fi eld of electronic literature has necessitated a reconceptualization of   “ materiality as the interplay between a text ’ s physical characteristics and its signifying  practices, ” something that, as Hayles argues, allows us to consider texts as “ embodied  entities ” and still foreground interpretative practices. 

Walter Benjamin did in  The Arcades Project (1928 – 40; 1999), it is necessary, I believe, to interrogate both the  media and methodologies for the study of literature, culture, and society.

While electronic literature offers a significant and multivalent possibility for  exploring the future of Comparative Literature, I want to examine the fi eld a bit more  broadly by situating the transformation of the literary vis - à - vis a set of issues that  have emerged over the past decade in the “ Digital Humanities. ”

the Humanities, including history and art history, literary and  cultural studies, and the humanistic social sciences, such as anthropology, archaeology,  and information studies. In fact, these issues, brought to the foreground in the digital  world, necessitate a fundamental rethinking of how knowledge gets created, what knowledge looks (or sounds, or feels, or tastes) like, who gets to create knowledge,  when it is “ done ” or published, how it gets authorised and disseminated, and how it  involves and is made accessible to a significantly broader (and potentially global)  audience.

Digital Humanities is an umbrella term  for a wide array of interdisciplinary practices for creating, applying, interpreting,interrogating, and hacking both new and old information technologies.

Digital Humanities projects  are almost always collaborative, engaging humanists, technologists, librarians, social  scientists, artists, architects, information scientists, and computer scientists in con ceptualizing problems, designing interfaces, analyzing data, sharing knowledge, and  engaging with a signifi cantly broader public than traditional academic research in the  Humanities.

Jeffrey Schnapp and I articulated in various instantiations of the “ Digital  Humanities Manifesto, ” it is essential that humanists assert and insert themselves into  the twenty - fi rst century cultural wars, which are largely being defi ned, fought, and  won by corporate interests. Why, for example, were humanists, foundations, and  universities conspicuously – even scandalously – silent when Google won its book  search lawsuit and, effectively, won the right to transfer copyright of orphaned books  to itself? Why were they silent when the likes of Sony and Disney essentially engi needed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, radically restricting intellectual property, copyright, and sharing?

Franco Moretti ’ s  provocation, is to consider Comparative Literature as a “ problem ” (not a canon of  objects, a theoretical position, or a particular medium) that “ asks for a new critical  method ” (Moretti, 2000 : p. 55) to analyze both the print world in the digital age and  the digital world in the post - print age. The “ problem ” of Comparative Literature is  to fi gure out how to take seriously the range of new authoring, annotation, and sharing  platforms that have transformed global cultural production. 

Digital media are always hypermedia and hypertextual.

How, then, might Comparative Literature be practiced when literature and scholarly work are created, exchanged, and critiqued in a multimodal environment such  as the Web?

Comparative Literature as Comparative Media Studies foregrounds  the formal material qualities of the surface structures upon which inscriptions are  made, the technical processes of reproduction and circulation, the institutional mecha nisms of dissemination and authorization, the reading and navigation practices enabled  by the media form, and the broad cultural and social implications for literacy and  knowledge production. It investigates all media as information and knowledge systems  that are bound up with histories of power, institutions, and governing and regulatory  bodies which legitimate and authorize certain utterances, while screening out and  dismissing others.

some of the most fundamental questions of our field with  new urgency: Who is an author? What is work? What constitutes a text, particularly  in an environment in which any text is ready and writer by potentially anyone?

Lev Manovich and Noah  Wardrip - Fruin, the field of “ cultural analytics' ' has emerged over the past five years  to bring the tools of high - end computational analysis and data visualization to dissect  large - scale cultural datasets.

Comparative Data Studies allows us to use the computational  tools of cultural analytics to enhance literary scholarship precisely by creating models,  visualization, maps, and semantic webs of data that are simply too large to read or  comprehend using unaided human faculties.

The “ data ” of Comparative Data Studies is constantly expanding in  terms of volume, data type, production and reception platform, and analytic  strategy. 

While Comparative Literature scholarship has not generally concerned itself with  design, interactivity, navigation strategies, and collaboration, these issues are a deci sive part of the domain of Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies. The knowledge platforms cannot be simply “ handed off ” to the technicians, publishers, and  librarians, as if the curation of knowledge – the physical and virtual arrangement of  information as an argument through multimedia constellations – is somehow not the  domain of literary scholars.

Wikipedia, a revolutionary knowledge production and editing platform.

Wikipedia  is already the most comprehensive, representative, and pervasive participatory platform for knowledge production ever created by humankind. In my opinion, that is  worth some pause and reflection, perhaps even by scholars in a future disciplinary  incarnation of Comparative Literature. 

Ppt on Article

Comparative_Literature_in_the_Age_of_Digital_Humanities.pptx from VachchhalataJoshi

Video

Comparative literature Unit 2 Susan Bassnett

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.

Ppt on Article

Introduction: what is comparative literature Today ? from JanviNakum

Video

Article 2 Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Future For a Discipline by Todd Presner

Live Burial

Hello readers:) 

                       This is a response blog on a task given by my teacher. It was related to African literature. In this blog I am given to analyze the thematic studies of Two poems one is You Laughed and Laughed and Laughed by Gabriel Okara and second is Live Burial by Wole Soyinka. 

 Live Burial

Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde  

Nigerian playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist in the English language. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, for "in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashioning the drama of existence", the first sub-Saharan African to be honoured in that category. Soyinka was born into a Yoruba family in Abeokuta.In 1954, he attended Government College in Ibadan, and subsequently University College Ibadan and the University of Leeds in England. After studying in Nigeria and the UK, he worked with the Royal Court Theatre in London. He went on to write plays that were produced in both countries, in theatres and on radio. He took an active role in Nigeria's political history and its campaign for independence from British colonial rule. In 1965, he seized the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio and broadcast a demand for the cancellation of the Western Nigeria Regional Elections.In 1967, during the Nigerian Civil War, he was arrested by the federal government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for two years, for volunteering to be a non-government mediating actor.

Wole Soyinka is best known as a playwright. Alongside his literary career, he has also worked as an actor and in theaters in Nigeria and Great Britain. His works also include poetry, novels, and essays. Soyinka writes in English, but his works are rooted in his native Nigeria and the Yoruba culture, with its legends, tales, and traditions. His writing also includes influences from Western traditions—from classical tragedies to modernist drama.

Poem

Sixteen paces

By twenty-three. They hold

Siege against humanity

And Truth

Employing time to drill through to his sanity

Schismatic

Lover of Antigone !

You will? You will unearth

Corpses of yester-

Year? Expose manure of present birth?

Seal him live

In that same necropolis.

May his ghost mistress

Point the classic

Route to Outsiders' Stygian Mysteries.

Bulletin:

He sleeps well, eats

Well. His doctors note

No damage

Our plastic surgeons tend his public image.

Confession

Fiction ? Is truth not essence

Of Art, and fiction Art?

Lest it rust

We kindly borrowed his poetic licence.

Galileo

We hoped he'd prove - age

Or genius may recant - our butchers

Tired of waiting

Ordered; take the scapegoat, drop the sage.

Guara'l The lizard:

Every minute scrapes

A concrete mixer throat.

The cola slime

Flies to blotch the walls in patterned grime

The ghoul:

Flushed from hanging, sniffles

Snuff, to clear his head of

Sins -- the law

Declared -- that morning's gallows load were dead of.

The voyeur:

Times his sly patrol

For the hour upon the throne

I think he thrills

To hear the Muse's constipated groan

Themes

1.Sadism

In the poem it was sadism about torture he was feel in the prison and he was describe the prison cell and how the Government official making fake documents of prison and Guard, voice of rebellion people. 

2.Greek Mythology

In this poem poet use three Greek mythical figures

Antigone

Antigone, in Greek legend, the daughter born of the unwittingly incestuous union of Oedipus and his mother, Jocasta. After her father blinded himself upon discovering that Jocasta was his mother and that, also unwittingly, he had slain his father, Antigone and her sister Ismene served as Oedipus’ guides, following him from Thebes into exile until his death near Athens. Returning to Thebes, they attempted to reconcile their quarreling brothers—Eteocles, who was defending the city and his crown, and Polyneices, who was attacking Thebes. Both brothers, however, were killed, and their uncle Creon became king. After performing an elaborate funeral service for Eteocles, he forbade the removal of the corpse of Polyneices, condemning it to lie unburied, declaring him to have been a traitor. Antigone, moved by love for her brother and convinced of the injustice of the command, buried Polyneices secretly. For that she was ordered by Creon to be executed and was immured in a cave, where she hanged herself. Her beloved, Haemon, son of Creon, committed suicide. According to another version of the story, Creon gave Antigone to Haemon to kill, but he secretly married her and they had a son. When this son went to Thebes to compete in athletic contests, Creon recognized him and put him to death, whereupon his parents committed suicide.

Muse

In ancient Greek religion and mythology, the Muses  are the inspirational goddesses of literature, science, and the arts. They were considered the source of the knowledge embodied in the poetry, lyric songs, and myths that were related orally for centuries in ancient Greek culture.

In Greek mythology, the nine Muses are goddesses of the various arts such as music, dance, and poetry. Blessed with wonderful artistic talents, they also possess great beauty, grace, and allure. Their gifts of song, dance, and joy helped the gods and mankind to forget their troubles and inspired musicians and writers to reach ever greater artistic and intellectual heights.

The Muses are the daughters of Zeus and the Titan Mnemosyne (Memory) after the couple slept together for nine consecutive nights.

Stygian

of or relating to the river Styx

 extremely dark, gloomy, or forbidding(Merriam Webster) 

Stygian comes to us (by way of Latin stygius and Greek stygios) from Styx, the name of the principal river in Hades, the underworld of the dead in Greek mythology. This is the river over which Charon the boatman was said to ferry the spirits of the dead; the Greeks and Romans would place a coin in the mouth or hand of the deceased to serve as fare. It is also the river by which the gods swore their most binding oaths, according to the epics of Homer. English speakers have been using stygian to mean "of or relating to the river Styx" since the early 16th century. From there the meaning broadened to describe things that are as dark, dreary, and menacing as one might imagine Hades and the river Styx to be. 

In the poem he was use greek mythology with great knowledge about that use in second stanza as lover of Antigone and third stanza use of Stygian with necropolice and atmosphere of the prison and third myth he was is about Muse in the last stanza to describe third guard he was use Or connected with constipation. 

3.Imprisonment

the act of putting someone in prison or the condition of being kept in prison:

Poet describe his cell length in the first line of poetry and he was also give some of the hints of Torture in the prison and how he was suffer and others who are in prison. Powerful people try to convince him by force to admit which they want. 

4.Metaphor

In poem poet use metaphor for guard when he was in prison for the first guard lizard and second as ghoul and for the third guard voyeur. All three have different habits and their description in the poem like first one always chewing something and then spit on walls second is hanged prisoners then take drugs to making himself relax or try to forget guilt and third was very disgusting habit like he was patrolling when prisoners on toilet seat

African Literature Poem

Hello readers:) 

                       This is a response blog on a task given by my teacher. It was related to African literature. 

             In this blog I am given to analyse the thematic studies of Two poems one is You Laughed and Laughed and Laughed by Gabriel Okara and second is Live Burial by Wole Soyinka. 

You Laughed and Laughed and Laughed

Gabriel Okara

"The straight word never runs away from the crooked word"

Gabriel Imomotimi Okara 

24 April 1921 – 25 March 2019

was a Nigerian poet and novelist who was born in Bumoundi in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State, Nigeria. The first modernist poet of Anglophone Africa, he is best known for his early experimental novel, The Voice (1964), and his award-winning poetry, published in The Fisherman's Invocation (1978) and The Dreamer, His Vision (2005). In both his poems and his prose, Okara drew on African thought, religion, folklore and imagery, and he has been called "the Nigerian Negritude".According to Brenda Marie Osbey, editor of his Collected Poems, "It is with publication of Gabriel Okara's first poem that Nigerian literature in English and modern African poetry in this language can be said truly to have begun."

Poem

In your ears my song

is motor car misfiring

stopping with a choking cough;

and you laughed and laughed and laughed.

In your eyes my ante-

natal walk was inhuman, passing

your ‘omnivorous understanding’

and you laughed and laughed and laughed

You laughed at my song,

you laughed at my walk.

Then I danced my magic dance

to the rhythm of talking drums pleading, but you shut your eyes

and laughed and laughed and laughed

And then I opened my mystic

inside wide like the sky,

instead you entered your

car and laughed and laughed and laughed

You laughed at my dance,

you laughed at my inside.

You laughed and laughed and laughed.

But your laughter was ice-block

laughter and it froze your inside froze

your voice froze your ears

froze your eyes and froze your tongue.

And now it’s my turn to laugh;

but my laughter is not

ice-block laughter. For I

know not cars, know not ice-blocks.

My laughter is the fire

of the eye of the sky, the fire

of the earth, the fire of the air,

the fie of the seas and the

rivers fishes animals trees

and it thawed your inside,

thawed your voice, thawed your

ears, thawed your eyes and

thawed your tongue.

So a meek wonder held

your shadow and you whispered;

‘Why so?’

And I answered:

‘Because my fathers and I

are owned by the living

warmth of the earth

through our naked feet.’

Themes

1.Racism

: a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race (Merriam Webster) 

racism, also called racialism, the belief that humans may be divided into separate and exclusive biological entities called “races”; that there is a causal link between inherited physical traits and traits of personality, intellect, morality, and other cultural and behavioral features; and that some races are innately superior to others. The term is also applied to political, economic, or legal institutions and systems that engage in or perpetuate discrimination on the basis of race or otherwise reinforce racial inequalities in wealth and income, education, health care, civil rights, and other areas. Such institutional, structural, or systemic racism became a particular focus of scholarly investigation in the 1980s with the emergence of critical race theory, an offshoot of the critical legal studies movement. Since the late 20th century the notion of biological race has been recognized as a cultural invention, entirely without scientific basis.

In this poem it was about how they (white) people laughed on their physical structure and for their screen they laughed on their culture also. They can't understand others culture because they consider they are superior and other are inferior. 

2.Cultural Conflict 

A cultural conflict is a dislike, hostility, or struggle between communities who have different philosophies and ways of living, resulting in contradictory aspirations and behaviors. The notion originates from sociological conflict theories and anthropological concepts of intercultural relations.

In this poem it was conflict of culture and race and he was give the example of their song is for them car misfiring they are laughed on their physical structure their walk is inhuman for them laughed on their dance poet try to said that their culture is different from African culture they have the mindset like their culture is more civilized and better than African culture so they are laughed on this was the cultural conflict. 

3.Modernism

Modernism is both a philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new forms of art, philosophy, and social organization which reflected the newly emerging industrial world, including features such as urbanization, architecture, new technologies, and war. Artists attempted to depart from traditional forms of art, which they considered outdated or obsolete. The poet Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make it New" was the touchstone of the movement's approach.

In this poem it was about modernism with the context of using cars. In the first stanza their song is for white people. It was like car's misfiring. 

4.Colonialism

Western colonialism, a political-economic phenomenon whereby various European nations explored, conquered, settled, and exploited large areas of the world.

Colonialism is defined as “control by one power over a dependent area or people.” It occurs when one nation subjugates another, conquering its population and exploiting it, often while forcing its own language and cultural values upon its people. By 1914, a large majority of the world's nations had been colonized by Europeans at some point.

The concept of colonialism is closely linked to that of imperialism, which is the policy or ethos of using power and influence to control another nation or people that underlies colonialism.

Colonialism was describe in three ways like it was about Physical torture, mental torture, and traits of being inferior as slave and inferior then white they face physical torture. 

5.Nationalism

Nationalism came into the focus of philosophical debate three decades ago, in the nineties, partly in consequence of rather spectacular and troubling nationalist clashes. Surges of nationalism tend to present a morally ambiguous, and for this reason often fascinating, picture. “National awakening” and struggles for political independence are often both heroic and cruel; the formation of a recognizably national state often responds to deep popular sentiment but sometimes yields inhuman consequences, from violent expulsion and “cleansing” of non-nationals to organized mass murder. The moral debate on nationalism reflects a deep moral tension between solidarity with oppressed national groups on the one hand and repulsion in the face of crimes perpetrated in the name of nationalism on the other. Moreover, the issue of nationalism points to a wider domain of problems related to the treatment of ethnic and cultural differences within democratic polity, arguably among the most pressing problems of contemporary political theory.

In the stanza five poet describe the richness of their African land connect that they are original and in poem last three stanza he was try to say that Or pretending that their culture is rich then white and pretending his nation. 

 

For another poem and themes click here

Comparative Literature

Hello readers:) 

                     This blog is on Thinking activity given by Dr. Dilip Barad sir on Comparative Literature and Translation studies. 

What is comparative Literature

The study of the interrelationship of the literatures of two or more national cultures usually of differing languages and especially of the influences of one upon the other

sometimes : informal study of literary works in translation

(Merriam Webster) 

Article :1

Why Comparative Indian Literature? 

-Sisir Kumar Das

Abstract

Since the beginning of this century a group of scholars have been trying to project the idea of an Indian literature, empha- sizing the underlying unity of themes and forms and attitudes among the various literatures produced in different Indian lan- guages during the last three thousand years or so. This is partly a manifestation of the Indian intellectual's anxiousness to dis- cover the essential threads of unity in our multilingual and multi religious culture. Its impact on our literary studies, still fragmented into smaller linguistic units, is extremely limited, and certainly the idea of an Indian literature as conceived by Sri Aurobindo and others has failed to provide us with a criti- cal framework to study Indian literatures together, except in viewing Indian literatures as expressions of a common heritage. Nevertheless, it has encouraged some of our scholars to identify certain themes and ideas and to see their ramifications in differ- ent literatures of India. Laudable though these attempts are in discovering the basic unity of the Indian creative mind, they are made at the risk of ignoring the plurality of expressions in our creative life.

The word 'comparative', however, has created some confusion and one wonders whether it is being used to lend some respectability to the study of Indian languages by linking it up with comparative literature, still a Western dis- cipline, or indeed to indicate the proper framework within which Indian literatures can be studied.

Key points/Argument

Western comparatist has kept himself restricted to Western Literatures. 

One can argue that comparative Western literature is the study of different national literatures, while comparative Indian literature is the study of literatures of one nation, or, according to some, of one national literature written in many languages.

Whatever be the goal of comparative lit- erature, it must have a terra firma, a solid ground. Indian litera- tures, produced in Indian languages like Hindi or Tamil Marathi or Assamese, alone provide that solid ground to start with. 

Literature deals with the concrete, not with abstractions, It is born of language and yet it goes beyond language; it is nourished by a culture. Its meaning and significance comes out of its relation with that culture. 

Any attempt towards a literary cosmopolitanism neglecting the literature or literatures that are components of a cultural history is bound to turn into dilettantism. 

The lesson we must learn from the Western comparatist is the lesson of vigilance against dilettantism.

Multilingualism is a fact of Indian society and Indian literature. 

Amiya Dev said, 'Comparison is right reason for us be- cause, one, we are multilingual, and two, we are Third World,'s The fact of multilingualism is now more or less appreciated by Indian scholars.

The Third World situation that lends Indian comparative literature a greater validity may need further comments. Professor Dev points out in this paper that the tools of Western comparison are hardly adequate to deal with our literary situation. For example, the categories 'influence' and' 'imitation' and 'reception' and 'survival' need serious modification to suit the Third World literary situation.

Conclusion

In order to make literary studies free from these psychological restrictions, we need to look at our literatures from within, so that we can also respond to the literature of other parts of the world without any inhibition or prejudice. Our idea of comparative literature will emerge only when we take into account the historical situation in which we are placed. Our journey is not from comparative literature to comparative Indian literature, but from comparative Indian literature to comparative literature.

At the End of this article Das try to say us first we need to understand our own culture and language and literature then we can compared world literature. It was about narrow minded thinking about Indian literature then study Western literature but Indian as multilingual country first we start with india then we try to study world literature. 

Ppt

Video

Article -2  

Comparative Literature and Culture

-Amiya Dev

Video

Article 3

Comparative Literature in India: An Overview of  its History 

-Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta

Abstract

The essay gives an overview of the trajectory of Comparative Literature in India, focusing primarily on the department at Jadavpur University, where it began, and to some extent the department of  Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies in the University of Delhi, where it later had a new beginning in its engagement with Indian literatures. The department at Jadavpur began with the legacy  of Rabindranath Tagore’s speech on World Literature and with a modern poet-translator as its founder.  While British legacies in the study of literature were evident in the early years, there were also subtle  efforts towards a decolonizing process and an overall attempt to enhance and nurture creativity.  Gradually Indian literature began to receive prominence along with literatures from the Southern part  of the globe. Paradigms of approaches in comparative literary studies also shifted from influence and  analogy studies to cross-cultural literary relations, to the focus on reception and transformation. In  the last few years Comparative Literature has taken on new perspectives, engaging with different areas of culture and knowledge, particularly those related to marginalized spaces, along with the focus  on recovering new areas of non-hierarchical literary relations.

Key points

The idea of world literature gained ground towards  the end of the nineteenth century when in Bengal, for instance, translation activities began to be taken  up on a large scale and poets talked of establishing relations with literatures of the world to promote,  as the eminent poet-translator Satyendranath Dutta in 1904 stated, “relationships of joy”

The talk by Rabindranath Tagore entitled “Visvasahitya” (meaning “world literature”), given at the  National Council of Education in 1907, served as a pretext to the establishment of the department of  Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University in 1956.

Rabindranath’s talk on “visvasahitya” while writing about the discipline, interpreting it more in the context of establishing connections, of ‘knowing’ literatures of the world.

Modern Indian Languages department established in  1962 in Delhi University.

A national seminar on Comparative Literature was held in Delhi  University organized by Nagendra

Older definitions of Indian literature often with only Sanskrit at the centre, with  the focus on a few canonical texts to the neglect of others, particularly oral and performative traditions, had  to be abandoned. 

Aijaz Ahmad, to trace “the dialectic  of unity and difference – through systematic periodization of multiple linguistic overlaps, and by grounding that dialectic in the history of material productions, ideological struggles, competing conceptions of  class and community and gender, elite offensives and popular resistances, overlaps of cultural vocabularies and performative genres, and histories of orality and writing and print”

Comparative Literature  studies necessarily had to be interdisciplinary and were highlighted by the pedagogy practiced in the department.

T.S. Satyanath developed the theory of a scripto-centric, body-centric and phono-centric study of  texts in the medieval period leading a number of researchers in the department to look for continuities and  interventions in the tradition that would again lead to pluralist epistemologies in the study of Indian literature and culture.

Indian literary systems along with diverse inter-cultural relations that communities in different parts of India have with different communities outside the borders of the nation state.

During the seventies and the eighties Comparative Literature was also practiced at a number of centres and departments in the South of India such as in Trivandrum, Madurai Kamaraj University, Bharatidasam University, Kottayam and Pondicherry. Although often Comparative Literature courses were held  along with English literature, a full-fledged Comparative Literary Studies department was established in  the School of Tamil Studies in Madurai Kamaraj University.

In Tamil, apart from studies related to the comparison of texts from two different cultures, Classical Tamil  texts were compared with texts from the Greek, Latin and Japanese counterpart traditions. 

The introduction of Canadian Studies was linked with a grant in the area, but gradually a field of studies focusing on oral traditions emerged within the space of  comparison.

Components from the diverse Area  Studies could possibly have been included as integrated parts of the main curriculum. 

Right from the beginning of the discipline in India, cross-cultural relations between Indian literatures  and European and American literatures had been in focus.

Sisir Kumar Das, that there were different Shakespeares.Shakespeare’s texts might have been imposed in the classroom, but the playwright had a rich and varied reception  in the world of theatre.

From reception studies the focus gradually turned to cross-cultural  reception where reciprocity and exchange among cultures were studied. For example, one tried to study the  

Romantic Movement from a larger perspective, to unravel its many layers as it travelled between countries,particularly between Europe and India.

Literature in modern texts and also inter and intra literary relations foregrounding impact and responses.  While one studied Vedic, Upanishadic, Buddhist and Jaina elements in modern texts, one also looked at clusters of sermons by Buddha, Mahavira and Nanak, at qissas and katha ballads across the country, the  early novels in different Indian literatures, and then the impact of Eastern literature and thought on Western  literature and vice versa.

Several books and translations emerged out of the project. The  department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Saurashtra University, Rajkot, took up the  theme of Indian Renaissance and translated several Indian authors into English, studied early travelogues  from Western India to England and in general published collections of theoretical discourse from the nineteenth century.

East-West Literary Relations, Indian Literature, Translation Studies and Third World Literature. Incidentally, the department had in Manabendra Bandyopadhyay, an avid translator who translated  texts from many so-called “third-world countries”

Romanticism as a term for periodization. Romanticism had very different dimensions in the Indian context  and necessitated a different reading within a continuum that situated it often at the source of modernity. 

Literature as knowledge system, therefore, became a thrust area for again it was felt that comparative literature with its interdisciplinary formation would be the right place to demonstrate the same. 

The first preliminary research in this  area led to links that suggested continuity and a constant series of interactions between and among Asian  cultures and communities since ancient times and the urgent need for work in this area in order to enter into meaningful dialogue with one another in the Asian context and to uncover different pathways of creative  

communications. 

Comparative Literature today have courses on Translation or Translation Studies. Both are seen  as integral to the study of Comparative Literature.

The M Phil course on the subject at Jadavpur University  highlights changing marginalities, ‘sub-cultures’ and movements in relation to contemporary nationalisms  and globalization, and also sexualities, gender and the politics of identity.

As in the case of humanities and literary studies, the discipline too is engaged with  issues that would lead to the enhancement of civilizational gestures, against forces that are divisive and that  constantly reduce the potentials of human beings.

In doing so it is engaged in discovering new links and  lines of non-hierarchical connectivity, of what Kumkum Sangari in a recent article called “co-construction”,  a process anchored in “subtle and complex histories of translation, circulation and extraction”

Conclusion

Delhi is the center of India, very rich in Indian diversity and multilingual people are there because of many reasons. We study that India influence a lot in Western literature first our write are wrote in English now the writer like Rushdie, Arundhti Roy they produced literature in English and getting many award on that also literature in India like Dalit literature it was now established. 

Ppt

Video