Description
Book SynopsisThis collection of essays takes on two of the most pressing questions that face the discipline of Comparative Literature today: “Why compare?” and “Where do we go from here?”. At a difficult economic time, when universities all over the world once again have to justify the social as well as academic value of their work, it is crucial that we consider the function of comparison itself in reaching across disciplinary and cultural boundaries. The essays written for this book are by researchers from all over the world, and range in topic from the problem of translating biblical Hebrew to modern atheism, from Freud to Marlene van Niekerk, from the formation of one person’s identity to experiences of globalisation, and the relation of history to fiction. Together they display the ground-breaking, ideas which lie at the heart of an act as deceptively simple as comparing one piece of writing to another.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Timothy Mathews: Foreword Part I: Provocation Dragana Obradović: Introduction Helena Carvalhão Buescu: Comparativism as Wounds of Possibility Ksenia Robbe: Comparison as Translation: The Possibility of the Comparative Study of South African Literatures Marta Pacheco Pinto: Oriental Paradises at the Crossroads of Cultural Translation Angela Becerra Vidergar: Uncanny Encounters: Face to Face with “Failed” Assimilation David Muino Barreiro: European Travel Writing, Imperialist Discourses and Analogy in Nineteenth-Century Argentinian Literature Marian Halls: “The Bone that Writes”: Desaparecidos and the Disappearance of Literature Patrick ffrench: The Idiom of the Other Kirsty Black: Representation and Re-Presentation in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens and David Jones Part II: Negotiation Gesche Ipsen: Introduction Sarah Kay: Allegory and Melancholy in Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Christine de Pizan Margarita García Candeira : Psychoanalysis and Literary Tradition: The “Anxiety of Influence” in Luis Garcia Montero’s Reformulation of Rafael Alberti Karolien Vermeulen: Lost/Lasting in Translation: What Happened to the Laughing Isaac (Genesis 17-26) Heiða Jóhannsdóttir: The Inflected Text: Hindle Wakes and Its Film Adaptations Denis Simon: Twentieth-Century Dramatizations of the Trials of Oscar Wilde Dennis Kersten: Henry James and the Death of the Biographer: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approach to the Writing of Lives Michiel Nys: Evolution and Agnosticism: Thomas Henry Huxley, Julian Huxley, and Richard Dawkins Valérie Macken: Matthew Arnold and the Use of Comparison Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: Afterword: “Cutting Edge” – Why It Matters and Where It Is Now Notes on Contributors Index
