Locations of Comparison

Slaughter, Joseph R.

doi:10.1017/pli.2017.59

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 6 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Joseph Slaughter has shown that Moretti's 'rule' is determined by the criticism upon which he builds, that 'reflect[s] the condition and history of comparison from the periphery'. 36 In other words, the rule of compromise fits so well in the Ottoman-Turkish context not accidentally, but rather because it is founded in Ottoman-Turkish scholarship which has always argued such a point.…”

Section: The Ottoman Novel: National and World Literary Criticismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Monolingualizing the multilingual Ottoman novel: Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s Felatun Bey ile Rakım Efendi

Anjaria¹

2021

Multilingual Literature as World Literature

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In the introduction to his recent book, What is a World?, 1 Pheng Cheah argues: 'It should be evident that we should not take the presentation of the world for granted because, it, at the very least, is given to us by imagination'. 2 His intervention into the debates within the field of world literature draws our attention to a hitherto overlooked aspect of the field: the world.Whether it is by charting circulation, waves within the world-system, or mapping the meridian of the world of letters -to reference the most famous, but certainly not the only models -world literature has relied heavily on 'normative understandings of the world', 3where the world remains a conceptually stable and seemingly objective unit of analysis. As Cheah asserts 'world literature as a world-making activity', 4 he refocuses our attention on the field of world literature itself, highlighting that it is a critical activity, one which produces and reinforces not only definitions of literature but also of the world. Cheah, of course, is not the only scholar to draw attention to world literature as worldmaking. Francesca Orsini, for example, points to the biases and privileges that have not yet been fully accounted for in the revival of world literature at the turn of the 21 st century: '"World literature," a famously slippery, apparently expansive yet surprisingly narrow category, has been much theorized and re-theorized in recent years as comparative literature for the global age, with one foot in the US university curriculum and the other in theories of globalization'. 5 Orsini's work takes aim particularly at the monolingual conception of the world in 21 st century revival of 'world literature', where it cannot seem to, or does not want to, accommodate the fact that 'literary cultures have indeed been multilingual in most parts of the world since the second millennium '. 6 Building on the above interventions in world literature, this chapter will consider world literature and multilingualism with regard to the late-Ottoman novel. 7 Its starting point is to emphasize that multilingualism is the contextual reality, linguistic scaffold and thematic interest of the Ottoman novel, particularly in Felatun Bey ile Rakım Efendi (1875). It will argue that, for the Ottoman novel, the multilingual ecology of the form may be defined as cosmopolitanism, where, according to Cheah it is 'about viewing oneself as part of the

show abstract

Section: The Ottoman Novel: National and World Literary Criticismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Monolingualizing the multilingual Ottoman novel: Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s Felatun Bey ile Rakım Efendi

Anjaria¹

2021

Multilingual Literature as World Literature

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…and "Does it matter where we are com(par)ing from?" 34 By underscoring the historical conditions that have enabled the dominance of Eurocentric and formalist approaches to literature, I contend that if we continue to use the comparative method without fully attending to the cultural and ideological assumptions that undergird it, literatures from the Western periphery will continue to remain in an essential sense marginal in comparative literature-even as these texts come to be incorporated into the field. The meaning of comparison is not primarily a question of geographic scope, nor must the act of comparison necessarily be conceived in identitarian terms.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The History of Comparison Matters

Behdad¹

2018

Postcolon. Lit. inq

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Joseph Slaughter remarks, "are made at particular historical moments under particular historical conditions, with particular historical motivations under particular historical constraints from particular locations." 1 To ignore the particular historical locations of comparison, he maintains, risks "sedimenting those occlusions and forgetting rich histories of comparison that should matter to us as scholars of comparative literature." 2 In his American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) presidential address, Slaughter draws attention to the ways scholars of comparative literature have avoided the historicity and the location of comparison, thus overlooking and misconstruing the contributions of African and other non-Western scholars to literary studies. This tendency, he insightfully observes, persists to this day, as demonstrated by the new scholarship on "world literature," a relatively recent area of critical inquiry that has quickly come to be regarded as emblematizing the very essence of the field of comparative literature itself. Taking as a representative case in point Franco Moretti's mode of "distant reading," one in which the critic relies on previous scholarship to generalize what he calls the "law of literary evolution," 3 Slaughter highlights this approach's blindness to "the political contingencies and historical locations of comparison." 4 Citing a footnote in Moretti's article to the works of African scholars Emmanuel Obiechina, Abiola Irele, and Ato Quayson, on whose scholarship Moretti relies to advance the claim that the evolution of the novel in the non-Western world depends on "a comparison between a western formal influence (usually French and English) and local materials," 5 Slaughter contends that Moretti's "distant reading" exemplifies "how the dominant literary critical institutions still treat [non-Western] scholars. .. as informants rather than theorists." 6 Today, scholars in comparative literature may be more willing to acknowledge and engage literary productions from the Western periphery, but Western scholars continue to read this literature against "the grid of intelligibility

show abstract

Introduction: comparative thinking in an age of corruption

Barnard

2020

Safundi

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In his introduction to Barack Obama's 2018 Nelson Mandela Lecture in Johannesburg, the South African writer Njabulo Ndebele commented on the dire political situation on both sides of the Atlantic: "What we came to see in South Africa as state capture," he declared, "seem[s] mirrored in the United States and other parts of the world by what we could call more accurately a 'capture of democracy.'" 1 Ordinary South Africans, too, saw parallels: quite a few wryly remarked to me that the 2016 election brought Americans the joys of a white Zuma. The laughable aspects of this comparison had in fact already been noted during Trump's campaign by the (South African-born, US-based) comedian Trevor Noah, who joked that the vulgar mogul was obviously presidential-but presidential for Africa, where he would be a fine companion to posturing strongmen like Muammar Gaddafi, Robert Mugabe, Idi Amin, and, yes, Jacob Zuma. Such observations return us, sobered, to the foundational premise for Safundi, namely that South Africa and the US can generate comparative insights, even though the mirrorthe familiar image that Ndebele redeploys-is often a distorted one. Comparative projects always negotiate tensions between sameness and difference, generalities and particularities; they proceed despite fundamental incommensurabilities and "develop within histories of hierarchical relation"-as contributors to this collection do not fail to point out. 2 Still, the scholarly project of thinking about the US and South Africa together, initiated by George M. Fredrickson's White Supremacy: A Comparative Study of American and South African History (1981), continues to generate compelling work. 3 Recent contributions include monographs (like Erica Still's

show abstract

Locations of Comparison

Cited by 4 publications

References 6 publications

Monolingualizing the multilingual Ottoman novel: Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s Felatun Bey ile Rakım Efendi

Monolingualizing the multilingual Ottoman novel: Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s Felatun Bey ile Rakım Efendi

The History of Comparison Matters

Introduction: comparative thinking in an age of corruption

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About