On Comparatism in the Colony: Archives, Methods, and the Project of<i>Weltliteratur</i>

Bhattacharya, Baidik

doi:10.1086/685608

Cited by 16 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 7 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…With its connections to comparative philology and the German romantic aesthetics of Herder, Goethe, Schlegel and Schleiermacher, among others (for more on this see Noyes 2015, Bhattacharya 2016, Ahmed 2018, post-eighteenth-century vernacularization is a deeply ambivalent affair: its value-coding can be programmatically positive yet grounded in untenable essentializations of race and ethnicity. A particularly effective challenge to this legacy has been the interrogation of language boundaries and 'artefactualized' languages (Blommaert 2010: 4), along with the critique of the 'monolingual paradigm' (Yildiz 2012; see also , Heller-Roazen 2005, Sakai 2009, Minaard and Dembeck 2014, Stockhammer 2015, Gramling 2016, Tidigs and Huss 2017.…”

Section: List Of Figures VIImentioning

confidence: 99%

Literature and the Making of the World

2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Section: List Of Figures VIImentioning

confidence: 99%

Literature and the Making of the World

2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…(Damrosch, 2003: 1)It is not so much the relations between Western Europe and the rest of the globe that are relevant here, but the way in which, at dispersed locations and for different reasons, writers and artists ask themselves ‘what is a world literature?’ and answer the question differently. In recent studies as different as Baidik Bhattacharya’s account of ‘comparatism in the colony’ and the work of the Linguistic Survey of India, B. Venkat Mani’s Recoding World Literature , Sarah Brouillette’s work on UNESCO, and Duncan Yoon’s account of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau, we see how a diversity of answers might be produced (Bhattacharya, 2016: 677–711; Mani, 2016; Brouillette, 2014: 33–54; Zecchini, 2019: 82–106; Yoon, 2015: 233–52). Yoon quotes the statement made by members of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference at Tashkent in Uzbekistan in 1958:We the writers of Africa and Asia, have come together here in Tashkent and have discussed issues of importance to us, writers, and to world literature .…”

Section: Whose Literature?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Which world, whose literature?

Chaudhuri

2021

Thesis Eleven

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This essay argues that the ‘thought figure’ of world literature has been under incalculable strain from its inception, given the diversity of linguistic and cultural contexts within which it must be understood. After a brief introductory discussion of Rabindranath Tagore’s talk on world literature (1907), the essay goes on to connect world literature debates with those in global modernism, especially modernism in the colony. Looking at the networks of modernism, and the role of little magazines in India, particularly Bengal, in creating a sense of world literature through reviews and translations, it stresses the importance of location, language, and perspective in the wake of decolonization. However, in the present time of ecological and planetary crisis, with a global upsurge of xenophobia, insularity, and ethnic, racist, or communal violence, the notion of a world, or of a world literature, is hard to sustain.

show abstract

“…With its connections to comparative philology and the German romantic aesthetics of Herder, Goethe, Schlegel and Schleiermacher, among others (for more on this see Noyes 2015, Bhattacharya 2016, Mufti 2016, Ahmed 2018), post-eighteenth-century vernacularization is a deeply ambivalent affair: its value-coding can be programmatically positive yet grounded in untenable essentializations of race and ethnicity. A particularly effective challenge to this legacy has been the interrogation of language boundaries and "artefactualized" languages (Blommaert 2010: 4), along with the critique of the "monolingual paradigm" (Yildiz 2012; see also Bauman and Briggs 2003, Heller-Roazen 2005, Sakai 2009, Minaard and Dembeck 2014, Stockhammer 2015, Gramling 2016, Tidigs and Huss 2017, Helgesson and Kullberg 2018.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Series introduction

2022

Vernaculars in an Age of World Literatures

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

World literature is not an object, it's a problem. " This was Franco Moretti (2000Moretti ( : 55), famously, in 2000 But what is the problem of world literature today, two decades later? In broad strokes, the disciplinary challenge would seem to be the same: to devise methods and reading practices that offer alternatives to entrenched national and civilizational frameworks. Scholarship within world literature shares a fundamentally comparative urge, whereby different instantiations of literature are considered in conjunction. But "conjunction" is in fact the nub of the problem, as this is supposedly not just an older version of comparative literature under a new name. Instead, conjunction can be conceptualized through a wide number of temporalities, scales, geographies, generic constellations, languages and ideological perspectives-all of them susceptible to historical change.Moretti proposed a world-systemic model, inspired by Immanuel Wallerstein, which has since developed into a strong but by no means exclusive or uncontested methodological premise of world literature. Deep-time approaches focusing on imperial formations, translation-based approaches, Alexander Beecroft's (2015) ecologies of literature-all offer distinct ways of investigating conjunction and connection. What they do not always offer is mutual compatibility. Instead, the most productive way to delineate world literature today might be to consider it as a set of procedures and methods rather than a coherent body of theory. As a scholarly field, it provides in the first instance a space of conversation and intellectual exchange across specializations that may also enable reconfigured empirical and critical investigations within those specializations.This give-and-take among different disciplinary locations has shaped the work leading up to the four volumes presented here. Emerging from a long-running project based in Sweden, and involving researchers from comparative literature, anthropology, intellectual history and a range of language departments, the basic

show abstract

On Comparatism in the Colony: Archives, Methods, and the Project ofWeltliteratur

Cited by 16 publications

References 7 publications

Literature and the Making of the World

Literature and the Making of the World

Which world, whose literature?

Series introduction

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About