Other People's Books

Da, Nan Z.

doi:10.1353/nlh.2020.0031

Cited by 2 publications

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“…Larger scales, however, mean increased adoption of social scientific concepts (e.g., variation and spread, spatial distribution patterns, models of dispersal) and consequently, in Da's estimation, a severe narrowing of "the meaning of contingency down to either completely isolated circumstance or combinatorial chance." 103 The result of this narrowing is a reductive sociology of reading that overlooks the open-endedness of encounters with books and all the ways that their "imprint on a life...does not translate into external signs." Applied to world literature, this sociology can slide into a "cultural essentialism" that treats the bibliographic currents unique to non-Anglo-European readerships as having total explanatory power over their reading lives-a discrete branch in the river leading to an alternative universe all the more exotic for being the one not taken at the centers of global cultural hegemony.…”

Section: Foregone Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Chance Encounters: World Literature Between the Unexpected and the Probable

Long¹

2021

Journal of Cultural Analytics

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This essay brings probabilistic reasoning into concerted dialogue with book-historical and sociological approaches to world literature. Using extensive bibliographic data about literary translations into Japanese during the modern era, it develops a series of case studies at interrelated scales-the literary anthology, world library collections, and individual readers-to reason about the likelihood of certain authors or works being plucked from the swirling currents of the global traffic in books. At each scale, I consider how such data might inform the interpretations we give to the choice of one author over another in a given context. Woven into these case studies is an extended reflection on the history of probabilistic reasoning from the late-eighteenth century to the late-twentieth. What, this essay ultimately asks, might literary historians gain from taking this history seriously in our own appeals to chance as a form of historical explanation?

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Section: Foregone Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Chance Encounters: World Literature Between the Unexpected and the Probable

Long¹

2021

Journal of Cultural Analytics

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“English like Hindi”: Chetan Bhagat, Popular Fiction, and India’s Voice

Srinivasan

2024

Comparative Literature

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This essay examines the rise of Chetan Bhagat, an icon of the New India “after English” who ironically writes his best-selling popular fictions in English. When Bhagat’s demotic English travels outside India, it is taken up by readers and critics whose responses to his work reveal the persistence of the fantasy of accessing India’s unmediated voice. The essay reads the extant Anglo-American critical discourse on Bhagat, with special attention to the postcritical and post-postcolonial turns in contemporary literary scholarship. It argues that Bhagat’s anointment as a global Anglophone literary icon with purchase on the “real” India lays bare a problem endemic to English literary studies—namely, the problem of enacting comparative literary analysis within English itself. It also raises a number of questions at the intersections of world literature and the global Anglophone, which are rival strategies for the teaching of non-Western literatures in English in US academe. In its concluding sections, the essay considers whether it is possible to teach Bhagat’s “English like Hindi” without allowing it to masquerade as a conduit to a supposedly authentic Indian vernacular sphere.

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Other People's Books

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Chance Encounters: World Literature Between the Unexpected and the Probable

Chance Encounters: World Literature Between the Unexpected and the Probable

“English like Hindi”: Chetan Bhagat, Popular Fiction, and India’s Voice

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