The Old/New Question of Comparison in Literary Studies: A Post-European Perspective

Chow, Rey

doi:10.1353/elh.2004.0022

Cited by 43 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…For one, Rey Chow (2004) finds fault with two of Comparative Literature's premises when she argues that multilingualism has become a prerequisite for the discipline of comparative literature, while it need not be. Drawing from Foucault's assertions in The Order of Things, that modern literary language has become self-referential, Chow implies that comparative literature's insistence on multilingualism is simply its effort to distinguish itself, from national literature, for example.…”

Section: Comparative Literature As Eros: Its Love For the "Other"mentioning

confidence: 99%

Dis-contenting Khayyam in the Context of Comparative Literature: An Invitation to Translating Rubaiyat with a Focal Shift from Content to Form

Yazdi

2019

IJCLTS

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Since its conception in France in 1877, Comparative Literature, always subject to a critique of Eurocentrism, has been in a state of perpetual crisis. In “The Old/New Question of Comparison in Literary Studies: A Post-European Perspective” (2004), Ray Chow argued for a Post-European perspective in which comparatists begin with the home culture and look outwards to the European cultures, contrary to the dominant approach of doing just otherwise. Missing in Chow’s argument is the position of translation in this post-European perspective. In the 14 years between 2004 and 2018, the grandiose claims of comparative literature have been problematized and addressed; the lay of the land, however, remains predominantly Eurocentric, as it still focuses on content disproportionately. In this paper, through a study of English translations of Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, and taking Chow’s argument further, I argue that with its commitment to transfer the form of a text as much as the content, translation studies can further help comparative literature to distance itself from Europe. To exemplify the implication of this, I suggest that a translation of Khayyam’s Rubaiyat from Farsi to English would be more faithful to the original if its translations were to focus on the poem’s form rather than the content. I argue that translating with a focus on form would foreignize Khayyam’s poetry, hence an act of resistance against cultural hegemony.

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Section: Comparative Literature As Eros: Its Love For the "Other"mentioning

confidence: 99%

Dis-contenting Khayyam in the Context of Comparative Literature: An Invitation to Translating Rubaiyat with a Focal Shift from Content to Form

Yazdi

2019

IJCLTS

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“…Over the last three or four decades, this has first manifested itself in the rise of postcolonialism, tracing relations of power between European colonial empires and their colonies as projected in literature and the study of the latter. Notwithstanding its oppositional intentions, or perhaps precisely because of them, postcolonialism for better or worse remains what Rey Chow (2004) has called a "Europe and . .…”

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confidence: 99%

Re-Orient?

D’haen

2019

Comparative Literature: East & West

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The economic rise, first of Japan and Korea, then, even stronger, China, and in its wake perhaps soon much of South and South-East Asia, has brought about a major geopolitical recalibration from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from Europe, or what we are used to call the "Western world," to Asia. In his 1998 book ReOrient, Andre Gunder Frank argued that this in fact merely marks a return to the pre-1800 situation, when China, India and places in-between, likewise were at the center of the world economy. Consequently, he asks Western scholars to look at the world with different eyes than their customarily Euro-or Western-centric ones. In many ways, this chimes with other such appeals launched since the 1970s, also in literary studies. Initially, this call was loudest from the side of postcolonial studies. Since the turn of the millennium world literature studies has joined the chorus. In the present essay, I consider what the implications of such a shift might be for the discipline of Comparative Literature. I will be particularly concerned with the role China and Chinese literature play in this.

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“…48 And that politics of comparison persists into the era of decolonization when, as Chow says (after Partha Chaterjee), "a third-world nation cannot be/become itself without being derivative of that epistemological frame against which it is struggling; and yet, try as it may, it cannot free itself of that frame." 49 Thus, the necessity of comparison (the imperative to compare) is also part of the history and practice of literary decolonization, when a "wretched" national literature might be validated in comparison to a paradigmatic European national literature. This is certainly true in the early days of postcolonial independence when, to paraphrase Fanon, it was necessary to be national (by comparison) in order to be international.…”

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confidence: 99%

Locations of Comparison

Slaughter¹

2018

Postcolon. Lit. inq

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What difference does it make who compares? From what location? What kinds of comparison are possible, inevitable, even necessary at particular historical moments? What are the extra-literary conditions of literary comparison? How and when does literature qualify for comparison? Revisiting Harry Levin’s seminal essay, “Comparing the Literature” (1968), this paper—originally presented as the presidential address at the 2017 American Comparative Literature Association conference—considers the historical conditions and locational contingencies that motivate acts of literary comparison. Looking at how specific comparisons of African literature to European literature have been mobilized at different times and locations, I argue that comparative literature’s de facto immigration policies (its [in]hospitality to other worlds of literature) may be read in the histories of comparisons that have been done before—comparisons once regarded as improper, impertinent, or insurgent that are now commonly practiced to give old Eurocentric fields new life, new prestige, and new authority.

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The Old/New Question of Comparison in Literary Studies: A Post-European Perspective

Cited by 43 publications

References 22 publications

Dis-contenting Khayyam in the Context of Comparative Literature: An Invitation to Translating Rubaiyat with a Focal Shift from Content to Form

Dis-contenting Khayyam in the Context of Comparative Literature: An Invitation to Translating Rubaiyat with a Focal Shift from Content to Form

Re-Orient?

Locations of Comparison

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