Volume 10, dedicated to 'Comedy, Irony, Parody', celebrates the first decade of Comparative Criticism in a light-hearted vein. Michael Silk opens with a wide-ranging essay asserting the primacy of comedy and declaring its independence of tragedy. T. L. S. Sprigge explores philosophers who dared to write on laughter: Schopenhauer and Bergson. Bernard Harrison looks at the twentieth century's favourite comic novel, Tristram Shandy, in the light of Locke's views on 'the particular'. Peter Brand pursues the theatrical arts of disguises, masking, and gender-swapping through Renaissance Europe, from Ariosto to Shakespeare. Jane H. M. Taylor traces the danse macabre in modern 'black humour'. Christine Brooke-Rose, distinguished novelist and critic, reads from and comments on her own witty fictions. Michael Wood describes how Lolita outwitted her seducer.
Nordic Literature: A comparative history is a multi-volume comparative analysis of the literature of the Nordic region. Bringing together the literature of Finland, continental Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Sápmi), and the insular region (Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands), each volume of this three-volume project adopts a new frame through which one can recognize and analyze significant clusters of literary practice. This first volume, Spatial nodes, devotes its attention to the changing literary figurations of space by Nordic writers from medieval to contemporary times. Organized around the depiction of various “scapes” and spatial practices at home and abroad, this approach to Nordic literature stretches existing notions of temporally linear, nationally centered literary history and allows questions of internal regional similarities and differences to emerge more strongly. The productive historical contingency of the “North” as a literary space becomes clear in this close analysis of its literary texts and practices.
An extended volume of New Literary History that considers the practice of comparison in literary studies and other disciplines within the humanities. Writing and teaching across cultures and disciplines makes the act of comparison inevitable. Comparative theory and methods of comparative literature and cultural anthropology have permeated the humanities as they engage more centrally with the cultural flows and circulation of past and present globalization. How do scholars make ethically and politically responsible comparisons without assuming that their own values and norms are the standard by which other cultures should be measured? Comparison expands upon a special issue of the journal New Literary History, which analyzed theories and methodologies of comparison. Six new essays from senior scholars of transnational and postcolonial studies complement the original ten pieces. The work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, R. Radhakrishnan, Bruce Robbins, Ania Loomba, Haun Saussy, Linda Gordon, Walter D. Mignolo, Shu-mei Shih, and Pheng Cheah are included with contributions by anthropologists Caroline B. Brettell and Richard Handler. Historical periods discussed range from the early modern to the contemporary and geographical regions that encompass the globe. Ultimately, Comparison argues for the importance of greater self-reflexivity about the politics and methods of comparison in teaching and in research.
"Comparison underlies all reading. Readers compare words to words, and books to all the other books which they have read. Some books, however, demand a particular comparative effort - for example, novels which contain parallel plot lines. In this ambitious and important study Catherine Brown compares Daniel Deronda with Anna Karenina and Women in Love in order to answer the following questions: why does one protagonist in each novel fail whilst another succeeds? Can their failure and success be understood on the same terms? How do the novels' uses of comparison compare to each other? How relevant is George Eliot's influence on Lev Tolstoi, and Tolstoi's on D. H. Lawrence? Does Tolstoi being a Russian make this a 'comparative' literary study? And what does the 'comparative' in 'comparative literature' actually mean? Criticism is combined with metacriticism, to explore how novels and critics compare."
A history of German film dealing with individual films as works of art has long been needed. Existing histories tend to treat cinema as an economic rather than an aesthetic phenomenon; earlier surveys that do engage with individual films do not include films of recent decades. This book treats representative films from the beginnings of German film to the present. Providing historical context through an introduction and interchapters preceding the treatments of each era's films, the volume is suitable for semester- or year-long survey courses and for anyone with an interest in German cinema. The films: The Student of Prague - The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - The Last Laugh - Metropolis - The Blue Angel - M - Triumph of the Will - The Great Love - The Murderers Are among Us - Sun Seekers - Trace of Stones - The Legend of Paul and Paula - Solo Sunny - The Bridge - Young T rless - Aguirre, The Wrath of God - Germany in Autumn - The Marriage of Maria Braun - The Tin Drum - Marianne and Juliane - Wings of Desire - Maybe, Maybe Not - Rossini - Run Lola Run - Good Bye Lenin - Head On - The Lives of Others Stephen Brockmann is Professor of German at Carnegie Mellon University and past President of the German Studies Assocation.
Futures of Comparative Literature is a cutting edge report on the state of the discipline in Comparative Literature. Offering a broad spectrum of viewpoints from all career stages, a variety of different institutions, and many language backgrounds, this collection is fully global and diverse. The book includes previously unpublished interviews with key figures in the discipline as well as a range of different essays – short pieces on key topics and longer, in-depth pieces. It is divided into seven sections: Futures of Comparative Literature; Theories, Histories, Methods; Worlds; Areas and Regions; Languages, Vernaculars, Translations; Media; Beyond the Human; and contains over 50 essays on topics such as: Queer Reading; Human Rights; Fundamentalism; Untranslatability; Big Data; Environmental Humanities. It also includes current facts and figures from the American Comparative Literature Association as well as a very useful general introduction, situating and introducing the material. Curated by an expert editorial team, this book captures what is at stake in the study of Comparative Literature today.
Comparative Literature is both the past and the future of literary studies. Its history is intimately linked to the political upheavals of modernity: from colonial empire-building in the nineteenth century, via the Jewish diaspora of the twentieth century, to the postcolonial culture wars of the twenty-first century, attempts at 'comparison' have defined the international agenda of literature. But what is comparative literature? Ambitious readers looking to stretch themselves are usually intrigued by the concept, but uncertain of its implications. And rightly so, in many ways: even the professionals cannot agree on a single term, calling it comparative in English, compared in French, and comparing in German. The very term itself, when approached comparatively, opens up a Pandora's box of cultural differences. Yet this, in a nutshell, is the whole point of comparative literature. To look at literature comparatively is to realize just how much can be learned by looking over the horizon of one's own culture; it is to discover not only more about other literatures, but also about one's own; and it is to participate in the great utopian dream of understanding the way nations and languages interact. In an age that is paradoxically defined by migration and border crossing on the one hand, and by a retreat into monolingualism and monoculturalism on the other, the cross-cultural agenda of comparative literature has become increasingly central to the future of the Humanities. We are all, in fact, comparatists, constantly making connections across languages, cultures, and genres as we read. The question is whether we realise it. This Very Short Introduction tells the story of Comparative Literature as an agent of international relations, from the point of view both of scholarship and of cultural history more generally. Outlining the complex history and competing theories of comparative literature, Ben Hutchinson offers an accessible means of entry into a notoriously slippery subject, and shows how comparative literature can be like a Rorschach test, where people see in it what they want to see. Ultimately, Hutchinson places comparative literature at the very heart of literary criticism, for as George Steiner once noted, 'to read is to compare'. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
This book serves several purposes, all very much needed in today's embattled situation of the humanities and the study of literature. First, in Chapter One, the author proposes that the discipline of Comparative Literature is a most advantageous approach for the study of literature and culture as it is a priori a discipline of cross-disciplinarity and of international dimensions. After a "Manifesto" for a New Comparative Literature, he proceeds to offer several related theoretical frameworks as a composite method for the study of literature and culture he designates and explicates as the "systemic and empirical approach." Following the introduction of the proposed New Comparative Literature, the author applies his method to a wide variety of literary and cultural areas of inquiry such as "Literature and Cultural Participation" where he discusses several aspects of reading and readership (Chapter Two), "Comparative Literature as/and Interdisciplinarity" (Chapter Three) where he deals with theory and application for film and literature and medicine and literature, "Cultures, Peripheralities, and Comparative Literature" (Chapter Four) where he proposes a theoretical designation he terms "inbetween peripherality" for the study of East Central European literatures and cultures as well as ethnic minority writing, "Women's Literature and Men Writing about Women"(Chapter Five) where he analyses texts written by women and texts about women written by men in the theoretical context of Ethical Constructivism, "The Study of Translation and Comparative Literature" (Chapter Six) where after a theoretical introduction he presents a new version of Anton Popovic's dictionary for literary translation as a taxonomy for the study of translation, and "The Study of Literature and the Electronic Age" (Chapter Seven), where he discusses the impact of new technologies on the study of literature and culture. The analyses in their various applications of the proposed New Comparative Literature involve modern and contemporary authors and their works such as Dorothy Richardson, Margit Kaffka, Mircea Cartarescu, Robert Musil, Alfred Döblin, Hermann Hesse, Péter Esterházy, Dezsö Kosztolányi, Michael Ondaatje, Endre Kukorelly, Else Seel, and others.
Comparison is an indispensable intellectual operation that plays a crucial role in the formation of knowledge. Yet comparison often leads us to forego attention to nuance, detail, and context, perhaps leaving us bereft of an ethical obligation to take things correspondingly as they are. Examining the practice of comparison across the study of history, language, religion, and culture, distinguished scholar of religion Bruce Lincoln argues in Apples and Oranges for a comparatism of a more modest sort. Lincoln presents critiques of recent attempts at grand comparison, and enlists numerous theoretical examples of how a more modest, cautious, and discriminating form of comparison might work and what it can accomplish. He does this through studies of shamans, werewolves, human sacrifices, apocalyptic prophecies, sacred kings, and surveys of materials as diverse and wide-ranging as Beowulf, Herodotus’s account of the Scythians, the Native American Ghost Dance, and the Spanish Civil War. Ultimately, Lincoln argues that concentrating one's focus on a relatively small number of items that the researcher can compare closely, offering equal attention to relations of similarity and difference, not only grants dignity to all parties considered, it yields more reliable and more interesting—if less grandiose—results. Giving equal attention to the social, historical, and political contexts and subtexts of religious and literary texts also allows scholars not just to assess their content, but also to understand the forces, problems, and circumstances that motivated and shaped them.
