Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline' by Todd Presner

This Blog-post is a response to the thinking activity task on 'Comparative Studies' given by our professor Dr.Dilip Barad Sir. To know more about Comparative Literary Studies, CLICK HERE.

Article 1. 'Why Comparative Indian Literature?' by Sisir Kumar Das

Article 2. Comparative Literature in India by Amiya Dev.

Article 3. 'An Overview of its History; by Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta

Article 4. What is Comparative Literature Today? by Susan Bassnett

Article 5. Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline' by Todd Presner

Article 6. Translation and Literary History: An Indian View by Ganesh Devy 

Article. 7 On Translating a Tamil Poem' by A.K. Ramanujan

Article. 8 History in Translation by Tejaswni Niranjana

Article 9. Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry by E.V.Ramkrishnan

The task assigned by our professor is to read the article and give an Introductory presentation on a particular topic with our group members. We studying the paper, 'Comparative Literature and Translation Studies in which the fourth article Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline' by Todd Presner presented by Vachchhalata Joshi and Hirva Pandya on 13 December 2022. 

Article 5. 'Comparative Literature and Translation Studies in which the fourth article Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline' by Todd Presner

Introduction/Key Points: 

After five hundred years of print and the massive transformations in society and culture that it unleashed, we are in the midst of another watershed moment in human history that is on par with the invention of the printing press or perhaps the discovery of the New World. With the invention of the printing press, communication, literacy, and the state of knowledge completely changed, providing the conditions of possibility for the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the age of Humanism, and the rise of mass media.

These technologies of networking and connection do not necessarily bring about the ever-greater liberation of humankind, as Nicholas Negroponte once asserted in his wildly optimistic book Being Digital (Negroponte, 1995 ), for they always have an underbelly: mobile phones, social networking technologies, and perhaps even the hundred-dollar computer, will not only be used to enhance education, spread democracy, and enable global communication but will likely be used to perpetrate violence and even orchestrate genocide in much the same way that the radio and the railway did in the last century. 

Or as Paul Gilroy analyzed in his study of “ the fatal junction of the concept of nationality with the concept of culture ” along the “ Black Atlantic, ” voyages of discovery, enlightenment, and progress also meant, at every moment, voyages of conquest, enslavement, and destruction. Indeed, this is why any discussion of technology cannot be separated from a discussion about formations of power and instrumentalized authority. 

As Walter Benjamin did in 'The Arcades Project (1928–40; 1999), it is necessary, as Toddy believes, to interrogate both the media and methodologies for the study of literature, culture and society.

While electronic literature offers a significant and multivalent possibility for exploring the future of Comparative Literature, I want to examine the field a bit more broadly by situating the transformation of the literary vis - à - vis a set of issues that have emerged over the past decade in the “ Digital Humanities.

The Humanities, include history and art history, literary and cultural studies, and the humanistic social sciences, such as anthropology, archaeology, and information studies. In fact, these issues, brought to the foreground in the digital world, necessitate a fundamental rethinking of how knowledge gets created, what knowledge looks (or sounds, or feels, or tastes) like, who gets to create knowledge, when it is “ done ” or published, how it gets authorized and disseminated, and how it involves and is made accessible to a significantly broader (and potentially global) audience.

The Humanities of the twenty-first century, as Prenser argues here, have the potential to generate, legitimate, and disseminate knowledge in radically new ways, on a scale never before realized, involving technologies and communities that rarely (if ever) were engaged in a global knowledge - creation enterprise. The purpose of this chapter is to provide some preliminary signposts for figuring out what this means for the Humanities generally and for Comparative Literature more specifically.

Further Presner and Jeffrey Schnapp articulated in various instantiations of the “ Digital Humanities Manifesto, ” it is essential that humanists assert and insert themselves into the twenty-first century cultural wars, which are largely being defined, fought, and won by corporate interests.

1. Why, for example, were humanists, foundations, and universities conspicuously–even scandalously –silent when Google won its book search lawsuit and, effectively, won the right to transfer the copyright of orphaned books to itself?
2. Why were they silent when the likes of Sony and Disney essentially engineered the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, radically restricting intellectual property, copyright, and sharing?
3. If new technologies are dominated and controlled by corporate and entertainment interests, how will our cultural legacy be rendered in new media formats? By whom and for whom?

These are questions that Humanists must urgently ask and answer we must actively engage with, design, create, critique, and finally hack the environments and technologies that facilitate this research, render this world as a world (and make it variously porous), and produce knowledge about who we are, where we live, and what that means.

Moretti has already indicated one possible way of doing this in his articulation of “ distant reading, ” a specific form of analysis that focuses on larger units and fewer elements in order to reveal “ their overall interconnection [through] shapes, relations, structures.

Three futures for “ Comparative Literature ” in the Digital Age:

Comparative Media Studies:

Digital media are always already hypermedia and hypertextual. Both of the foregoing terms were originally coined in 1965 by the visionary media theorist, Theodor Nelson, in his early articulations of the conceptual infrastructure for the World Wide Web.

For Nelson, a hypertext is a:

Body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper [ ... ] Such a system could grow indefinitely, gradually including more and more of the world's written knowledge.

Hypertextual or hypermedia documents deploy a multiplicity of media forms in aggregate systems that allow for annotation, indefinite growth, mutability, and non-linear navigation. comparative studies investigates all media as information and knowledge systems that are bound up with histories of power, institutions, and governing and regulatory bodies which legitimate and authorize certain utterances, while screening out and dismissing others.

Comparative Media Studies also implies that the output or scholarly “ work ” is not uni - medial and might not even be textual. It draws attention to the design and interrelationship of every unit of the argument, whether a page, a folio, a database field, XML metadata, a map, a film still, or something else. Comparative Media Studies enables us to return to some of the most fundamental questions of our field with new urgency: Who is an author? What is work? What constitutes a text, particularly in an environment in which any text is readerly and writerly by potentially anyone?

Comparative Data Studies

Through the work of Lev Manovich and Noah Wardrip - Fruin, the field of “ cultural analytics ” has emerged over the past five years to bring the tools of high-end computational analysis and data visualization to dissect large-scale cultural datasets.

Comparative Data Studies allows us to use the computational tools of cultural analytics to enhance literary scholarship precisely by creating models, visualizations, maps, and semantic webs of data that are simply too large to read or comprehend using unaided human faculties. performing “ close ” and “ distant ” analyses of data, Comparative Data Studies also radically broadens the canon of objects and cultural material.

As Jerome McGann argues with elegant analysis of “radiant textuality, ” the differences between the codex and the electronic versions of the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, illustrate that the electronic OED is “ a metabook [that has] consumed everything that the code OED provides and reorganized it at a higher level ” adding value through new indexing and search mechanisms, hyperlinks, editing and annotation tools, and even reading strategies.

Comparative Authorship and Platform studies

While the radically “ democratizing ” claims of the web and information technologies should certainly be critically interrogated. We no longer just “ browse ” and passively consume predigested content but are actively engaged in the production, annotation, and evaluation of digital media and software thanks to the open - source movement.

The real danger is not unauthorized file sharing but “ failed sharing ” due to enclosures and

strictures placed upon the world of the creative commons.The knowledge platforms cannot be simply “ handed off ” to the technicians, publishers, and librarians, as if the curation of knowledge – the physical and virtual arrangement of information as an argument through multimedial constellations – is somehow not the domain of literary scholars. While preserving the authority of peer review, the publication platform foregrounds collaborative authorship and public feedback through threaded discussion forums and annotation features.

This emphasis on openness and collaboration is, of course, nowhere more apparent than with Wikipedia, a revolutionary knowledge production and editing platform. While it is easy to dismiss Wikipedia as amateurish and unreliable or to scoff at its lack of scholarly rigor.

Presner believes-

Wikipedia represents a truly innovative, global, multilingual, collaborative knowledge - generating community and platform for authoring, editing, distributing, and versioning knowledge.

To date, it has more than three million content pages, more than three hundred million edits, over ten million registered users, and articles in forty - seven languages.

Conclusion/Concluding remark:

Presner concludes by suggesting that it is actually a model for rethinking collaborative research and the dissemination of knowledge in the Humanities and at institutions of higher learning, which are all - too - often fixated on individual training, discrete disciplines, and isolated achievement and accomplishment.

At this moment in its short life, Wikipedia is already the most comprehensive, representative, and pervasive participatory platform for knowledge production ever created by humankind. In my opinion, that is worth some pause and reflection, perhaps even by scholars in a future disciplinary incarnation of Comparative Literature.

The “data” of Comparative Data Studies is constantly expanding in terms of volume, data type, production and reception platform, and analytic strategy.

Here is the video presentation and the Presentation is embedded:

Comparative_Literature_in_the_Age_of_Digital_Humanities.pptx from VachchhalataJoshi

What is Comparative Literature Today? by Susan Bassnett

This Blog-post is a response to the thinking activity task on 'Comparative Studies' given by our professor Dr.Dilip Barad Sir. To know more about Comparative Literary Studies, CLICK HERE.

Article 1 'Why Comparative Indian Literature?' by Sisir Kumar Das

Article 2. Comparative Literature in India by Amiya Dev.

Article 3. 'An Overview of its History; by Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta

Article 4. What is Comparative Literature Today? by Susan Bassnett

Article 5. Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline' by Todd Presner

Article 6. Translation and Literary History: An Indian View by Ganesh Devy 

Article. 7 On Translating a Tamil Poem' by A.K. Ramanujan

Article. 8 History in Translation by Tejaswni Niranjana

Article 9. Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry by E.V.Ramkrishnan

The task assigned by our professor is to read the article and give an Introductory presentation on a particular topic with our group members. We studying the paper, 'Comparative Literature and Translation Studies in which the third article 'What is Comparative Literature Today?' by Susan Bassnett presented by Janvi Nakum and Nidhi Dave on 12 December 2022. 

Article 3. What is Comparative Literature Today? by Susan Bassnett:

Introduction/Key Points:

The article starts with an explanation of the term 'Comparative Literature' that it involves the study of texts across cultures, that it is interdisciplinary, and that it is concerned with patterns of connection in literature across both time and space. Most people do not start with comparative literature, they end up with it in some way or other, traveling towards it from different points of departure. Sometimes the journey begins with a desire to move beyond the boundaries of a single subject area that might appear to be too constraining, at other times a reader may be impelled to follow up on what appear to be similarities between texts or authors from different cultural contexts. 

Matthew Arnold in his Inaugural Lecture at Oxford in 1857 when he said: 

Everywhere there is connection, everywhere there is illustration. No single event, no single literature is adequately comprehended except in relation to other events, to other literatures.

Russian writers (in trans- lation, of course), compare how James Joyce borrowed from and loaned to Italo Svevo.

Critics at the end of the twentieth century, in the age of post-modernism, still wrestle with the same questions that were posed more than a century ago:

1. What is the object of study in comparative literature?
2. How can comparison be the object of anything?
3. If individual literatures have a canon, what might a comparative canon be? 
4. How does the comparatist select what to compare?
5. Is comparative literature a discipline? Or is it simply a field of study? 

As early as 1903, Benedetto Croce argued that comparative literature was a non-subject, contemptuously dismissing the suggestion that it might be seen as a separate discipline. He discussed the definition of comparative literature as the exploration of 'the vicissitudes, alterations, developments and reciprocal differences' of themes and literary ideas across literatures, and concluded that 'there is no study more arid than researches of this sort'.

Croce maintained, is to be classified 'in category of erudition purely and simply'. Instead of something called comparative literature, he suggested that the proper object of study should be literary history: 

the comparative history of literature is history understood in its true sense as a complete explanation of the literary work, en- compassed in all its relationships, disposed in the composite whole of universal literary history (where else could it ever be placed?), seen in those connections and preparations that are its raison d'être.s 

Croce claimed he could not distinguish between literary history pure and simple and comparative literary history. The term, 'comparative literature', he maintained, had no substance to it. 

Charles Mills Gayley, one of the founders of North American comparative literature, proclaimed in the same year as Croce's attack that the working premise of the student of comparative literature was: 

literature as a distinct and integral medium of thought, a common institutional expression of humanity; differentiated, to be sure, by the social conditions of the individual, by racial, historical, cultural and linguistic influences, opportunities, and restrictions, but, irrespective of age or guise, prompted by the common needs and aspirations of man, sprung from common faculties, psychological and physiological, and obeying common laws of material and mode, of the individual and social humanity." 

Yet even as that process was underway in the West, comparative literature began to gain ground in the rest of the world. New programmes in comparative literature began to emerge in China, in Taiwan, in Japan and other Asian countries, based, however, not on any ideal of universalism but on the very aspect of literary study that many western comparatists had sought to deny: the specificity of national literatures. As Swapan Majumdar puts it: 

it is because of this predilection for National Literature - much deplored by the Anglo-American critics as a methodology - that Comparative Literature has struck roots in the Third World nations and in India in particular.

Ganesh Devy goes further, and suggests that comparative literature in India is directly linked to the rise of modern Indian nationalism, noting that comparative literature has been 'used to assert the national cultural identity' There is no sense here of national literature and comparative literature being incompatible. 

Homi Bhabha sums up the new emphasis in an essay discussing the ambivalence of post- colonial culture, suggesting that: 

Instead of cross-referencing there is an effective,productive cross- cutting across sites of social significance, that erases the dialectical, disciplinary sense of 'Cultural' reference and relevance.

 James Snead, in an essay attacking Hegel, points out that: 

The outstanding fact of late twentieth-century European culture is its ongoing reconciliation with black culture. The mystery may be that it took so long to discern the elements of black culture already there in latent form, and to realize that the separation between the cultures was perhaps all along not one of nature, but one of force.

What we have today, then, is a very varied picture of comparative literary studies that changes according to where it is taking place. African, Indian, Caribbean critics have challenged the refusal of a great deal of Western literary criticism to accept the implications of 

their literary and cultural policy.of force.

Ganesh Devy's argument that comparative literature in India coincides with the rise of modern Indian nationalism is important, because it serves to remind us of the origins of the term 'Comparative Literature' in Europe, a term that first appeared in an age of national struggles, when new boundaries were being erected and the whole question of national culture and national identity was under discussion throughout Europe and the expanding United States of America.

What distinguishes translation studies from translation as traditionally thought of, is its derivation from the polysystems theory developed by Itamar Evan- Zohar and later by Gideon Toury in Tel Aviv.19 Translation studies will be discussed in more detail later in this book, but essentially the key to its rapid expansion and successful entry into literary studies lies in its emphasis on literature as a differentiated and dynamic 'conglomerate of systems', characterized by internal oppositions and dynamic shifts. This notion of literature as a polysystem sees individual literary systems as part of a multi-faceted whole, thereby changing the terms of the debates about 'majority' and 'minority' cultures, about 'great' literatures and 'marginal' literatures.

Conclusion/Concluding remark:

Comparative literature has always claimed translation as a sub-category, but as translation studies establishes itself firmly as a subject based in inter-cultural study and offering a methodology of some rigour, both in terms of theoretical and descriptive work, so comparative literature appears less like a discipline and more like a branch of something else. Seen in this way, the problem of the crisis could then be put into perspective, and the long, unresolved debate on whether comparative literature is or is not a discipline in its own right could finally and definitely be shelved. 

Here is the video presentation and the Presentation is embedded:

Introduction: what is comparative literature Today ? from JanviNakum

To read the next blog on Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline' by Todd Presner, CLICK HERE. 

'Why Comparative Indian Literature?' by Sisir Kumar Das

This Blog-post is a response to the thinking activity task on 'Comparative Studies' given by our professor Dr.Dilip Barad Sir. To know more about Comparative Literary Studies, CLICK HERE.

Article 1 'Why Comparative Indian Literature?' by Sisir Kumar Das

Article 2 Comparative Literature in India by Amiya Dev.

Article 3. 'An Overview of its History; by Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta

Article 4. What is Comparative Literature Today? by Susan Bassnett

Article 5. Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline' by Todd Presner

Article 6. Translation and Literary History: An Indian View by Ganesh Devy 

Article. 7 On Translating a Tamil Poem' by A.K. Ramanujan

Article. 8 History in Translation by Tejaswni Niranjana

Article 9. Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry by E.V.Ramkrishnan

The task assigned by our professor is to read the article and give an Introductory presentation on a particular topic with our group members. I, Divya Sheta, and Aamena Rangwala presented an article on 'Why Comparative Indian Literature?' by Sisir Kumar Das on 5 December 2022.

What is Comparative Literature:

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, 

Comparative Literature is the study of the interrelationship of the literature of two or more national cultures usually of differing languages and especially of the influences of one upon the other

sometimes: the informal study of literary works in translation

According to my point of view, Comparative Literature is not the study of any comparison between two texts, characters, themes, settings, and authors, but it is the study of two different literature and their culture, the people and their tradition, their environment through theoretical views. And for that, we should learn about the term of 'World Literature. 

The term 'Weltliterature' was coined by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Sisir Kumar Das mentioned in the article, 'Why Comparative Indian Literature? that, 

"Gothe did not tell us how to hasten the approach of world literature nor did he say what exactly it meant. But we assume that by Weltliterature he meant the memorable works in all language od world, rather than the assemblage of all literatures." 

Sisir Kumar Das gave the definition of Comparative Literature,

Comparative literature emerged as a new discipline to counteract the notion of the autonomy of national literatures. Its ultimate goal, though it is doubtful whether that can ever be achieved, is to visualize the total literary activities of man as a single universe.

Here is the group presentation Youtube Video and Presentation is embedded. 

Why Comparative Indian Literature from DivyaSheta

Introductory presentation on this article: 

Second Article: Comparative Literature in India by Amiya Dev.

Introductory Presentation Video on this article. Presented by Mayuri Pandya and Divya Paramar on 6 December 2022.

Introduction/Key Points:

In his article, "Comparative Literature in India," Amiya Dev bases his discussion on the fact that India has many languages and literatures thus representing an a priori situation and conditions of diversity. He, therefore, argues that to speak of an Indian literature in the singular is problematic. Nonetheless, Dev also observes that to speak of Indian literature in the plural is equally problematic. Such a characterization, he urges, either overlooks or obscures manifest interrelations and affinities. His article compares the unity and the diversity thesis and identifies the relationship between Indian commonality and differences as the prime site of comparative literature in India. He surveys the current scholarly and intellectual positions on unity and diversity and looks into the post-structuralist doubt of homogenization of differences in the name of unity. Dev also examines the search for common denominators and a possible pattern of togetherness and Dev underlines location and located inter-Indian reception as an aspect of interliterariness. It is t/here Dev perceives Indian literature, that is, not as a fixed or determinate entity but as an ongoing and inter literary process: Indian language and literature ever in the re/making.

Key Points:

In his article, Amiya Dev discusses the apriori location of comparative literature with regard to aspects of diversity and unity in India. His proposal involves a particular view of the discipline of comparative literature because he argues that in the case of India the study of literature should involve the notion of the inter-literary process and a dialectical view of literary interaction. 

While we have a plurality of so-called major literature in India, we are confronted by a particular problem: Is Indian Literature, in the singular, a valid category, or are we rather speak of Indian literature in the plural?

The single-focus perspective is a result of both a colonial and a post-colonial perspective, the latter found in the motto of the Sahitya Akademi: "Indian literature is one though written in many languages"(Radhakrishnan)

In his opinion, an argument of unity in diversity is suspect, for they encroach upon the individualities of the diverse literatures. In other words, a cultural relativist analogy is implied here, the difference is underlined and corroborated by the fact that both writers and readers of particular and individual literatures are overwhelmingly concerned with their own literature and own literature only. It is from this perspective that to the Akademi's motto, "Indian literature is one though written in many languages" the retort is " Indian literature is one because it is written in many languages." 

Gurbhagat Singh has been discussing the notion of "differential multilogue" (see Singh). He does not accept the idea of Indian literature as such but opts for the designation of literatures produced in India. For Singh, comparative literature is thus an exercise in differential multilogue. His insistence on the plurality of logoi is particularly interesting because it takes us beyond the notion of dialogue, a notion that comparative literature is still confined to. Singh's proposal of differential multilogue as a program will perhaps enable us to understand Indian diversity without sacrificing the individualities of the particulars.

However, poststructuralism understands difference as a notion of inclusion, that is, mutuality. Thus, it cannot accept the single-focus category "Indian" without deconstructing its accompanying politics. In other words, if the deconstruction of politics involves the weeding out of things excessively local or peripheral, it is appropriate because all value-loading is suspect. If, on the other hand, "Indian" is a mere description, a general signifier, then there is no need for the act of deconstruction.

Jaidev's notion of an Indian sensus communis is not that routine Indianness which we often encounter from our cultural ambassadors or in the West, that is, those instances of "national" and racial image formations that suggest homogeneity and result in cultural stereotyping. The concept of an Indian sensus communist in the context of Singh's differential multilogue or Jaidev's differential approach brings me to the question of situs and theory. That is, the "site" or "location" of the theory and of the theorist are important factors here.

Jaidev suggests in turn are rooted in a situs of the premodern age of Indian literatures (that is, in periods prior to the advent of print). Where Jaidev's structure is applicable, instead, is our contemporary literatures in India because it is here that the danger of a oneness construction -- the process of nation-state construction -- looms.

Aijaz Ahmad's In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. Ahmad describes the construct of a "syndicated" Indian literature that suggests an aggregate and unsatisfactory categorization of Indian literature (see 243-85). Ahmad also rules out the often argued analogy of Indian literature with that of European literature by arguing that the notion of "European literature" is at best an umbrella designation and at worst a pedagogical imposition while Indian literature is classifiable and categorizable.

In Ahmad's argumentation, the problem is that in the "Indian" archive of literature, Indianness ultimately proves limited when compared with the differential litereture comprised in each of the twenty-two literatures recognized by the Sahitya Akademi. 

An "Indian" archive of literature as represented by an "English" archive -- while non-hegemonious on the one hand by removal from a differential archive but hegemonizing by a latent colonial attitude on the other -- also reflects the official language policy of the government: English, while not included in the Indian Constitution, is still recognized as a lingua franca of government, education, etc. For example, until recently the government sponsored the National Book Trust, an entity entrusted with the task of inter-Indian translation by a process of a first translation into English followed by translation from that into the other languages.

V.K. Gokak and Sujit Mukherjee who were speaking of an Indo-English corpus of literature that was created out of English translations of major texts from major Indian languages. 

Ahmad's concern is with the hegemony of English, although he does not suggest its abolition in a way which would be close to Ngugi's arguments. On the other hand, Gokak, Mukherjee, and Motilal Jotwani -- who was a committee member for drafting the above circular -- suggested to implement English as a function, owing to the ever-growing corpus of translations from the various Indian literatures into English, thus making this new corpus of Indo-English literature available to all.

Majumdar suggests that Indian literature is neither "one" nor "many" but rather a systemic whole where many sub-systems interact towards one in a continuous and never-ending dialectic.

However, the underlying and most important finding is a pattern of commonality in nineteenth-century Indian literatures. Das's work on the literatures of the nineteenth century in India does not designate this Indian literature a category by itself. Rather, the work suggests a rationale for the proposed research, the objective being to establish whether a pattern can be found through the ages. One age's pattern may not be the same as another age's and this obviously preempts any given unity of Indian literature. Thus, Das's method and results to date show that Indian literature is neither a unity nor is it a total differential.

Das's work is similar to K.M. George's two-volume Comparative Indian Literature of 1984-85 that was researched and published under the auspices of Kerala Sahitya Akademi. 

Poetry, for instance, was discussed in terms of "traditional" and "modern" but as if traditional was exclusively Indian and modern the result of a Western impact.

The Gujarati poet Umashankar Joshi -- a supporter of the unity approach -- was the first president of the Indian National Comparative Literature Association, while the Kannada writer U.R. Anantha Murthy is the current president of the Comparative Literature Association of India in addition to being the president of Sahitya Akademi.

Conclusion/Concluding remark:

In the concluding part of the article, Amiya Dev assures the readers, scholars and the students that, the problematics of unity and diversity are not unique to India. He discussed that if, for an instance, Canadian diversity, it would have been from the outside, that is. from and Indian situs. Comparative Literature has taught us not to take comparison literally and it also taught us that theory formation in literary history is not universally tenable. He suggesting that we should first look at ourselves and try to understand our own situations as thoroughly as possible. Let us first give full shape to our own comparative literatures and then we will formulate a comparative literature of diversity in general.

Third article summarised in other blogpost. To visit, CLICK HERE. 

'An Overview of its History; by Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta

This Blog-post is a response to the thinking activity task on 'Comparative Studies' given by our professor Dr.Dilip Barad Sir. To know more about Comparative Literary Studies, CLICK HERE.

Article 1 'Why Comparative Indian Literature?' by Sisir Kumar Das

Article 2 Comparative Literature in India by Amiya Dev.

Article 3. 'An Overview of its History; by Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta

Article 4. What is Comparative Literature Today? by Susan Bassnett

Article 5. Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline' by Todd Presner

Article 6. Translation and Literary History: An Indian View by Ganesh Devy 

Article. 7 On Translating a Tamil Poem' by A.K. Ramanujan

Article. 8 History in Translation by Tejaswni Niranjana

Article 9. Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry by E.V.Ramkrishnan

The task assigned by our professor is to read the article and give an Introductory presentation on a particular topic with our group members. I, Divya Sheta, and Aamena Rangwala presented an article on 'Why Comparative Indian Literature?' by Sisir Kumar Das. Here is the presentation and presentation video.

Why Comparative Indian Literature ? from DivyaSheta

Presentation video: 

Third Article:

Comparative Literature in India: An Overview of its History by Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta. Presented by Jheel Barad and Dhruvuta Dhameliya on 7 December 2022. Here is the presentation video.

Abstract: 

The essay gives an overview of the trajectory of Comparative Literature in India, focusing primarily on the department at Jadavpur University, where it began, and to some extent the department of Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies in the University of Delhi, where it later had a new be- ginning in its engagement with Indian literatures. The department at Jadavpur began with the legacy of Rabindranath Tagore’s speech on World Literature and with a modern poet-translator as its founder. While British legacies in the study of literature were evident in the early years, there were also subtle efforts towards a decolonizing process and an overall attempt to enhance and nurture creativity. Gradually Indian literature began to receive prominence along with literatures from the Southern part of the globe. Paradigms of approaches in comparative literary studies also shifted from influence and analogy studies to cross-cultural literary relations, to the focus on reception and transformation. In the last few years Comparative Literature has taken on new perspectives, engaging with different ar- eas of culture and knowledge, particularly those related to marginalized spaces, along with the focus on recovering new areas of non-hierarchical literary relations.

Key Points:

The Beginnings:

The idea of world literature gained ground towards the end of the nineteenth century when in Bengal, for instance, translation activities began to be taken up on a large scale and poets talked of establishing relations with literatures of the world to promote. 

Satyendranath Dutta in 1904 stated, “relationships of joy”

The talk by Rabindranath Tagore entitled “Visvasahitya” (meaning “world literature”), given at the National Council of Education in 1907, served as a pre-text to the establishment of the department of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University in 1956, the same year in which the university started functioning. The National Council of Education was the parent body of the University and the Council was established by a group of intellectuals in order to bring about a system of education that would be indigenous, catering to the needs of the people and therefore different from the British system of education prevalent at the time.

Buddhadeva Bose, one of the prime architects of modern Bangla poetry, did not fully subscribe to the idealist visions of Tagore, for he believed it was necessary to break away from Tagore to be a part of the times, of modernity, but he too directly quoted from Rabindranath’s talk on “visvasahitya” while writing about the discipline, interpreting it more in the context of establishing connections, of ‘knowing’ literatures of the world.

Sudhindranath Dutta, also well-known for his translation of  Mallarmé and his erudition both in the Indian and the Western context, to teach in the department of Comparative Literature. Of the first five students in the department, three became well-known poets and the fourth a fine critic of Bengali poetry.

Despite certain impulses towards a decolonizing process, the colonial framework was also evident in the pedagogic structure, in the large space given to English literature and the organization of the courses around the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Romantic and the Modern period.

In the early stages it was a matter of recognizing new aesthetic systems, new visions of the sublime and new ethical imperatives – the Greek drama and the Indian nataka - and then it was a question of linking social and historical structures with aesthetics in order to reveal the dialectic between them.

Comparisons between the Iliad and the Ramayana, and between Sanskrit and Greek drama taking both Aristotle’s Poetics and Bharata’s Natyasastra into consideration formed the core of a section of the syllabus. While similarities were highlighted, differences led to the comprehension of core areas of cultural components. The project did not “bring into existence a new object/subject of knowledge” (Radhakrishnan)) as such, but by laying out the terms of comparison it did start a chain of reflections that would constitute the materiality of comparison, an ongoing series of engagements with the multi-dimensional reality of questions related to the self and the other, to arrive at networks of relationships on various levels. The Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, which went on to become an important journal in literary studies in the country, came out in 1961.

Indian Literature as Comparative Literature:

If comparative literature meant studying a text within a network of relations, where else could these relations be but in contiguous spaces where one also encountered shared histories with differences? The Modern Indian Languages department was established in 1962 at Delhi University. In 1974, the department of Modern Indian Languages started a post-MA course entitled “Comparative Indian Literature”. A national seminar on Comparative Literature was held at Delhi University organized by Nagendra, a writer-critic who taught in the Hindi department of Delhi University, and a volume entitled Comparative Literature was published in 1977.

Different canons had led to the questioning of universalist canons right from the beginning of comparative studies in India and now with the focus shifting to Indian literature, and in some instances to literatures from the Southern part of the globe, one moved further away from subscribing to a priori questions related to canon-formation.

Aijaz Ahmad, traced his voice so aptly that, “the dialectic of unity and difference – through systematic periodization of multiple linguistic overlaps, and by grounding that dialectic in the history of material productions, ideological struggles, competing conceptions of class and community and gender, elite offensives and popular resistances, overlaps of cultural vocabularies and performative genres, and histories of orality and writing and print”

Dealing with Indian literature from a comparative perspective also meant looking at the interactions taking place with literatures in regions beyond the geo-political boundaries of the nation-state.

Indian literatures were studied not as discrete units but in dialogue with one another, brought out by Sisir Kumar Das, a faculty member at the department of Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies, with support from other members of the department and the Sahitya Akademi.

T.S. Satyanath developed the theory of a scripto-centric, body-centric and phono-centric study of texts in the medieval period leading a number of researchers in the department to look for continuities and interventions in the tradition that would again lead to pluralist epistemologies in the study of Indian literature and culture.

It must be mentioned that situated in Delhi, the department has students from different parts of India including a large section from the North-east of India, that allow multiple points of entry into Indian literary systems along with diverse inter-cultural relations that communities in different parts of India have with different communities outside the borders of the nation state.

Centres of Comparative Literature Studies:

During the seventies and the eighties Comparative Literature was also practiced at a number of centres and departments in the South of India such as in Trivandrum, Madurai Kamaraj University, Bharatidasam University, Kottayam and Pondicherry.

Later in the eighties and the nineties other Centres were established in different parts of the country, either as independent bodies or within a single language department as in Punjabi University, Patiala, Dibrugarh University, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University, Sambalpur University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai. In 1986 a new full-fledged department of Comparative Literature was established at Veer Narmad South Gujarat University, Surat, where focus was on Indian literatures in Western India. Also in 1999 a department of Dravidian Comparative Literature and Philosophy was established in Dravidian University, Kuppam.

A core area of comparative literature studies and dissertations, particularly in the South, was taken up as a central area of research by the Visvanatha Kaviraja Institute of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics in Orissa. During this period two national associations of Comparative Literature came into being, one at Jadavpur called Indian Comparative Literature Association and the other in Delhi named Comparative Indian Literature Association. The two merged in 1992 and the Comparative Literature Association of India was formed, which today has more than a thousand members. 

Reconfiguration of areas of comparison: 

The eighties again saw changes and reconfigurations of areas of comparison at Jadavpur University. In the last years of the seventies, along with Indian literatures, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred

Years of Solitude became a part of the syllabus with a few other texts from Latin American Literatures and then Literatures from African countries were included. 

During the nineties, Area Studies papers on African, Latin American, Canadian literatures and literature of Bangladesh were introduced. 

Right from the beginning of the discipline in India, cross-cultural relations between Indian literatures and European and American literatures had been in focus.

Reception studies also pointed to historical realities determining conditions of acceptability and hence to complex configurations between literature and history.

Burns and Wordsworth were very popular

and it was felt that their romanticism was marked by an inner strength and serenity. The much talked about ‘angst’ of the romantic poet was viewed negatively.

Again while Shelley and Byron were often cri-

tiqued, the former for having introduced softness and sentimentality to Bengali poetry, they were also often

praised for upholding human rights and liberty in contrast to the imperialist poetry of Kipling. 

Contemporary political needs then were linked with literary values and this explained the contradictory tensions often found in the reception of romanticism in Bengal.

From reception studies the focus gradually turned to cross-cultural reception where reciprocity and exchange among cultures were studied. 

Reception studies both along vertical and horizontal lines formed the next major area of focus – one studied for instance, elements of ancient and medieval literature in modern texts and also inter and intraliterary relations foregrounding impact and responses.

With the introduction of the semester system the division was abandoned and cer-

tain other courses of a more general nature such as Cross-cultural Literary Transactions, where Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora, were taken up, or sometimes in courses entitled Literary Transactions one looked more precisely at the tradition of Reason and Rationalism in European and Indian literatures of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries.

Research directions: 

The department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Saurashtra University, Rajkot, took up the theme of Indian Renaissance and translated several Indian authors into English, studied early travelogues

from Western India to England and in general published collections of theoretical discourse from the nineteenth century

The Department of Assamese in Dibrugarh University received the grant and published

a number of books related to translations, collections of rare texts and documentation of folk forms. 

The department of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University also received assistance to pursue research in four major areas, East-West Literary Relations, Indian Literature, Translation Studies and Third World literature. Incidentally, the department had in Manabendra Bandyopadhyay, an avid translator who translated texts from many so-called “third-world countries”. 

The department at Jadavpur University was upgraded under the programme to the status of Centre of Advanced Studies in 2005, and research in Comparative Literature took a completely new turn.

A large focus, therefore, in this area was on

oral texts and research on methods of engaging with such texts. The project led to documentation and compilation of notes related to experiences of such studies and the collaboration with grassroots artists from rural areas.

A particularly important question for

Comparative Literature in this area could be linked with questions of Dalit literature’s relationship with mainstream writing, subverting, questioning and at the same time also inflecting other discourses while continuing to maintain its unique identity based to a large degree on performativity to draw the reader in as an ethical witness to the extreme limits of human suffering on which it is poised.

The second area in the Centre for Advanced Studies was the interface between literatures of India and its neighbouring countries.

Interface with Translation Studies and Cultural Studies : 

Almost all departments or centres of Comparative Literature today have courses on Translation or Translation Studies. Both are seen as integral to the study of Comparative Literature. Translation Studies cover different areas of interliterary studies. Histories of translation may be used to map literary relations while analysis of acts of translation leads to the understanding of important characteristics of both the source and the target literary and cultural systems. 

As for Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature had always engaged with different aspects of Cultural Studies, the most prominent being literature and its relation with the different arts. 

The M Phil course on the subject at Jadavpur University highlights changing marginalities, ‘sub-cultures’ and movements in relation to contemporary nationalisms and globalization, and also sexualities, gender and the politics of identity. 

In some of the new centres of Comparative Literature that came up in the new universities established in the last Five Year Plan, diaspora studies were taken up as an important area of engagement. It must be mentioned though that despite tendencies towards greater interdisciplinary approaches, literature

continues to occupy the central space in Comparative Literature and it is believed that intermedial studies may be integrated into the literary space.

Non-hierarchical connectivity: 

As in the case of humanities and literary studies, the discipline too is engaged with

issues that would lead to the enhancement of civilizational gestures, against forces that are divisive and that constantly reduce the potentials of human beings. 

Kumkum Sangari in a recent article called “co-construction”, a process anchored in “subtle and complex histories of translation, circulation and extraction” And comparatists work with the knowledge that a lot remains to be done and that the task of the construc-

tion of literary histories, in terms of literary relations among neighbouring regions, and of larger wholes, one of the primary tasks of Comparative Literature today has perhaps yet to begin. In all its endeavours, however, the primary aim of some of the early architects of the discipline to nurture and foster creativity

continues as a subterranean force. 

Concluding remarks: 

The article conclude with Non-hierarchical literary relation. However, the article gives a brief overview of the history of Comparative Literature in India and how it's start from specific university like the department t Jadavpur University and the department of Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies in the University of Delhi and grow with new techniques and it's theoretical as well practical approaches used by the scholars. 

I also wrote a blogpost on "Comparative Literature in India," Amiya Dev. CLIKE HERE and to visit.