Comparative Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies

Preface

vii Preface This collection of papers is the second volume of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies, a new series of books published by Purdue University Press. The new series follows the aims and objectives of and work published in CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal, also published by Purdue at . The journal’s aims and objectives include the publishing of new work in comparative literature, cultural studies, and comparative cultural studies, the maintenance of an online Library with extensive and selected bibliographies, an international directory of scholars in the field, pertinent web links, and the operation of a moderated listserv for news and announcements. Both the journal and the new series are built on principal notions of comparative literature and cultural studies and where work with contextual approaches is encouraged. CLCWeb is a peer-reviewed quarterly published online only; however, Purdue publishes an annual of the journal with selected articles of the year’s work. The present volume is the first annual of the journal, a hard-copy edition of the journal published in the Purdue series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. The theme of the journal’s first annual in hard copy is Comparative Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies, selected from articles published in volumes 1999 and 2000 of the journal. The selection of papers for the present volume is with focus on theories and histories of comparative literature and the emerging field of comparative cultural studies ; presented in alphabetical order by authors, the papers are as follows. Kwaku Asante-Darko, in “Language and Culture in African Postcolonial Literature,” offers both conceptual basis and empirical evidence in support of the fact that critical issues concerning protest, authenticity, and hybridity in viii Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek African post-colonial literature have often been heavily laden with nationalist and leftist ideological encumbrances, which tended to advocate the rejection of Western standards of aesthetics. One of the literary ramifications of nationalist /anti-colonial mobilization was a racially based aesthetics which saw even the new product of literary hybridity born of cultural exchange as a mark of Western imposition and servile imitation by Africa in their literary endeavor. Asante-Darko exposes the hollowness of the hostile racial militancy of the works of Frantz Fanon and Ngugi by assessing their salient arguments from the point of view of the themes, the methodology, the language choice, and the stratagem of African literary discourse. He explains that all these aspects contain a duality born of the reconcilability of African literary aspirations on one-hand, and Western standards on the other. Asante-Darko demonstrates that the African literary and cultural past cannot be reconstituted but only reclaimed and that the linguistic, thematic, and aesthetic hybridity this presupposes must be embraced to give African literature the freedom it needs to contribute its full quota to the universality of literature. Hendrik Birus, in “The Goethean Concept of World Literature and Comparative Literature,” presents a new reading and understanding of Goethe’s famous dictum: “National literature does not mean much at present , it is time for the era of world literature and everybody must endeavor to accelerate this epoch” (Eckermann 198, 31 January 1827). According to Birus, this dictum is not to be taken at face value today and argues that Goethe’s concept of world literature ought to be understood in the sense that today it is not the replacement of national literatures by world literature we encounter; rather, it is the rapid blossoming of a multitude of European and non-European literatures and the simultaneous emergence of a world literature—mostly in English translations—as two aspects of one and the same process. The understanding of this dialectic, Birus argues, ought to be one of the main targets of comparative literature today. Amiya Dev, in “Comparative Literature in India,” 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...