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This volume is a Festschrift in honor of the scholar who has been a leader in the renewal of Comparative Literature as a major discipline. However, the papers in this collection are also a celebration of the discipline that has been the passion of Anna Balakian's life: the rigorous, scrupulous, uncompromisingly logical study of literary history across cultural barriers. This volume is also literary history as discourse because the contributors examine and question the enterprise itself. As a collection these essays comprise a searching assessment of the present state of the discipline.
List of contents
Contents: Theory of comparative literary history - Problems of historiography and questions of geneology and textuality.
About the author
The Editor: Mario J. Valdes, is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto and is currently the 101st President of the MLA. He has taught as a visiting professor in Comparative Literature at New York University during the last five years of Anna Balakian's mandate as chair (1982-1987). He was also her co-editor of the New York, proceedings of the ICLA Congress.
The Contributors: E. Behler, R. Bauer, A.O. Aldridge, E. Kushner, T.M. Greene, M.A. Caws, Z. Ben-Porat, M. Angenot, F.J. Warnke, A. Dutu, V. Nemoianu, M.A. Szegedy-Maszak, E. Caramaschi, R. Mortier, D. Javitch, G. Gillespie, P. D'Acierno, J.J.Wilhelm, J. Weisgerber, A.H. Greet, G. St. Pierre, A. Balakian
Report
"This collection of twenty-two essays, presented as a tribute to Anna Balakian's long career as a comparatist, achieves that goal and much more. For along with recalling her work on surrealism and symbolism, it also provides a stimulating survey of historical topics once treated under the headings of influence, cultural periodization, and interart analogies but now seen in terms of intertextuality, the mapping of discursive fields, or the interplay of verbal and visual signification. ...this book honors Balakian not by replicating her specific research interests but by emulating and communicating her enthusiasm for wide-ranging cultural inquiry." (John Burt Foster, Jr., The Comparatist)
