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Zusatztext What does it mean to study literature in our time of crisis? What could or should it mean? A shared commitment to critical self-awareness and reflection on the grounds and aims of literary study unifies the diversity of perspectives represented here! which take a distinctive approach to famous (or infamous) disputes regarding literature's ambitions. The contested boundaries among literature! religion! and ethics serve as the starting point; the essays navigate these boundaries! and the tensions between assumptions of universality! on the one hand! and the rights of the marginalized and the irreducibly particular! on the other. The journeys through this fraught terrain draw our attention back to what has always been at stake: the complexity of human needs in times of cultural crisis! and literature's potential role in their redemption. Informationen zum Autor Kitty Millet is Professor of Comparative Jewish Literatures and Holocaust Studies, as well as Chair of the Department of Jewish Studies, at San Francisco State University, USA. She also is the editor of the Bloomsbury Series, Comparative Jewish Literatures . She is also chairperson of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) research committee on Religion, Ethics, and Literature. Her book, The Victims of Slavery, Colonization, and the Holocaust: A Comparative History of Persecution (Bloomsbury, 2017), analyzes the constitutive side of victimization within three groups, slaves in the Americas, Africans under German colonization, and death camp survivors of the Reinhard camps. Dorothy Figueira is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia, USA. She is the author of 3 books, including Otherwise Occupied: Theories and Pedagogies of Alterity (SUNY Press, 2008), and the editor of 3 books. She is past President of the International Comparative Literature Association (2005-6), former Editor of The Comparatist (2007-2011), and current Editor of the journal, Recherche littéraire/ Literary Research. Focuses on how literature, ethics, and religion overlap in subjective experience, producing new ethical positions from within a range of global texts. Zusammenfassung This state of the art collection offers fresh perspectives on why intersections between literature! religion! and ethics can address the fault lines of modernity and are not necessarily the cause of modernity's 'faults.' From a diverse cohort of scholars from around the world! with appointments in comparative literature and other disciplines! the essays suggest that the imagined hegemony of a Judeo-Christian Western project is neither exclusively true nor productive. However! the essays also suggest that elements of the Western religious traditions are important vectors for understanding modernity's complicated relationship to the past. Inhaltsverzeichnis AcknowledgmentsIntroduction Kitty Millet (San Francisco State University, USA) I. The Transcendental and Transcendence 1. Rewriting Grand Narratives as a Supratemporal Mystical Competition: Illustrations from Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Goethe, Proust, Mann, and Joyce Gerald Gillespie (Stanford University, USA) 2. "Clearer Awareness of the … Crisis": Erich Auerbach’s Radical Relativism and the "Rich Tensions" of the Historical Imperative Geoffrey Green (San Francisco State University, USA) 3. Secularism and Post-Secularism Wlad Godzich (University of California at Santa Cruz, USA) II. Literature 4. Redemptive Readings between Maurice Blanchot and Franz Rosenzweig Shawna Vesco (University of California at Santa Cruz, USA) 5. “So What If You Are Big?”: Divisive Identities and the Ethics of Pluralism in Medieval Indian Literatures of Devotion Ipshita Chanda (Jadavpur University, India, and Georgetown University, USA) 6. Alterity and...
