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It is a collection of papers that addresses a central question about the discipline: if Eurocentrism has been integral to Comparative Literature, and if the world we live in is undergoing radical changes, then how can, or should, the discipline change to overcome this problem to accommodate non-Western traditions?
List of contents
List of ContributorsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Comparative Literature Beyond Eurocentrism?
Part I: Institutions and Comparative Literature1. Comparative Mobilities
2.
Comparativism or What We Talk about When We Talk about Comparing
3. Provincializing the Buffered Self: Deep Eurocentrism and World Literature
4. World Literature and Global Anglophone Comparativism
Part II: Translation as Comparison, Comparison as Translation5. No Good Paradigms! Untranslatability as Critical Praxis
6. Comparative Criticism Beyond Eurocentrism: In Search of the Untranslatables of Literary Theory
7. Critical Terms and Their Resonances in Translation: The Case of "
feng"
8. Global Translation Zones: New Paradigms for Decentering Literary and Translation History
9. Comparative Literature and Machine Translation
10. Reversing Linguistic Dependence: How Translated and Untranslated Chinese Texts shaped Rousseau's Populism
Part III: Comparisons, Literatures: In Plural11. Global Comparative Literature in a World of Pandemics
12. Contrapunctal Comparison
13. Towards a Non-Occidentocentric World Literature: Lessons from Soviet Russia
14. World Literature and the Modernity Question
15. Comparing the "West" and "Rest": Beyond Eurocentrism?
16. Centers, Peripheries, and Overlapping Peripheries of Different Centers: Variations on "Word Literature" Models
17. Contactless Comparison
18. Comparing Literary Colonialisms: Located Multilingual Perspectives Beyond Europe
19. North-South Comparatism: New Worldism, Theories of Lack and Acclimatization
20. Comparing the Literatures of the Global South
Part IV: Worlds and Literary Historiographies21. Overcoming Thresholds and the Mysterious Travels of Literary Influence: Why National Canons Cannot be Projected onto the Big Canvas
22. Chinese Antecedents of Life Writing and the Western Genre
23. Vernacular Comparatism: The Secret History of Comparative Literature in Colonial India,
c. 1800-54
24. Environmental Comparative Literature
25. Forming a Significant Geography Across Modernist Poetry in Arabic and Persian
26. Diasporic Difference: The Global Jewish Journey of
Robinson Crusoe27. Afro-Arab Circulations
28. The Challenge of Writing a World Literary History
Index
About the author
Zhang Longxi holds an MA in English from Peking University (1981) and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard (1989). He has taught at Peking, Harvard, the University of California, Riverside, and the City University of Hong Kong, and is currently Xiaoxiang Chair Professor of Comparative Literature at Hunan Normal University and Li De Chair Professor at the Yenching Academy of Peking University. He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities in 2009 and a foreign member of Academia Europaea in 2013. He was President of the International Comparative Literature Association from 2016-2019. He is an Editor-in-Chief of the
Journal of World Literature and an Advisory Editor of
New Literary History. He has published more than 20 books and numerous articles in both English and Chinese in East-West comparative studies. His books in English include
The Tao and the Logos: Literary Hermeneutics, East and West (1992);
Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (1998);
Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (2005);
Unexpected Affinities: Reading across Cultures (2007);
From Comparison to World Literature (2015), and more recently
A History of Chinese Literature (2023) and
World Literature as Discovery: Expanding the World Literary Canon (2024).
Omid Azadibougar was previously Professor of Comparative Literature at Hunan Normal University. He is the author of
The Persian Novel: Ideology, Fiction and Form in the Periphery (2014),
World Literature and Hedayat's Poetics of Modernity (2020), a co-editor of
Persian Literature as World Literature (2021), and one of the founding editors and an editorial board member of
Journal of World Literature.
Summary
It is a collection of papers that addresses a central question about the discipline: if Eurocentrism has been integral to Comparative Literature, and if the world we live in is undergoing radical changes, then how can, or should, the discipline change to overcome this problem to accommodate non-Western traditions?
