18 articles in this issue
Jonathan Locke Hart
"The contributors to this special issue demonstrate innovative ways to explore comparative literature and world literature, which we have examined under the rubric, “Literary Texts and Contexts: Comparing the World and the World of Comparison.” This is no... see more
J. Hillis Miller
"In this essay, I want, by way of the word 'tears' in a passage in one canonical work in nineteenth-century Romantic English literature, Keats’s 'Ode to a Nightingale,' to see what can be said about reading that word in the context of world literature as ... see more
Haun Saussy
"Current world-literature discussions are located far from Hugo’s place on the spectrum, and far from Baudelaire’s and Flaubert’s too. In their attention to measurable proxies of success and influence, they waver between the 'American' and 'rosy' alternat... see more
Jean Bessière
"can we bring to any large unification of literatures the same kind of understanding brought to bear on the acts and works of individuals - writers, readers - or limited writers’ or readers’ groups, or broader ensembles - nations and, eventually, regions?... see more
Dorothy Figueira
"With comparative literature becoming American world literature or globalized cultural studies, comparatists need to ask themselves whether they want to remain in such a dysfunctional relationship. It is one thing to go along with comparative literature’s... see more
Theo D'haen
"I will focus on Edward Said’s handling of the work of the British geographer Halford Mackinder...in Culture and Imperialism.... In 1904, Mackinder published an influential paper in The Geographical Journal...in which he labelled all of European and Asian... see more
Ranjan Ghosh
"My coinage of the term 'aesthetic imaginary' follows the line of a few thinkers in a field that I would like to call 'imaginary studies': Cornelius Castoriadis’s social imaginary, Miche`le Le Dœuff’s philosophical imaginary, and Marguerite La Caze’s anal... see more
Galin Tihanov
"How we actually understand 'world literature,' as an attestable reality of texts or as a prism - one might even be tempted to add a 'unit' - of comparison, in other words, a 'mode of reading,' is not a metaphysical issue. It has very real implications fo... see more
"To choose among national, comparative, and world literatures is a false choice. They are complementary. We cannot deny that we have nations today, partly created from internal colonization, and that colonization went hand in hand with external colonizati... see more
Ming Xie
"World poetics is about how different versions of what poetry is, or has been, lead to new visions of what poetry can be. World poetry draws upon particular poetries without idealizing any particular poetic language or tradition. To be a world poet, or to... see more
I-Chun Wang
"Throughout literary history, war has been a recurrent theme in life writing. This article discusses life writing as an important aspect of comparative literature or world literature, and focuses on three early modern women’s geographical experiences and ... see more
Q.S. Tong
"This essay proposes to revisit Erich Auerbach’s seminal essay 'Philology and Weltliteratur,' published in 1952, and rethink the idea and practice of world literature as a historical process, with reference to cross-cultural appropriations of Shakespeare ... see more
Tom Cohen
"In global weirding, “nature” or the “natural” has become, not “unearthly,” but all too earthly. The occluded term at the peripheries names an unseeable and untrackable backloop that feeds off its acceleration in advance to the cognitive reactions or defe... see more
Shang Wu
"This paper examines the British film adaptation and the Japanese TV adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, asking the following questions: what changes are made in different adaptations? How do these changes relate to the concepts of resis... see more
Hao Li
"Critics have read Dorian Gray in the context of late nineteenth-century theories of the material nature of the mind, especially the empirical and positivist approaches that dominated late Victorian thought. In this paper, I shall argue for the importance... see more
Ruth Y.Y. Hung
"This paper examines the poetry of the Marxist poet and critic Hu Feng (1902-85) within the context of the modernizing transformations that took place in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), with a particular focus on Hu’s claims of the political effects... see more
Rong Guo
"The relationship between history and literature has long been a key element in literary studies: Marxism, old historicism, and new historicism all relate text to context, and comparative literature as a discipline has stressed literary history and textua... see more
King-Kok Cheung
"Three writers connected across the Atlantic and Pacific produced cogent critiques of their native countries in part as a result of their immersion in other cultures, which provided them with critical distance from which to observe domestic mores and poli... see more