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E-book Literature and the Making of the World : Cosmopolitan Texts, Vernacular Practices

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Penilaian

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World literature is not an object, it’s a problem.’ This was Franco Moretti (2000: 55), famously, in 2000. But what is the problem of world literature today, two decades later? In broad strokes, the disciplinary challenge would seem to be the same: to devise methods and reading practices that offer alternatives to entrenched national and civilizational frameworks. Scholarship within world literature shares a fundamentally comparative urge, whereby different instantiations of literature are considered in conjunction. But ‘conjunction’ is in fact the nub of the problem, as this is supposedly not just an older version of comparative literature under a new name. Instead, conjunction can be conceptualized through a wide number of temporalities, scales, geographies, generic constellations, languages and ideological perspectives – all of them susceptible to historical change.Moretti proposed a world-systemic model, inspired by Immanuel Wallerstein, which has since developed into a strong but by no means exclusive or uncontested methodological premise of world literature. Deep-time approaches focusing on imperial formations, translation-based approaches, Alexander Beecroft’s (2015) ecologies of literature – all offer distinct ways of investigating conjunction and connection. What they do not always offer is mutual compatibility. Instead, the most productive way to delineate world literature today might be to consider it as a set of procedures and methods rather than a coherent body of theory. As a scholarly field, it provides in the first instance a space of conversation and intellectual exchange across specializations that may also enable reconfigured empirical and critical investigations within those specializations.This give-and-take among different disciplinary locations has shaped the work leading up to the four volumes presented here. Emerging from a long-running project based in Sweden, and involving researchers from comparative literature, anthropology, intellectual history and a range of language departments, the basic methodological wager of our work differs from much else that has been published in the field of world literature. Avoiding hard-wired systemic, deterministic or ‘global’ claims, what we call the cosmopolitan–vernacular dynamic (which can also be read as vernacular–cosmopolitan) offers itself not as a distinct theory, but as a methodological starting point – akin to an Ansatzpunkt in Erich Auerbach’s (1952) sense – from which to explore the resonances and connections between widely diverse literary texts and cultures.To explain the motivations behind such a methodology, we need to make a detour into the current state of world literature studies. Undergirding this sprawling field is the political and ethical intuition that literary knowledge in our crisis-ridden, globalized and racialized world – even in its (anticipated) post-Covid-19 shape – requires new modes of scholarly attention. To speak from our own contemporary vantage point in Scandinavia, it is clear that the joint impact of the cultural Anglosphere, migration from Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, the cultural policies of the EU and the ubiquitous presence of digital media not only weaken the explanatory value of the nation state and the national language as the privileged loci of the production and reading of literature in Sweden today, but also invite reconsiderations of an earlier literary history in the region. Similar shifts in the production of literature and in the literary imagination can be registered elsewhere across the world, shifts that prompt us to rethink how we read and contextualize literature. The road to such a revised conception of literary studies leads, however, to a garden of forking paths. This is one important lesson to be learned from the twenty-odd years since Moretti’s lively provocation in the year 2000.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

801 HEL l

Penerbit

USA : Bloomsbury Academic., 2021

Deskripsi Fisik

353 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781501374173

Klasifikasi

801

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Philosophy and Theory of Literatures

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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