Author：Karen Thornber

Abstract: Ours is a world of pandemics. Intersecting with and frequently exacerbated by responses to the coronavirus pandemic have been numerous pandemics with much longer histories, including pandemics of other communicable diseases, as well as pandemics of non-communicable diseases, mental illness, addiction, systemic racism, social injustice, gender-based violence, and misinformation, all of which have been deeply intertwined with environmental degradation and climate disruption. In our era of multiple intensifying pandemics, not to mention often anemic humanities enrollments, it is crucial that comparative literature go more global: engaging more deeply with a broader array of texts,...

Vol. 6 No. 1 June 2022      Time：2022-06-20 View Citation

Author：Theo D'haen

Abstract: From different perspectives, Shu-mei Shih, Rey Chow, and Revathi Krishnaswamy have accused Comparative Literature of being inherently Eurocentric in that the comparative study of non-European/Western literatures continues being steered by European/Western paradigms. In what follows I briefly outline their respective positions, and argue that over the past few decades at least some attempts have been made to move beyond Eurocentrism.

Vol. 6 No. 1 June 2022      Time：2022-06-20 View Citation

Author：Mads Rosendahl Thomsen

Abstract: World literature studies has to navigate between idealism and realism: the idealism of creating a broader and more inclusive understanding of the world’s literature, and the realism of how literature circulates and has to overcome many thresholds to change canonization. The increased recognition of how translation is a necessary part of world literature has done much to lay the grounds for an increased engagement with literature in non-European languages. I propose that an understanding of key patterns in the international circulation of literary works can provide a better critique of the imbalances of canonization, and the inspiration for the inclusion of neglected works in the future.

Vol. 6 No. 1 June 2022      Time：2022-06-20 View Citation

Author：Thomas O. Beebee

Abstract: While the study of world literature is often seen as escaping the boundaries of eurocentrism—albeit with the need for constant revision and self-critique—a truer overcoming would involve another sort of anthologization, namely, of world theory and criticism. World literature should go beyond being a reified collection of translated texts, to become an exploration and comparison of the different ways of thinking about literature and aesthetics in different parts of the world. Barbara Cassin's Vocabulaire Européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles provides a possible model in this regard....

Vol. 6 No. 1 June 2022      Time：2022-06-20 View Citation

Author：Yan Liu

Abstract: Critical terms in Chinese poetics pose difficulties to those who expect clear definitions and scopes of reference since many such words are not "properly" defined in their first appearances. To make matters worse, they gain new meanings when they are used and re-used in different contexts. By tracing the origins and the further resonances of feng in Chinese poetics, this essay demonstrates the discrepancy between the varied meanings of the word in Chinese and those in the English translations. This essay argues that one should not use their preconceptions to judge other literatures and cultures but to respect this "otherness" by probing the other intellectual traditions to find out their particularities.

Vol. 6 No. 1 June 2022      Time：2022-06-20 View Citation

Author：Martin Powers

Abstract: Within the vast body of scholarship on the Enlightenment, only a small portion addresses the role of China in the debates of that period. Among those, scarcely any concerns the relationship between China and Rousseau's thought. Yet the connections are many, and deep. This essay surveys a body of Chinese political theory available to Rousseau, then compares Rousseau's understanding of sovereignty, the "people," popular will, public opinion, and the authority of office, with comparable terms present in the Chinese theory available to him. The aim of this exercise is not so much to establish influence, though that can be difficult to deny. Primarily, the essay attempts to show that Rousseau's system generates contradictions in part because he attempts to combine parliamentary procedure with the conception of sovereignty and the popular will found in his Chinese sources.

Vol. 6 No. 1 June 2022      Time：2022-06-20 View Citation

Author：Zhang Longxi

Abstract: The writing of history has encountered many challenges in twenty-century theoretical discussions, and postmodernism and deconstruction in particular have made literary history all but impossible in the West. Because world literature today remains the canonical works of Western literature, while much of the non-Western literatures and even “minor” European literatures remain unknown and untranslated, a world history of literature is absolutely necessary to introduce the yet-unknown world literature to a global readership beyond the original linguistic and cultural milieux of those unknown literary works. Translating those yet-unknown works into English for a wider circulation is the first step to make world literature go beyond Eurocentrism, and writing a world history of literature will help us know the basic situation of the world’s literary traditions from a truly global perspective.

Vol. 6 No. 1 June 2022      Time：2022-06-20 View Citation

Author：

Abstract: Vol.6 No.1 2022 Notes on Contributors

Vol. 6 No. 1 June 2022      Time：2022-06-20 View Citation

Author：João Cezar de Castro Rocha, Ran Wei

Abstract: A specter is haunting Latin American Studies: exceptionalism. In other words, the highly un-anthropological (if you can forgive us for inventing such an awkward word) assumption, according to which Latin American cultures defy interpreters, especially if they are foreigners, given their complexity beyond any possible translation into any system of references other than th...

Vol. 5 No. 2 Dec. 2021      Time：2022-01-10 View Citation

Author：William Egginton

Abstract: In the mid-seventies, Paraguay was two decades into what would ultimately be the second longest dictatorship in its history, second only to the reign of its “founding father,” Doctor José Rodríguez Gaspar de Francia. The regime of Alfredo Stroessner justified its existence and articulated its continued role in Paraguayan politics on a genealogy of national identity that had its supposed roots in the Francia government, Francia’s political ideology and, in fact, in the historical person of Francia himself. In this essay I show how the great Paraguayan writer Augusto Roa Bastos’s 1974 novel, I, the Supreme, takes aim at the “kernel of the real” in the Stroessner regime’s political genealogy, using fiction to make evident its anamorphic manipulation of national and nationalist identity. By taking at its word the regime’s historical discourse, I, the Supreme reveals the psychotic logic animating its version of political power.

Vol. 5 No. 2 Dec. 2021      Time：2022-01-10 View Citation