Hello Friends,
This blog is my response to the task assigned to us by our Prof. Dr. Dilip Sir in Paper Comparative Literature and Translation Studies. In this blog have a look at the overview of the articles. So, read understand and enjoy. Happy Learning!
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE IN INDIA: AN OVERVIEW OF ITS HISTORY
(Comparative Literature & World Literature)
BY SUBHA C. DASGUPTA, JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY
ABSTRACT
● An overview of the trajectory of Comparative Literature in India.
● Rabindranath Tagore’s speech on World Literature and with a modern poet-translator as its founder.
● While British legacies in the study of literature were evident in the early years, there were also subtle efforts towards a decolonizing process and an overall attempt to enhance and nurture creativity.
● Gradually Indian literature began to receive prominence.
● Paradigms of approaches in comparative literary studies also shifted from influence and analogy studies to cross-cultural literary relations, to focus on reception and transformation.
● The focus is on recovering new areas of non-hierarchical literary relations.
KEY ARGUMENTS
● In the last few years, Comparative Literature has taken on new perspectives, engaging with different areas of culture and knowledge, particularly those related to marginalised spaces, along with the focus on recovering new areas of non-hierarchical literary relations.
● It is a question of linking social and historical structures with aesthetics to reveal the dialectic between them.
● The materiality of comparison, the multi-dimensional reality of questions related to self and the other and to arrive at networks of relationships on various levels.
KEY POINTS IN ANALYSIS
● The beginnings
● Indian literature as Comparative Literature
● Centres of Comparative Literature Studies
● Reconfiguration of Areas of Comparison
● Research directions
● Interface with Translation Studies and Cultural Studies
●Non-hierarchical connectivity
ANALYSIS
● The idea of World literature gained ground towards the end of the nineteenth century when in Bengal, for instance, translation activities began to be taken up on a large scale and poets talked of establishing relations with the literature of the world to promote, as the eminent poet-translator Satyendranath Dutta in 1904 stated, “relationships of joy” (Dutta 124)
● Tagore used the word “Visva Sahitya” and stated that the word was generally termed “comparative literature”.
✹What is the flowers of evil about Baudelaire?
Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) is his most famous work. In beautiful prose-poetry, Baudelaire expresses the fleeting, ephemeral, ever-changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century. His work influenced an entire generation of poets.
● Bose, also well-known for his translations of Baudelaire, Hoelderlin & Kalidasa, wrote in his preface to the translation of Les Fleurs du Mal that his intention in turning to French poetry was to move away from the literature of the British, the colonial masters, while in his introduction to the translation of Kalidasa's Meghdutam, he wrote that it was essential to bring to life the literature of the ancient times in a particular tradition in order to make it a part of contemporary.
👉 In the early stages it was a matter of recognizing new aesthetic systems, new visions of the sublime and new ethical imperatives - the Greek drama and the Indian nataka - and then it was a question of linking social and historical structures with aesthetics in order to reveal the dialectic between them.
👉 Indian Literature as Comparative Literature
Comparatists dealing with Indian literature also necessarily had to look at the interplay between the mainstream and the popular, the elite and the marginalised and also to some extent foreground intermedial perspectives as different forms existed together in a composite manner.
👉 Centres for Comparative Literature Studies
ICLA + CILA = CLAI
Two national associations of Comparative Literature came into being, one at Jadavpur called
ICLA = Indian Comparative Literature Association
and the other in Delhi named
CILA = Comparative Indian Literature Association
The two merged in 1992 and the
CLAI = Comparative Literature Association of India
was formed, which today has more than a thousand members.
👉 Reconfiguration of areas of comparison
Contemporary political needs then were linked with literary values.
From reception studies the focus gradually turned to cross-cultural reception where reciprocity and exchange among cultures were studied.
CONCLUSION
● The comparatists work with the knowledge that a lot remains to be done and that the task of the construction of literary histories, in terms of literary relations among neighboring regions and of larger wholes one of the primary tasks of Comparative Literature today has yet perhaps to begin.
● In all its endeavors, however, the primary aim of some of the early architects of the discipline to nurture and foster creativity continues as a subterranean force.
● It is evident that Comparative literature in the country today has multifaceted goals and visions in accordance with historical needs, both local and planetary.
● As in the case of humanities and literary studies, the discipline too is engaged with issues that would lead to the enhancement of the civilizational gestures, against forces that are divisive and that constantly reduce the potential of human beings.
Next Article
Why Comparative Indian Literature?
By Sisir Kumar Das
Abstract
The word 'Comparative', however, has created some confusion and one wonders whether it is being used to lend some respectability to the study of Indian Languages by linking it up with comparative literature, still a Western discipline, or to indicate the proper framework within which Indian literature can be studied. Indian literature must be taken as complex of literary relations and any study of Indian literature must reflect that. It is not an enquiry into their unity alone, but also a study in their diversity which enables one to understand the nature of literary facts.
Key Arguments
⮚ One can argue that comparative Western literature is the study of different national literatures, while comparative Indian literature is the study of literatures of one nation, or, according to some, of one national literature written in many languages. Is not comparative Indian literature, then, a retrograde step so far as the basic premise of comparative literature is concerned?
⮚ Today, when we have a nation state like India with many languages, or a country like the Soviet Union consisting of several nationalities speaking different languages, the principle of relationship between national literatures need revision. Neither language nor political boundary nor culture can be the sole creation.
⮚ The English and the Americans use the same language but they have different national literatures. Yet no comparatist would regard a study of British literature and American literature as comparative literature proper.
⮚ Do French writings in Belgium, Switzerland and Canada form a part of French literature? Are Indian English writings a part of English literature?
⮚ What will be our criterion, language or nationality? There is hardly any dependable criterion. Taking all this into consideration, comparative literature has to be both intra-linguistic and inter-linguistic.
Analysis
👉 Comparative literature emerged as a new discipline to counteract the notion of the autonomy of national literatures. Its ultimate goal, though it is doubtful whether that can ever be achieved, is to visualize the total literary activities of man as a single universe.
👉The early exponent of Indian literature, too, must in all probability have meant the great works in the different languages of India, those which had withstood the test of time, rather than total mass of writing in all Indian languages.
👉 A comparatist is hardly in a position to exercise any aesthetic judgement in choosing the best works in all the languages of the world. He is concerned mainly with the relationships, the resemblances and differences between national literatures; with their convergences and divergences. He wants to arrive at a certain general understanding of literary activities of man and to help create a universal poetics.
👉 Goethe wanted the common reader to come out of the narrow confines of his language and geography to enjoy the finest achievements of man. The comparatist also wants to come out of the confines of language and geography, but not so much to identify the best in all literatures as to understand the relationships between literatures in their totality.
👉 His goal too is 'world literature', not in the sense that Goethe and Rabindranath Tagore had used it, but in the sense of all the literary traditions. The comparatist knows that comparative literature is the method of investigation, while world literature, as Goethe meant, is a body of valuable literary works.
👉 Comparative literature differes from the study of single literatures not in method, but in manner, attitude and perspective. It can go on extending its area of operation - its ultimate limit is the literatures of the whole world. Its strength and its weakness lie in its cosmopolitanism.
👉 But the question can still be asked: Will not the study of Indian literatures alone breed a kind of literary patriotism or critical parochialism which must be avoided? The nature of Indian literature as evidenced by the history of the Indian people can help to provide an answer to this important question.
👉 Multilingualism is a fact of Indian society and of Indian Literature. This multilingualism appears bewildering to the foreign students of India, and certainly occasions a grave concern in our politicians. But the literary history of India is a history of multilingual literary activity.
👉 But what is perhaps more significant for the student of literature is the frequent interaction between India and other civilizations. The relations between India and Greece, or India and China have yet to be investigated by literary scholars. The historical contact between two civilizations, the Indian and the Middle Eastern, and later on, the European, makes it imperative for any serious student of Indian literature to study the literary traditions of other countries.
Conclusion
⮚ Modern Indian literatures, exposed as they are to various thought currents and literary traditions coming from various parts of the world, can hardly allow any serious student to rest content with a narrow world.
⮚ Comparative Indian literature not only justifies the need for literary study, but it provides the comparative study of literature with a new range and vision.
⮚ In a recent article, 'Towards Comparative Indian Literature,' Amiya Dev said, 'Comparison is right reason for us because, one, we are multilingual, and two, we are Third World.'
⮚ The fact that multilingualism is now more or less appreciated by Indian scholars. The Third World situation that lends Indian comparative literature a greater validity may need further comments. Prof. Dev points out in this paper that the tools of Western comparison are hardly adequate to deal with our literary situation.
⮚ The Third World situation has imposed certain psychological restrictions on us. Not only did we learn to venerate the language and literature of our colonial masters and were happy to be influenced by them, but we also believed in the infallibility of Western literary categories and applied them to our own literatures to gain respectability.
⮚ In order to make literary studies free from these psychological restrictions, we need to look at our literatures from within, so that we can also respond to the literature of other parts of the world without any inhibition or prejudice.
⮚ Our idea of comparative literature will emerge only when we take into account the historical situation in which we are placed. Our journey is not from comparative literature to comparative Indian literature, but from comparative Indian literature to comparative literature.
Thank you.