A Companion To Comparative Literature

• Features over thirty original essays from leading international contributors
• Provides a critical assessment of the status of literary and cross-cultural inquiry
• Addresses the history, current state, and future of comparative literature
• Chapters address such topics as the relationship between translation and transnationalism, literary theory and emerging media, the future of national literatures in an era of globalization, gender and cultural formation across time, East-West cultural encounters, postcolonial and diaspora studies, and other experimental approaches to literature and culture

Dominic Thomas is Chair of the Departments of French and Francophone Studies and Italian at the University of California Los Angeles, where he is also Professor of Comparative Literature. He has edited several volumes on literary topics and is the author of Nation-Building, Propaganda and Literature in Francophone Africa (2002) and Black France: Colonialism, Immigration and Transnationalism (2007).

PART I: ROADMAPS:

1. Rey Chow.

A Discipline of Tolerance.

2. David Ferris.

Why Compare?

3. David Palumbo-Liu.

Method and Congruity.

4. Haun Saussy.

Comparisons, World Literature, and the Common Denominator.

5. Kenneth Surin.

Comparative Literature in America: Attempt at a Genealogy.

PART II. THEORETICAL DIRECTIONS:

6. Stathis Gourgouris.

The Poiein of Secular Criticism.

7. Eric Hayot.

Vanishing Horizons: Problems in the Comparison of China and the West.

8. Efrain Kristal.

Art and Literature in the Liquid Modern Age: On Richard Wollheim, Zygmunt Bauman and Yves Michaud.

9. Michael Lucey.

A Literary Object’s Contextual Life.

10. Sharon Marcus.

The Theater of Comparative Literature.

PART III: DISCIPLINARY INTERSECTIONS:

11. Jorge Coronado.

What Pictures Tell Us about the Letter: Visual and Literary Practices in Latin America.

12. Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller.

If there’s a text in this class, where did it come from? Or, what does Marilyn Monroe have to do with The Sorrows of Young Man Werther?

13. Todd Presner.

Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline.

14. Zoë Norridge.

Comparing pain: theoretical explorations of suffering and working towards the particular.

15. Gisèle Sapiro.

Comparativism, Transfers, Entangled History: Sociological Perspectives on Literature.

PART IV: LINGUISTIC TRAJECTORIES:

16. Cathy Caruth.

Orphaned Language: Traumatic Crossings in Literature and History.

17. Simon Gikandi.

Contested Grammars: Comparative Literature, Translation, and the Challenge of Locality.

18. Mary Louise Pratt.

Comparative Literature and the Global Languagescape.

19. Nasrin Rahimieh.

Persian Incursions: The Transnational Dynamics of Persian Literature.

20. Mireille Rosello.

Rudimentariness as home.

PART V: POSTCOLONIAL MOBILITIES:

21. Allison Crumly and Dominic Thomas.

Afro-European Studies: Emerging Fields and New Directions.

22. David Theo Goldberg.

The Comparative and the Relational: Meditations on Racial Method.

23. Deborah Jenson.

Kidnapped Narratives: Mobility without Autonomy and the Nation/Novel Analogy.

24. Françoise Lionnet.

Counterpoint and Double Critique in Edward Said and Abdelkebir Khatibi:

A Transcolonial Comparison.

25. David Murphy.

How French Studies became Transnational; Or postcolonialism as comparatism.

26. Sangeeta Ray.

Towards a Planetary Reading of Postcolonial and American Imaginative Eco-Graphies.

PART VI: GLOBAL CONNECTIONS:

27. Emily Apter.

Terrestrial Humanism: Edward W. Said and the Politics of World Literature.

28. Brian T. Edwards.

Logics and Contexts of Circulation.

29. Charles Forsdick.

“Worlds in Collision:” The Languages and Locations of World Literature.

30. Graham Huggan.

The Trouble with World Literature.