Is There an Indian Way of Thinking about Comparative Literature?
E. V. Ramakrishnan
The preceding decades have put on the agenda of contemporary criticism the need to resist hegemonic forces that legitimate homogenized world-views. With the rise of disciplines such as Post-Colonial Studies, Gender Studies and Cultural Studies, ethical issues regarding representation have assumed urgency. Some of the assumptions held as sacred by Comparative Literature regarding texts and canons have been challenged by successive waves of theories and have resulted in new formulations regarding the literary, the role of the reader and literary history. A hermetic view of literary works and their canons informed by a linear approach to literary influences has given way to a complex awareness about the constitutive nature of ambivalence and polysemy in the production of literary texts. The view that literary texts are sites where a coherent view of cultural heritage can be defended is no more valid. Consequently, the “concern for values and qualities“ and “a distant ideal of universal literary history and scholarship“ that Rene Wellek mentions in the context of the “true criticism“ in his essay on “The Name and Nature of Comparative Literature“ appears increasingly problematic. The ethical turn in theory has opened up a context of realigning a discipline like Comparative literature with the social and political realities of the global south. In his book Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai argues that in a globalised world one cannot enforce a normative concept of modernity. He says: A central challenge for current anthropology is to study the cosmopolitan cultural forms of the contemporary world without logically or chronologically presupposing either the authority of Western experience or the models derived from that experience. (Appadurai 1997: 49) What Appadurai says in the context of ethnic studies is applicable to comparative literature as well. In redefining its field and methodology, Comparative Literature has to recognize that categories such as the text, reader and tradition are sets of relationships and not absolute entities with fixed essences. The nature of these relationships will vary from culture to culture. For instance, the idea of the text in a multilingual and multi- religious society with multiple cultural traditions will not be the same as that in a monolingual culture with a single language and religion. The field of Comparative Literature has to include studies of how these categories are constituted in different cultures differently. Reception Theory and Reader Response Criticism have contributed to the redefining of the field of the textual production as a fluid interactive site that cannot be standardized. Discourses are forms of being in the world and hence articulate socially situated identities. The literary cannot be segregated from this subliminal layer of the social where language as discourse embodies identities, world- views, attitudes and assumptions. In constructing the normative, discourses often marginalize certain experiences or subjects as the other. To understand this process of “othering“ one has to study mainstream canons critically. Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 |
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