Ghosts in the disciplinary machine: The uncanny life of world literature

Comparative Literature Studies

Volumn 41, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 10-36

  Cooppan, Vilashini ^a  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33646354345     PISSN: 00104132     EISSN: 15284212     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/cls.2004.0001     Document Type: Article

References (107)

1. References refer respectively to: David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990)
2. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (London: Polity, 1990)
3. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System (New York: Academic, 1974)
4. Marshall Hodgson, Rethinking World History: Essays in Europe, Islam, and World History (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993)
5. and Basem L. Ra'ad, "Primal Scenes of Globalization: Legacies of Canaan and Etruria," Giles Gunn, ed., Globalizing Literary Studies, spec. issue of PMLA 116.1 (January 2001): 89-110
6. On the homogenizing aspects of global culture, see Anthony D. Smith, "Towards a Global Culture?," Theory, Culture & Society 7.2-3 (1990): 171-93
7. On the standardizing effects of global capital in the hands of the transnational corporation, see Masao Miyoshi, "A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State," Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, eds. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham: Duke UP 1996) 78-106
8. and George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life (Newbury Park, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1993)
9. and The McDonaldization Thesis: Explorations and Extensions (London: Sage Publications, 1998)
10. For assessments of globalization's heterogenizing and liberating impulses, see: Ulf Hannerz, "Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture," Theory, Culture & Society 7.2-3 (1990): 237-52
11. and Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (New York: Routledge, 1996)
12. Stuart Hall, "The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity" and "Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities," both in Culture, Globalization, and the World-System, ed. Anthony D. King (Binghamton: Department of Art and Art History, State U of New York at Binghamton P, 1991) 19-39 and 41-68
13. and Jonathan Friedman, "Global Crises, The Struggle for Cultural Identity and Intellectual Porkbarrelling: Cosmopolitans versus Locals, Ethnics and Nationals in an Era of De-hegemonisation," Debating Cultural Hybridity, eds. Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood (London: Zed Books, 1997) 70-89
14. Globalization's stratifying effects have been indexed by, among others: Arif Dirlik, "The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism," Critical Inquiry 20.2 (1994): 331-50
15. Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalisation: The Management of Contemporary Society (London: Zed Books, 1997)
16. and Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia UP, 1998)
17. See Fredric Jameson, "Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue," The Cultures of Globalization, eds. Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham: Duke UP, 1998) 54-77
18. The volume as a whole offers a useful range of accounts of globalization's inherent contradictions and contestations, as does The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, eds. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (Durham: Duke UP, 1997)
19. For a long historical view of globalization's dualities, see Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage Publications, 1992)
20. Stuart Hall, "When Was 'the Post-Colonial'? Thinking at the Limit," The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, eds. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (New York: Routledge, 1996) 242-60, 246
21. King, Culture, Globalization, and the World-System ix
22. For useful histories and models of other border-crossing courses, see: Peter Brooks, "Man and His Fictions: One Approach to the Teaching of Literature," College English (October 1973): 40-49
23. Herbert Lindenberger, "The Western Culture Debate at Stanford University," Comparative Criticism 11 (1989): 225-34
24. and Kristin Ross, "The World Literature and Cultural Studies Program," Critical Inquiry 19.4 (1993): 666-76
25. E.D. Hirsch, Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987)
26. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1994)
27. Sarah Lawall, Introduction, Reading World Literature: Theory, History, Practice, ed. Lawall (Austin: U of Texas P, 1994) 3
28. Among recent discussions of world literature, the following emphasize its status as a particular mode of reading: David Damrosch, "Literary Study in an Elliptical Age," Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, ed. Charles Bernheimer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996) 122-133
29. and What is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003), especially 1-36
30. Wai Chee Dimock, "Literature for the Planet," Giles Gunn, ed., Globalizing Literary Studies, spec. issue of PMLA 116.1 (January 2001): 173-88
31. and "A Theory of Resonance," PMLA 112.5 (October 1997): 1060-71
32. On this history and its possible futures, see: Damrosch, "Literary Study" and What is World Literature, especially 1-36
33. Wlad Godzich, "Emergent Literatures and the Field of Comparative Literature," The Comparative Perspective on Literature, eds. Clayton Koelb and Susan Noakes (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988) 18-36
34. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993)
35. George Steiner, What is Comparative Literature? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995)
36. Djelal Kadir, "Comparative Literature Hinternational," World Literature Today 69.2 (1995): 245-47
37. and Emily Apter, "Comparative Exile: Competing Margins in the History of Comparative Literature," Bernheminer, ed. 86-96
38. Anne Louise Germaine Stael-Holstein, De la Littérature Considérée dans ses Rapports avec les Institutions Sociales, 2 vols. (Paris, 1812) 1: 45
39. See in particular Roland Robertson's claim that "the idea of nationalism (or particularism) develops only in tandem with internationalism" (103). On the simultaneously nationalist and internationalist aspects of Weltliteratur, see: Steiner 6
40. Lawall 13-20
41. and John Pizer, "Goethe's 'World Literature' Paradigm and Contemporary Cultural Globalization," Comparative Literature 52.3 (2000): 213-227, especially 216-18
42. Johann von W. Goethe, "Some Passages Pertaining to the Concept of World Literature," Comparative Literature: The Early Years, eds. Hans-Joachim Schulz and Philip Rhein (Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 1973) 3-11, 8
43. Fritz Strich, Goethe and World Literature, trans. C.A.M. Sym (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949) 5
44. René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (1949; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1962) 41
45. René Wellek, "The Crisis of Comparative Literature" (1959), Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963) 282-95, 295
46. Werner Friederich, "Great Books versus 'World Literature'" (1959), The Challenge of Comparative Literature and Other Addresses, ed. William J. DeSua (Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 1970) 25-35, 30-31
47. In addition to works already cited, see: Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993)
48. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993)
49. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994)
50. Mary Louise Pratt, "Comparative Literature and Global Citizenship" and Françoise Lionnet, "Spaces of Comparison," both in Berheminer, ed. 58-65, 165-174
51. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke UP, 1996)
52. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996)
53. Bruce Robbins, "Comparative Cosmopolitanism." Social Text 31/32 (1992): 169-86
54. Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah, eds. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998)
55. Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1998)
56. and Emily Apter, Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999)
57. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York: Pantheon, 1953)
58. Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony, ed. Anna Granville Hatcher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1963)
59. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953)
60. On Auerbach's exile as a crucial problematic in the history of modern comparative literature see: Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983), especially 5-9
61. Michael Holquist, "The Last European: Erich Auerbach as Precursor in the History of Cultural Criticism," Modern Language Quarterly 54.3 (1993): 371-91
62. Herbert Lindenberger, "On the Reception of Mimesis," Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, ed. Seth Lerer (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996) 195-213
63. Aamir Mufti, "Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture," Critical Inquiry 25.1 (1998): 95-125
64. and Emily Apter, "Comparative Exile" and "Global Translatio: The "Invention" of Comparative Literature, Istanbul, 1933," Critical Inquiry 29.2 (2003): 253-81
65. Erich Auerbach, "Philology and Weltliteratur," trans. Edward Said and Marie Said, The Centennial Review 13 (1969): 1-17
66. In addition to translating Auerbach's essay, Said has commented on the possibilities it affords to literary criticism and intellectual culture in Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975), especially 68-9, 72-3, 76, 324
67. For further discussions, see: Hayden White, "Auerbach's Literary History: Figurai Causation and Modernist Historicism," Lerer, ed. 124-39
68. and Paul Bové, Intellectuals in Power: A Genealogy of Critical Humanism (New York: Columbia UP, 1986) 131-208
69. Fredric Jameson, "Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism," Social Text 14/15 (1986): 65-88, 68
70. Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez, trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: Verso, 1996)
71. The Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 (London: Verso, 1998)
72. "Conjectures on World Literature," New Left Review 1 (January-February 2000): 54-68
73. and "More Conjectures," New Left Review 20 (March-April 2003): 73-81
74. Moretti's earlier work advances a "possible geography of literary forms" in which the core and the periphery are dominated by the distinct genres of novel and epic respectively (Modern Epic 50)
75. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Devil on the Cross (London: Heinemann, 1982) 56
76. Dimock, "Literature for the Planet" 178
77. Damrosch, What is World Literature? 283
78. Vilashini Cooppan, "World Literature and Global Theory: Comparative Literature for the New Millennium," Symplokê 9.1-2 (2001): 15-43
79. Sigmund Freud, "The 'Uncanny'", trans. Alix Strachey, in Collected Papers, ed. Ernest Jones (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1934) 4: 368-407, 369-70
80. Helène Cixous, "Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud's Das Unheimliche (The 'Uncanny')," trans. Robert Dennomé, New Literary History 7.3 (Spring 1976): 525-548, 547
81. For additional discussions of the fictional structure of the Freudian uncanny, see Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (New York: Oxford UP, 1982) 91-118
82. and Neil Hertz, The End of the Line (New York: Columbia UP, 1985) 97-122
83. Reingard Nethersole, "Models of Globalization," PMLA 116.3 (May 2001): 638-49, 646
84. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 3rd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988) 38
85. "Darmok," The Next Generation, episode 102, dir. Larry Shaw and David Carson (1987)
86. The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. Benjamin Foster, eds. Douglas Fayne and Gary M. Beckman (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001)
87. D.T. Niane, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali (London: Longman African Writers, 1994)
88. Gordon Innes, trans, and ed., Sunjata: Gambian Versions of the Mande Epic by Bamba Suso and Banna Kanute (New York: Penguin, 1974)
89. Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator," Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968) 69-82, 75
90. Fumiko Enchi, Masks, trans. Juliet Winters Carpenter (New York: Vintage, 1983) 24, 25, 68
91. Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot, trans. Henry Reed (New York: Signet, 1962)
92. Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, trans. Ina Rilke (New York: Anchor 2002)
93. Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (New York: Penguin, 1991)
94. Jonathan Arac, "Anglo-Globalism?," New Left Review 16 (July-August 2002): 35-45
95. Ian Baucom, "Globalit, Inc.; or, The Cultural Logic of Global Literary Studies," Giles Gunn, ed., Globalizing Literary Studies, spec. issue of PMLA 116.1 (January 2001): 158-172, 160
96. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1984)
97. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981)
98. Franco Moretti, "Quantitative Evidence and Literary History," lecture, Yale University, New Haven, 10 April, 2003
99. Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977) 15-18
100. Bloom, Agon
101. and The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford UP, 1975)
102. Baucom 170
103. Franco Moretti, "The Slaughterhouse of Literature," Modern Language Quarterly 61.1 (2000): 207-27
104. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. A.R. Braunmuller (New Cambridge, 1997) IV.i.116
105. Moretti, "Conjectures" 57
106. Karl Marx, Capital, 2 vols. (London: Harmondsworth, 1976) I:342
107. as quoted in Franco Moretti, "Dialectic of Fear," Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms (1983, New York: Verso, 1988) 83-108, 91