This blog is a response of Task, which is given by Dr. Dilip Barad sir. This blog deals with three article which is of Comparative & Translation studies
. In this blog we are supposed to write abstract, key points / arguments and concluding remarks on all three articles of Unit 1 of paper Comparative Literatures and Translation Studies. It also includes the recording of class presentations presented by respective students.
ARTICLE 1
why comparative Indian Literature
Sisir Kumar Das
Abstract
Article begins with an idea of attempt of finding unity is literature of India, the beginning of the century a group of scholars have been trying to project the idea of Indian literature emphasizing the underlying unity of themes and forms and attitudes. It is commendable but these attempts in discovering the basic unity of the Indian creative mind are made at the risk of ignoring the plurality of expressions in our creative minds.
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 up with comparative literature. the main diemma of comparatist then is to reconcile his idea of literature as a single universe of verbal expression with his ability to study totality.
Gothe spoke about Weltliteratur instead of european literature. national literature is now rather than unmeaning term said Gothe conversation with eckermann on 31 January 1827 the epoch of world literature is at hand and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.
A comparatist hardly in a position to exercise any aesthetic judgement choosing best work in all languages of the world. he is mainly concerned with the relationships the resembles and differences between national literatures. the comparatist knows that the comparative literature is method of investigation while world literature as Gothe means is a body of valuable literary works.
Western comparatist has kept itself restricted to Western literature. if one goes through corpus of a work already enormous in size produced by him, one would wonder whether he is aware of existences of any literature other than his own. the contact between both east and west literature began very early in History.
Europe came to know about the hebrew literature the day it accepted Christianity. the Panchatantra reached Europe through arabic and syrian versions before renaissance. La fontaine in the second edition of his fables Acknowledge his debt Pilpay. Europe acquaintance with arabic was even earlier. the court of cordova in spain in a 11th century was a centre of arabic literature.spnish arab poetry particularly work of zaydum of Cordova Ibn Hazon or mutamid is now integral part of literary history in spain. and by the end of 18th century Europe discovered sanskrit which brought revolution in linguistics.
When comparative literature was established in the universities of Europe and america translation of many works in Chinese and Japanese of course in Arabic and Persian were available in European Languages.
Das is ready to admit that the charge of Eurocentrism against the western comparatist is unfair and that his choice of European literatures as the main area of investigation has been prompted more by pragmatism than by prejudice against oriental literatures. Ulrich Weinsstein expressed his hesitation to extend ‘the study of parallels of phenomena pertaining to two different civilizations’,
One can also argue western literature is a study of different national literature while compartive literature is the study of different literature written in many languages. today we have many nation state like india with many languages or soviet union consisting several nationalities.
when the case of comparative indian literature as a valid area of comparative literature in west exclusively study of western literature.
Conclusion
In a recent article towards comparative indian literature Amiya dev said comparison is right reason for us because one we are multilingual two we are Third world. The third world situation that lends Indian comparative literature of greater validity may need further comments. He points out that the tools of Western comparison are hardly adequate to deal with our literary situation.
Article 2:
Comparative Literature in India
Amiya Dev
Abstract
In his article, "Comparative Literature in India," Amiya Dev bases his discussion on the fact that India has many languages and literatures thus
representing an apriori situation and conditions of diversity. He therefore argues that to speak of Indian literature in the singular is problematic.He surveys the current scholarly and intellectual positions on unity and diversity and looks into the post-structuralist doubt of homogenization of differences in the name of unity. He also examines the search for common denominators and a possible pattern of togetherness and Dev underlines location and located inter-Indian reception as an aspect of inter-literariness. It is t/here Dev perceives Indian literature, that is, not as a fixed or determinate entity but as an ongoing and inter literary process: Indian language and literature ever in the remaking.
There are 22 languages according to census. we have so called major literatures in india, we are confronted by a particular problematic is indian literature in the
singular valid category or are we rather to speak of indian literature in plural?
Single focus perspective is a result of both colonial and post colonial perspective the latter found motto of sahitya Akademi "Indian literature is one through written in many languages" however the perspective was opposed by scholar who argued that a country where so many languages co exist should be understood as a country with literature presently a different kind of resistance has unity thesis in a what may be called hegemonic apprehension in brief "arguments of unity in diversity are in my opinion suspect for they encroach upon individualities of the diverse literature"
Gurbhagat Singh who has been discussing the notion of "differential multilogue". He rejects the notion of Indian literature because the notion as such includes and promotes a nationalist identity. For singh Comparative literature is an exercise in different multilogue. Singh notion of different multilogue reflect poststructualist trend in indian discourse today. There would be no resistance unity in diversity and it cannot be denied that in the pursuit of "Indian literature "
Jaidev's notion of an Indian sensus communis is not routine indianess which we often encounter from our cultural ambassador or in the West that is those instance of national and racial image formation which suggest homogeneity and result in cultural stereotyping. It is situs tagore spoke many of his prose text and it is suits that Gandhi consistently practice.
The notion of "English Archive of English literature came about two decades ago by the suggestion of V.K.gokak and Sujit Mukherjee who were speaking of Indo English corpus of literature that was created out of English translations of major texts. further they are suggested the canonization of their proposal by inserting Indo English corpus into university curricula. Ahmed concern is with hegemony of english although he does not suggested its abolition in a way would be close to Ngugi's arguments. on the other hand Gokak, Mukherjee and Motilal Jotwani who was committee member for drafting the other circular suggested the implement as a function owning to the ever growing corpus of translation of various English literature into english thus, making new corpus of Indo English available to all.
Das's work is similar to K.M. George's two-volume Comparative Indian Literature of 1984-85. George's work was not as comprehensive as Das's: it only dealt with fifteen literatures and that too in a limited way.
The Gujarati poet Umashankar Joshi -- a supporter of the unity approach -- was the first president of the Indian National Comparative Literature Association, and the Kannada writer U.R. Anantha Murthy is the current president of the Comparative Literature Association of India. Comparatists reflect the binary approach to the question of Indian literature as explained.
Through inter-Indian translation we have also access to texts from a fourth and more languages. Now, as readers, consciously or subconsciously we place the texts in additional languages beside our original and first text.
Conclusion:
Comparative Literature has taught us not to take comparison literally and it also taught us that theory formation in literary history is not universally tenable. He suggesting that we should first look at ourselves and try to understand our own situations as thoroughly as possible. Let us first give full shape to our own comparative literatures and then we will formulate a comparative literature of diversity in general.
Article:3
Comparative Literature In India: An Overview of its history
Abstract:
The essay gives an overview of the trajectory of Comparative Literature in India, focusing primarily on the department at Jadavpur University, where it began, and to some extent the department of Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies in the University of Delhi, where it later had a new be- ginning in its engagement with Indian literatures. The department at Jadavpur began with the legacy of 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 along with literatures from the Southern part of the globe. Paradigms of approaches in comparative literary studies also shifted from influence and analogy studies to cross-cultural literary relations, to the focus on reception and transformation. In the last few years Comparative Literature has taken on new perspectives, engaging with different ar- eas of culture and knowledge, particularly those related to marginalized spaces, along with the focus on recovering new areas of non-hierarchical literary relations.
Beginnings
comparative literature as a discipline there were texts focusing on comparative aspects of literature in india both from the points of view its relation with literatures from the other parts of the world particularly persian, Arabian, English and from the perspactive of inter indian literary studies.
Translation activities to be taken a large scale and poets talked of established relations with literatures of the world to promote as the eminent poet- Translator Satyendranath Datta 1904 stated "Relationships of Joy". The talk by Rabindranath Tagore entitled "VishvaSahitya "given at the National Council of Education in 1907 served as a pretext to the establishment of the department of comparative Literature at Jadhavpur
university in 1956.
Indian Literature as Comparative Literature
In 1974, the department of Modern Indian Languages started a post-MA course entitled “Comparative Indian Literature”. A national seminar on Comparative Literature was held at Delhi University organized by Nagendra, a writer-critic who taught in the Hindi department of Delhi University, and a volume entitled Comparative Literature was published in 1977.
Aijaz Ahmad, traced his voice so aptly that, “the dialectic of unity and difference – through systematic periodization of multiple linguistic overlaps, and by grounding that dialectic in the history of material productions, ideological struggles, competing conceptions of class and community and gender, elite offensives and popular resistances, overlaps of cultural vocabularies and performative genres, and histories of orality and writing and print”
T.S. Satyanath developed the theory of a scripto-centric, body-centric and phono-centric study of texts in the medieval period leading a number of researchers in the department to look for continuities and interventions in the tradition that would again lead to pluralist epistemologies in the study of Indian literature and culture.
Centres of Comparative Literature Studies:
During the seventies and the eighties Comparative Literature was also practiced at a number of centres and departments in the South of India such as in Trivandrum, Madurai Kamaraj University, Bharatidasam University, Kottayam and Pondicherry.
Later in the eighties and the nineties other Centres were established in different parts of the country, either as independent bodies or within a single language department as in Punjabi University, Patiala, Dibrugarh University, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University, Sambalpur University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai. In 1986 a new full-fledged department of Comparative Literature was established at Veer Narmad South Gujarat University, Surat, where focus was on Indian literatures in Western India. Also in 1999 a department of Dravidian Comparative Literature and Philosophy was established in Dravidian University, Kuppam.
Reconfiguration of areas of comparison:
During the nineties, Area Studies papers on African, Latin American, Canadian literatures and literature of Bangladesh were introduced. Right from the beginning of the discipline in India, cross-cultural relations between Indian literatures and European and American literatures had been in focus.
Reception studies also pointed to historical realities determining conditions of acceptability and hence to complex configurations between literature and history. Contemporary political needs then were linked with literary values and this explained the contradictory tensions often found in the reception of romanticism in Bengal.
Research directions:
The department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Saurashtra University, Rajkot, took up the theme of Indian Renaissance and translated several Indian authors into English, studied early travelogues
from Western India to England and in general published collections of theoretical discourse from the nineteenth century The Department of Assamese in Dibrugarh University received the grant and published a number of books related to translations, collections of rare texts and documentation of folk forms.
The department of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University also received assistance to pursue research in four major areas, East-West Literary Relations, Indian Literature, Translation Studies and Third World literature. Incidentally, the department had in Manabendra Bandyopadhyay, an avid translator who translated texts from many so-called “third-world countries”.
The department at Jadavpur University was upgraded under the programme to the status of Centre of Advanced Studies in 2005, and research in Comparative Literature took a completely new turn.
Interface with Translation Studies and Cultural Studies :
As for Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature had always engaged with different aspects of Cultural Studies, the most prominent being literature and its relation with the different arts.
The M Phil course on the subject at Jadavpur University highlights changing marginalities, ‘sub-cultures’ and movements in relation to contemporary nationalisms and globalization, and also sexualities, gender and the politics of identity.
In some of the new centres of Comparative Literature that came up in the new universities established in the last Five Year Plan, diaspora studies were taken up as an important area of engagement. It must be mentioned though that despite tendencies towards greater interdisciplinary approaches, literature
Non-hierarchical connectivity:
Kumkum Sangari in a recent article called “co-construction”, a process anchored in “subtle and complex histories of translation, circulation and extraction” And 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 neighbouring regions, and of larger wholes, one of the primary tasks of Comparative Literature today has perhaps yet to begin.
Conclusion
The article conclude with Non-hierarchical literary relation. However, the article gives a brief overview of the history of Comparative Literature in India and how it's start from specific university like the department t Jadavpur University and the department of Modern Indian Language
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