Thinking Activity

Literature review: Research Methodology - Dissertation writing 

Hello everyone, i am Nidhi Dave a student of the department of English, MKBU. This blog is response of my Thinking Activity given by professor Dr. Dilip Barad sir. In this blog I'm going to discuss about the Literature review: Research methodology and Dissertation writing. 

🔆Literature Review: 

🔆Define Literature Review: 

A literature review (or “relevant review of the literature”) is an objective, concise, critical summary of published research literature relevant to a topic being researched in an article.

A literature review is a piece of academic writing demonstrating knowledge and understanding of the academic literature on a specific topic placed in context. A literature review also includes a critical evaluation of the material; this is why it is called a literature review rather than a literature report. It is a process of reviewing the literature, as well as a form of writing.

Usually a literature review forms a section or part of a dissertation, research project or long essay. However, it can also be set and assessed as a standalone piece of work.

🔆Why is literature review carried out in research? 

The aim of any literature review is to summarize and synthesize the arguments and ideas of existing knowledge in a particular field without adding any new contributions. Being built on existing knowledge they help the researcher to even turn the wheels of the topic of research. It is possible only with profound knowledge of what is wrong in the existing findings in detail to overpower them. For other researches, the literature review gives the direction to be headed for its success. 

Thinking Activity

Thinking Activity: Unit 3: Translation Studies 

Hello everyone, i am Nidhi Dave a student of the department of English, MKBU. This blog is response of my Thinking Activity given by professor Dr. Dilip Barad sir. In this blog I'm going to discuss about the articles of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies.  

♻️Unit 3: 6,  “Translation and literary history: An Indian view” - Ganesh Devy

This Article is explained by Nilay Rathod and Emisha Ravani, students of the Department of English, MKBU.

 

🔆Abstract : 

This article is about the role of translation in communicating literary movements across linguistic borders. According to J. Hillis Miller ‘Translation is the wandering existence of a text in a perpetual exile.’Chaucer, Dryden and the Pope used the tool of translation to recover a sense of order. The tradition of Anglo-Irish literature branched out of translating Irish works into English.No critic has taken a well-defined position on the place of translations in literary history. Origins of literary movements and literary traditions inhabit various acts of translation.Translations are popularly perceived as unoriginal, not much thought has been devoted to the aesthetics of translation. 

🔆Key Arguments : 

Roman Jakobson in his essay on the linguistics of translation proposed a threefold classification of translations: 

• (a) those from one verbal order to another verbal order within the same language system

• (b) those from one language system to another language system, and

• (c) those from a verbal order to another system of signs (Jakobson, 1959, pp. 232– 9).

In Chomsky’s linguistics the concept of semantic universals plays an important role. However, his level of abstraction marks the farthest limits to which the monolingual Saussurean linguistic materialism can be stretched. In actual practice, even in Europe, the translating consciousness treats the SL and TL as parts of a larger and continuous spectrum of various intersecting systems of verbal signs.

J.C. Catford presents a comprehensive statement of theoretical formulation about the linguistics of translation in A Linguistic Theory of Translation, in which he seeks to isolate various linguistic levels of translation. His basic premise is that since translation is a linguistic act any theory of translation must emerge from linguistics: ‘Translation is an operation performed on languages: a process of substituting a text in one language for a text in another; clearly, then, any theory of translation must draw upon a theory of language – a general linguistic theory’ (Catford, 1965, p. vii).

♻️"Translation and literary history: An Indian view” - Ganesh Devy

One of the most revolutionary events in the history of English style has been the authorized translation of the Bible. It was also the literary expression of Protestant Christianity. The recovery of the original spirit of Christianity was thus sought by Protestant England through an act of translation. It is well known that Chaucer was translating the style of Boccacio into English when he created his Canterbury Tales. When Dryden and Pope

wanted to recover a sense of order, they used the tool of translation. Similar attempts were made in other European languages such as German and French. 

The tradition that has given us writers like Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, Beckett and Heaney in a single century – the tradition of Anglo-Irish literature – branched out of the practice of translating Irish works into English initiated by Macpherson towards the end of the eighteenth century.

Many of the Anglo-Irish and Indian English writers have been able translators themselves. Similarly the settler colonies such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand have impressive modern traditions of literature, which have resulted from the ‘translation’ of the settlers from their homeland to alien locations. Post- colonial writing in the former Spanish colonies in South America, the former colonies in Africa and other parts of the world has experienced the importance of translation as one of the crucial conditions for creativity. Origins of literary movements and literary traditions inhabit various acts of translation.

Roman Jakobson in his essay on the linguistics of translation proposed a threefold classification of translations:

 (a) those from one verbal order to another verbal order within the same language system, (b) those from one language system to another language system, and  (c) those from a verbal order to another system of signs (Jakobson, 1959, pp. 232– 9). As he considers, theoretically, a complete semantic equivalence as the final objective of a translation act – which is not possible – he asserts that poetry is untranslatable.

He maintains that only a ‘creative translation’ is possible. The translating consciousness exploits the potential openness of language systems; and as it shifts significance from a given verbal form

to a corresponding but different verbal form it also brings closer the materially different sign systems. 

The concept of a ‘translating consciousness’v and communities of people possessing it are no mere notions. In most Third World countries, where a dominating colonial language has acquired a privileged place, such communities do exist. In India several languages are simultaneously used by language communities as if these languages formed a continuous spectrum of signs and significance. The use of two or more different languages in translation activity cannot be understood properly through studies of foreign-language acquisition. Such theories work round the premise that there inevitably is a chronological gap and an order or a priority of scale in language- learning situations. 

However, his level of abstraction marks the farthest limits to which the monolingual Saussurean linguistic materialism can be stretched. In actual practice, even in Europe, the translating consciousness treats the SL and TL as parts of a larger and continuous spectrum of various intersecting systems of verbal signs. Owing to the structuralist unwillingness to acknowledge the existence of any non-systemic or extra- systemic core of significance, the concept of synonymy in the West has remained inadequate to explain translation activity. And in the absence of a linguistic theory based on a multilingual perspective or on translation practice, the translation thought in the West

overstates the validity of the concept of synonymy.

J.C. Catford presents a comprehensive statement of theoretical formulation about the linguistics of translation in A Linguistic Theory of Translation, in which he seeks to isolate various linguistic levels of translation. His basic premise is that since translation is a linguistic act any theory of translation must emerge from linguistics: ‘Translation is an operation performed on languages: a process of substituting a text in one language for a text in another; clearly, then, any theory of translation must draw upon a theory of language – a general linguistic theory’ (Catford, 1965, p. vii). 

The privileged discourse of general linguistics today is closely interlinked with developments in anthropology, particularly after Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss. During the nineteenth century, Europe had distributed various fields of humanistic knowledge into a threefold hierarchy: comparative studies for Europe, Orientalism for the Orient, and anthropology for the rest of the world. In its various phases of development modern Western linguistics has connections with all these. After the ‘discovery’ of Sanskrit by Sir William Jones, historical linguistics in Europe depended heavily on Orientalism. For a long time afterwards linguistics followed the path of comparative philology. 

The translation problem is not just a linguistic problem. It is an aesthetic and ideological problem with an important bearing on the question of literary history. Literary translation is not just a replication of a text in another verbal system of signs. It is a replication of an ordered sub-system of signs within a given language in another

corresponding ordered sub-system of signs within a related language. Translation is not a transposition of significance or signs. After the act of translation is over, the original work still remains in its original position. 

The problems in translation study are, therefore, very much like those in literary

history. They are the problems of the relationship between origins and sequentiality. And as in translation study so in literary history, the problem of origin has not been tackled satisfactorily. The point that needs to be made is that probably the question of origins of literary traditions will have to be viewed differently by literary communities with ‘translating consciousness’. The fact that Indian literary communities do possess this translating consciousness can be brought home effectively by reminding ourselves that the very foundation of modern Indian literatures was laid through acts of translation, whether by Jayadeva, Hemcandra, Michael Madhusudan Dutta, H.N. Apte or Bankim Chandra Chatterjee.

🔆Conclusion :

Comparative literature implies that between two related languages there are areas of significance that are shared, just as there may be areas of significance that can never be shared. When the soul passes from one body to another, it does not lose any of its essential significance. Indian philosophies of the relationship between form and essence, structure and significance are guided by this metaphysics. The true test is the writer’s capacity to transform, to translate, to restate, to revitalize the original. And in that sense Indian literary traditions are essentially traditions of translation.

♻️Unit 3: 7, On Translating a Tamil Poem by A. K. Ramanujan

This Article is explained by Himanshi Parmar and Nirav Amreliya, students of the Department of English, MKBU. 

🔆Abstract : 

'How does one translate a poem from another time, another culture,another language? Ramanujan translated poems from Tamil were written two thousand years ago in a comer of south India, in a Dravidian language relatively untouched by the other classical language of India, Sanskrit. The subject of this paper is not the fascinating external history of this literature, but translation, the transport of poems from classical Tamil to modem English; the hazards, the damages in transit, the secret paths, and the lucky by passes.The chief difficulty of translation is its impossibility. Frost once even identified poetry as that which is lost in translation. We know now that no translation can be 'literal,' or 'word for word'. That is where the impossibility lies. The only possible translation is a 'free' one.What is everyday in one language must be translated by what is everyday in the 'target' language also, and what is eccentric must find equally eccentric equivalents. In this article Ramanujan took various examples of Tamil poems that he translated into English and he described difficulties that he faced during translation.

🔆Key Arguments:

● Frost once said “poetry as that which is lost in translation”. 

● Evans-Pritchard, the anthropologist, used to say: If you translate all the European arguments for atheism into Azande, they would come out as arguments for God in Azande. Such observations certainly disabuseus of the commonly-held notion of 'literal' translation. 

● Woollcott argued that English does not have leftbranching possibilities, but they are a bit abnormal. 

● Hopkins's and Thomas's poetry the leftward syntax is employed for special poetic effects-it alternates with other, more 'normal', types of English sentences. In Tamil poetry the leftward syntax is not eccentric, literary or offbeat. but part of everyday 'natural' speech.

♻️On Translating a Tamil Poem by A. K. Ramanujan: 

✴️Part: 1

This essay is divided into three parts. In Part I started with the Question, how does one translate a poem from another time, another culture, another language? The poems I translate from Tamil were written two thousand years ago in a comer of south India, in a Dravidian language relatively untouched by the other classical language of India, Sanskrit. 

Of the literatures of the world at that time, Sanskrit in India, Greek and Latin in Europe, Hebrew in the Middle East, and Chinese in the Far East were Tamil's contemporaries. 

The collocations and paradigms make for metonymies and metaphors, multiple contextual meanings clusters special to each language, quile untranslatable into another language like Tamil. Even when the elements of a system may be similar in two languages, like father, mother, brother, mother-in-law, etc., in kinShip, the system of relations and the feelings traditionally encouraged each relative are ali culturally sensitive and therefore part of the expressive repertoire of poets and novelists. Ramanujan took two different poems about love (What She Said) and war ( A Young Warrior ) and made point that, when we move from one to the other we are struck by the associations across them forming a web not only of the akam and puram genres. But also of the five landscape.; with all their contents signifying moods. And the themes and motifs 0f love and war. 

How does one translate a poem from another time, another culture, another language? Of, the literatures of the world at that time, Sanskrit in India, Greek and Latin in Europe, Hebrew in the Middle East, and Chinese in the Far East were Tamil's contemporaries. By this argument he is making clear front of us that Tamil is as old as these languages.

The subject of this paper is not the fascinating external history of this literature, but translation, the transport of poems from classical Tamil to modem English; the hazards, the damages in transit, the secret paths, and the lucky bypasses.

Further, He out the question like ' How shall we divide up and translate this poem? What are the units of translation? We may begin with the sounds. We find at once that the sound system of Tamil is very different from English. For instance, Old Tamil has six nasal consonants: a labial, a dental, an alveolar, a retroflex, a palatal and a velar-m, n, n. ii, n, n-three of which are not distinctive in English. How shall we translate a six-way system into a three-way English system (m, n, n).

English words may end in stops, as in 'cut, cup, tuck,' etc.; Tamil words do not. When we add up these myriad systemic differences, we cannot escape the fact that phonologies are systems unto themselves (even as grammatical, syntactic, lexical, semantic systems too are, as we shall see). Any unit we pick is defined by its relations to other units. So it is impossible to translate the phonology of one language into that of another-even in a related, culturally neighboring language. We can map one system on to another, but never reproduce it. A poem is identical only with itself-if that.

When we attend to syntax, we see that Tamil syntax is mostly left- branching. English syntax is, by and large, rightward. Even a date like 'the 19th of June, 1988,' when translated into Tamil, would look like '1988, June, 19.' The Tamil sentence is the mirror image of the English one.

When one translates, one is translating not only Tamil, its phonology, grammar and semantics, but this entire intertextual web, this intricate yet lucid second language of landscapes which holds together natural forms with cultural ones in a code, a grammar, a rhetoric, and a poetics. 

✴️Part: 2

Ramanujan takes a closer look at the original of Kapilar's poem, Ainkurunuru 203, 'What She Said', and his translation, quoted earlier in this essay. The word annay (in spoken Tamil, ammo), literally 'mother', is a familiar term of address for any woman, here a 'girlfriend'. So he have translated it as 'friend', to make clear that the poem is not addressed to a mother (as some other poems are) but to a girl friend.

Note the long, crucial, left-branching phrase in Tamil: '. . . hisland's / [in- leaf-holes low /animals- having- drunk- / and]- leftover, muddied water’(in a piece-by-piece translation). In his English, it becomes 'the leftover water in his land, low in the water holes / covered with leaves and muddied by animals.' His phrase order in English tries to preserve the order and syntax of : themes, not of single words: (I) his land's waler, followed by (2) leaf– covered waterholes, and (3) muddied by animals.

The poem is a kurinci piece, about the lovers' first union, set in the hillside landscape. My title ('What she said to her girl friend, when she returned from the hills') summarizes the whole context (speaker, listener, occasion) from the old colophon that accompanies the poem. The progression is lost if we do not preserve the order of themes so naturally carried by the left-branching syntax of Tamil. More could be said about it from the point of view of the old commentaries.

The love poems get parodied, subverted and played with in comic poems about poems. In a few Centuries, both the love poems and the war poems provide models and motives for religious poems. God like Krsna the are both lovers and Warriors.

Thus any single poem is part of a set, a family of sets, a landscape, a genre. The intertextuality is concentric on a pattern of membership as well as neighborhoods of likenesses and unlikeness. Somehow a translator has to translate each poem in ways that suggest these interest, dialogue and network.

✴️Part: 3 

If attempting a translation means attempting such an impossibly intricate task, Foredoomed to failure, what makes it possible at all? At least four things.

💠1, Universals:

If there were no Universals in which languages participate and of which all particular languages were selections and combinations, no language learning, translation, comparative studies or cross-cultural understanding of even the most meager kind would be possible. if such universals did not exist we would have had to invent them.

💠2, Interiorised contexts:

Poems interiorize the entire culture. Indeed we know the culture of the ancient Tamils only through a careful study of these poems. Later colophons and commentaries explore and explicate this knowledge carried by the poems setting them in context using them to make lexicons and charming the fauna and flora of landscape. 

💠3, Systematicity:

The systematicity of such bodies of poetry, the way figures, genres, personae, etc., intermesh in a master-code, is a great help in entering this intricate yet lucid world of words. One translates not single poems but bodies of poetry that create and contain their origins world.

💠4, Structural mimicry: 

The structures of individual poems, the unique figures they make out of all the given codes of their language, rhetoric , and poetics, become the points of entry. So one attempts a structural mimicry, to translate relations, not items not single words but phrases, sequences, sentences; not metrical Units but rhythms; not morphology but syntactic patterns.

🔆Conclusion : 

The translation must not only represent,, but re- present, the original. One walks a tightrope between the To-language and the From-language, in a double loyalty. A translator is an 'artist on oath'. Sometimes one may succeed only in re-presenting a poem, not in closely representing it. At such times one draws consolation from parables like the following.If the representation in another language is not close enough, but still succeeds in ’carrying’ the poem in some sense, we will have two poems instead of one. 

Thinking Activity

Thinking Activity: Unit 2: Comparative Literature 

 

Hello everyone, i am Nidhi Dave a student of the department of English, MKBU. This blog is response of my Thinking Activity given by professor Dr. Dilip Barad sir. In this blog I'm going to discuss about the articles of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies. 

 

♻️Unit: 2, 4: Introduction: What is Comparative Literature Today? 

 

Introduction: What is Comparative Literature Today? by Susan Bassnett. This Article is explained by my self, Nidhi Dave and Janvi Nakum, students of the English department MKBU. 

🔅Here is the video recording of the presentation

🔅Here is the presentation presented in above video:

comparative literature by Susan Bassnett from NidhiDave30

 

♻️Unit: 2, 5: Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline. 

This Article is explained by Hirva Pandya and Vachhalata Joshi, students of the English department MKBU.

 

🔆Abstract:

After five hundred years of print and the massive transformations in society and culture that it unleashed, we are in the midst of another watershed moment in human history that is on par with the invention of the printing press or perhaps the discovery of the New World. This article focuses on the questions like it is essential that humanists assert and insert themselves into the twenty - first century cultural wars, which are largely being defined, fought, and won by corporate interests.

 👉Key Arguments:

Why, for example, were humanists, foundations, and universities conspicuously – even scandalously – silent when Google won its book search lawsuit and, effectively, won the right to transfer copyright of orphaned books to itself? Why were they silent when the likes of Sony and Disney essentially engineered the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, radically restricting intellectual property, copyright, and sharing? The Manifesto is a call to Humanists for a much deeper engagement with digital culture production, publishing, access, and ownership. If new technologies are dominated and controlled by corporate and entertainment inter ests, how will our cultural legacy be rendered in new media formats? By whom and for whom? 

Comparative Literature since they raise questions that have formed the methodological, disciplinary, and institutional foundation of a wide - range of academic fi elds in the Humanities, including history and art history, literary and cultural studies, and the humanistic social sciences, such as anthropology, archaeology, and information studies

If new technologies are dominated and controlled by corporate and entertainment inter ests, how will our cultural legacy be rendered in new media formats? By whom and for whom? These are questions that Humanists must urgently ask and answer.

The question that we need to confront in the fourth information age concerns the specifi city of the digital medium vis - à - vis other media formats, the various kinds of cultural knowledge produced, the ways of analyzing it, the various platforms that support it, and, fi nally, the modes of authorship and reception that facilitate new architectures of participation and new architectures of power. 

Who is an author? What is a work? What constitutes a text, particularly in an environment in which any text is readerly and writerly by potentially anyone?

Comparative Media Studies thus enables us to return to some of the most fundamental questions of our fi eld with new urgency: Who is an author? What is a work? What constitutes a text, particularly in an environment in which any text is readerly and writerly by potentially anyone? 

Google has already digitized and indexed more than ten million books, allowing scholars to perform ever - more complex searches, discover patterns, and potentially export large datasets derived from the digital book repository into other applications (such as Geographic Information Systems) in order to pursue quantitative questions such as statistical correlations, publishing histories, and semantic analyses as well as qualitative, hermeneutical questions. Spurred by the work of Lev Manovich and Noah Wardrip - Fruin, the fi eld of “ cultural analytics ” has emerged over the past fi ve years to bring the tools of high - end computational analysis and data visualization to dissect large - scale cultural datasets.  Such datasets might include historical data that have been digitized, such as every shot in the fi lms of Vertov or Eisenstein, the covers and content of every magazine published in the United States in the twentieth century, or the collected works of Milton, not to mention contemporary, real - time data fl ows such as tweets, SMS messaging, or search trends. Because meaning, argumentation, and interpretative work are not limited to the “ insides ” of texts or necessarily even require “ close ” readings, Comparative Data Studies allows us to use the computational tools of cultural analytics to enhance literary scholarship precisely by creating models, visualizations, maps, and semantic webs of data that are simply too large to read or comprehend using unaided human faculties. My point here is not to pitch “ close ” hermeneutical readings against “ distant ” data mappings, but rather to appreciate the synergistic possibilities between a hyper - localized, deep analysis and a macrocosmic view. 

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

Nicholas Negroponte once asserted in his wildly optimistic book Being Digital (Negroponte, 1995 ), for they always have an underbelly: mobile phones, social networking technologies, and perhaps even the hundred - dollar computer, will not only be used to enhance education, spread democracy, and enable global communication but will likely be used to perpetrate violence and even orchestrate genocide in much the same way that the radio and the railway did in the last century (despite the belief that both would somehow liberate humanity and join us all together in a happy, interconnected world that never existed before)

Paul Gilroy analyzed in his study of “ the fatal junction of the concept of nationality with the concept of culture ” along the “ Black Atlantic, ” voyages of discovery, enlightenment, and progress also meant, at every moment, voyages of conquest, enslavement, and destruction. Indeed, this is why iany discussion of technology cannot be separated from a discussion about formations of power and instrumentalized authority.

N. Katherine Hayles, I find myself wondering – as we ponder various possible futures for Comparative Literature in the second decade of the twenty - first century – how to rouse ourselves from the “ somnolence [of] five hundred years of print ” (Hayles, 2002 : p. 29). Of course, there is nothing neutral, objective, or necessary about the medium of print; rather it is a medium that has a long and complex history connected to the formation of academic disciplines, institutions, epistemologies, and ideologies, not to mention conceptions of authorship and scholarly research.

Darnton ’s assessment seriously that we are now in the fifth decade of the fourth information age in the history of humankind, it seems to me that we ought to try to understand not only the contours of the discipline of Comparative Literature – and for that matter, the Humanities as a whole – from the perspective of an information - and media - specific analysis, but that we also ought to come to terms with the epistemic disjunction between our digital age and everything that came before it.

Walter Benjamin did in The Arcades Project (1928 – 40; 1999), it is necessary, I believe, to interrogate both the media and methodologies for the study of literature, culture, and society. 

The “ problem ” of Comparative Literature is to figure out how to take seriously the range of new authoring, annotation, and sharing platforms that have transformed global cultural production. 

• Comparative Media Studies 
• Comparative Data Studies 
• Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies 

1, Comparative Media Studies:

      For Nelson, a hypertext is a:

Body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper [ ... ] Such a system could grow indefinitely, gradually including more and more of the world ’ s written knowledge.

Comparative Literature be practiced when literature and scholarly work are created, exchanged, and critiqued in a multimodal environment such as the Web? And, at the same time, how do we as scholars develop methodologies that appreciate and evaluate the media - specifi city of every literary or cultural artifact, including print? Comparative Literature as Comparative Media Studies foregrounds the formal material qualities of the surface structures upon which inscriptions are made, the technical processes of reproduction and circulation, the institutional mechanisms of dissemination and authorization, the reading and navigation practices enabled by the media form, and the broad cultural and social implications for literacy and knowledge production. It investigates all media as information and knowledge systems that are bound up with histories of power, institutions, and governing and regulatory bodies which legitimate and authorize certain utterances, while screening out and dismissing other.

Comparative Media Studies also implies that the output or scholarly “ work ” is not uni - medial and might not even be textual. It draws attention to the design and interrelationship of every unit of the argument, whether a page, a folio, a database field, XML metadata, a map, a film still, or something else. Comparative Media Studies enables us to return to some of the most fundamental questions of our field with new urgency: Who is an author? What is work? What constitutes a text, particularly in an environment in which any text is readerly and writerly by potentially anyone?

2, Comparative Data Studies:

Lev Manovich and Noah Wardrip - Fruin, the field of “ cultural analytics ” has emerged over the past five years to bring the tools of high - end computational analysis and data visualization to dissect large - scale cultural datasets.

Comparative Data Studies allows us to use the computational tools of cultural analytics to enhance literary scholarship precisely by creating models, visualizations, maps, and semantic webs of data that are simply too large to read or comprehend using unaided human faculties. performing “ close ” and “ distant ” analyses of data, Comparative Data Studies also radically broadens the canon of objects and cultural material.

As Jerome McGann argues with elegant analysis of “radiant textuality, ” the differences between the codex and the electronic versions of the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, illustrate that the electronic OED is “ a metabook [that has] consumed everything that the code OED provides and reorganized it at a higher level ” adding value through new indexing and search mechanisms, hyperlinks, editing and annotation tools, and even reading strategies.

The “ data ” of Comparative Data Studies is constantly expanding in terms of volume, data type, production and reception platform, and analytic strategy.

3, Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies:

While the radically “ democratizing ” claims of the web and information technologies should certainly be critically interrogated, I think that it is incontestable that the barriers for voicing participation, creating and sharing content, and even developing software have been significantly lowered when compared to the world of print. And more than that, collaborative authorship, peer - to - peer sharing of content, and crowdsourced evaluation of data are the hallmarks of the participatory web known as the world of Web 2.0. We no longer just “ browse ” and passively consume predigested content but are actively engaged in the production, annotation, and evaluation of digital media and software thanks to the open - source movement. This is an economy based on abundance, creative commons, open access, and the proliferation of copies, not one based on scarcity, property, trade secrets, and the sanctity of originals, although, as James Boyle points out, there are many corporate entities eager to regulate the public domain and control the “ commons of the mind. 

Comparative literature scholarship has not generally concerned itself with design, interactivity, navigation strategies, and collaboration, these issues are a decisive part of the domain of Comparative Authorship and platform studies.

Conclusion:

This article mainly focuses on this twenty-first century in terms of digital humanities how we are doing comparative studies. After discussing various arguments, we come to know that to date, it has more than three million content pages, more than three hundred million edits, over ten million registered users, and articles in forty - seven languages (Wikipedia Statistics). This is a massive achievement for eight years of work. Wikipedia represents a dynamic, flexible, and open - ended network for knowledge creation and distribution that underscores process, collaboration, access, interactivity, and creativity, with an editing model and versioning system that documents every contingent decision made by every contributing author. At this moment in its short life, Wikipedia is already the most comprehensive, representative, and pervasive participatory platform for knowledge production ever created by humankind. In my opinion, that is worth some pause and reflection, perhaps even by scholars in a future disciplinary incarnation of Comparative Literature. 

Thinking Activity

Thinking Activity: unit 4 - Poems

Hello everyone, I am Nidhi Dave, a student of the department of English, MKBU. This blog is a response to my Thinking Activity given by professor Yesha Ma'am. In this blog I'm going to discuss the thematic study of poems.

🔆The Piano and The Drums by Gabriel Okara 

   ✴️About the author: 

Gabriel Okara is prominent among African poets. He was born in 1921 and raised to be an Ijaw man at Bumadi village in Niger Delta, Nigeria. His full name is Gabriel Imomotimi Gbaingbain Okara.

Gabriel Okara as an African renowned poet is noted to be someone who fathoms African culture right from the onset. He is cognizant of the ways at which Africans are biding with their cultural orientation. In such a case, he exercises an African musical instrument, the drum , that is peculiar to their primitive culture to make a stand for Africans and their culture in his poetic presentation. The drum is actually a symbol plied by the poet in order to make delineation for Africans. 

✴️The Piano and The Drums:

In the poem, the piano and the drums, the poetic persona shows the difference between the normal lifestyle of Africans and that of the modern world. The setting of the poem, as is seen in the poem, dates from the advent of civilization to the modern time. The central theme of the poem hinges on the effect of foreign culture on Africans. This theme he elaborates using the effect of music on the poetic persona as an analogy. The poem tries to emphasize the purity of African content before the interference of civilization.

In essence, Gabriel Okara perceives the desecration of the African way of life from the musical perspective, and comes out to lament about it through the instrument of poetry.

✴️Thematic study of poem:

1) Nature:

• African natural sceneries 
•  Animals
• Mystic rhythm
• Naked warmth

2) Motherland:

• Mother's lap
• Description of nature
• Paths with no innovation
• Naked warmth (African essence)

3) Childhood nostalgia:

• Primal youth
• Animals-leaves- flowers
• Mother's lap-suckling

4) Cultural conflict:

• Drum versus Piano 
• African culture versus Western Culture
• Complexed piano versions - Natural drum Urbans and rawness

5) Dilemma:

• Keep one culture - follow another
•  African culture base - Western culture desire
• Chaos of culture - which one to follow
•  What to choose
• How to dwell in both culture 

1, Nature:

Piano and Drums is quite clearly a poem about the cultural dichotomy of traditional and Western cultures in post-colonial Africa, but the raw emotion of the poem makes it an expression of confusion that anyone tied to more than one culture (which is a lot of people in this day and age of globalization) can relate to. Even failing that, the imagery of the poem is powerful enough to express his confusion – we can almost feel Okara’s indecision seeping through the page. Okara’s metaphors are simple but fitting: the drums represent traditional African life, while the piano represents the Western world. What I love so much about the writing in this poem is how his reaction to each “instrument” is portrayed.

The environment in this culture is physically dangerous, surrounded by wild animals. Drums here are a way of communication, and “jungle drums telegraphing the mystic rhythm, urgent, raw…” shows the way of life in this culture. This is life which is simple, near the beginnings of man. The stanza ... ... middle of paper ... ...with one another, with Drums illustrating primitive behavior, and a savage, dangerous culture. The connotations of the piano are complex and technical. The piano uses significantly different word sounds, showing that it is learnt, westernized and intricate compared to the drums which is instinctive and naturally acquired, and simple. The poem uses no set rhyme pattern which suits the poem as it has an undecided effect, emphasizing the confusion of the persona over his future.

2, Motherland: 

Once again, the poetic persona remembers of years back when he was still an infant in his mother’s laps suckling her breast (lines 9 to 11). Suddenly, he is walking the paths of the village with no new ideas of a way of life different from the one he is born into: 

In this line we find the theme of motherland.

 

“At once I’m walking simple

Paths with no innovations,

Rugged, fashioned with the naked

Warmth of hurrying feet and groping hearts

In green leaves and wild flowers pulsing.”

3, Childhood nostalgia: 

The poetic persona remembers years back when he was still an infant in his mother’s laps suckling her breast. Suddenly, he is walking the paths of the village with no new ideas of a way of life different from the one he is born in.

4, The Theme of Culture / Conflict: 

Culture in Piano and Drums by Gabriel Okara In the poem “Piano and Drums” the poet Gabriel Okara depicts and contrasts two different cultures through symbolism of pianos and drums. The Poem is divided into four stanzas. The first two stanzas represent the “drum” culture and the second two stanzas show the “piano” culture. The description of the drums is in two stanzas, but is one sentence long. The first line of the first stanza: ‘When at break of day at a riverside’ Uses trochees to emphasize the deliberate broken rhythm. The stanza has savage words, “bleeding flesh,” “urgent raw,” “leopard snarling,” “spears poised,” to show that this is a primitive culture, one which has dependency on the environment, as is represented by the “hunters crouch with spears poised.” The environment in this culture is physically dangerous, surrounded by wild animals. Drums here are a way of communication, and “jungle drums telegraphing the mystic rhythm, urgent, raw…” shows the way of life in this culture. This is life which is simple, near the beginnings of man. The stanza ... ... middle of paper ... ...with one another, with Drums illustrating primitive behavior, and a savage, dangerous culture. The connotations of the piano are complex and technical. The piano uses significantly different word sounds, showing that it is learnt, westernized and intricate compared to the drums which is instinctive and naturally acquired, and simple. The poem uses no set rhyme pattern which suits the poem as it has an undecided effect, emphasizing the confusion of the persona over his future. 

5, The Theme of Dilemma:

The theme of dial also features in the poem, while the poet speaks glowingly of african culture, he also finds european culture, despite its shortcomings, seductive. Thus he is unable to decide whether to let go of the inherited culture or embrace the new one; this is the plight of many educated Africans today . many have however resolve this dilemma by taking from the two cultures in what has come to be known as cultural syncretism Poetic Device of literary terms in Piano and Drum. 

Poem: 2 , Vultures by Chinua Achebe 

‘Vultures’ is one of the famous poems of the Nigerian poet Chinua Achebe. It is a dark and somber piece that focuses on the Belsen concentration camp and a commandant who works there.

✴️Chinua Achieve: 

Chinua Achebe was born on the 16th of November, in 1930 to Isaiah Okafo Achebe, a servant of the church missionary society, and Janet Anaenechi Iloegbunam. He spent his childhood in Igbo town. The storytelling was part of an ancient tradition in the Igbo society. His mother and sister used to narrate him various stories on Chinua’s request, which helped him develop his interest in literature. His father also had a vast literary collection along with the pictures of colleges hung at their home including, Shakespeare’s literature and ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’. These influences played a crucial role in his early development toward writing.

✴️Poem:Vultures:- 

Chinua Achebe’s ‘Vultures’ is a gritty poem that is hard to read due to the harrowing subject matter. By using several visual and olfactory imagery, Achebe creates a dark and filthy environment in the poem. It depicts a truthful picture of the Belsen concentration camp. The commandant, in the poem, is none other than a representative of a class, who selflessly thinks of his own family even if thousands of families are rotting just around him. The fetid smell of rotting humanity inside him gets featured through the imagery of the vultures. 

✴️Thematic study of poem: 

Predation, love and barbarism are three major thematic strands of this poem. Achebe has beautifully presented the predatory rapacity of colonialism through the Commandant at Belson, equating him with the vultures enjoying their feast at the charnel house. Yet, Achebe says that both show the other side of their barbarism that is love. When vultures have their fill, they show love for each other and when the commandment is tired of cruelty over his subjects, he shows love and tenderness for his children. The poem, then, asks the readers to praise the Lord that he has put love in hate and hate in love in almost all his creatures.

1, Nazism:

Bergen Belson was one of the many notorious Nazi concentration camps. Unlike the death camps such as Auschwitz it did not have gas chambers. Instead prisoners were worked to death on a starvation diet. Conditions were appealing and the cruelty was unspeakable. By the time the camp was liberated by Allied troops 50,000 European citizens had been killed within its fences many of the dead were put into mass graves; others were incinerated in giant crematoria. One its most famous victims was the diarist Anne Frank. 

2, Vulture as metaphor: 

Vultures symbolize death and decomposition. The poet tells us that these symbols of death and evil, who eat the decaying corpses, can have a loving side. This image of love contrasts with their evil nature. bashed-in head – another image of violence that creates a terrifying/ugly picture of them.

3, Ecology-vulture:

This first stanza of ‘Vultures’ begins with a relentlessly long sentence filled with dark, sullen descriptions. Achebe uses alliteration in the second and third lines: “and drizzle of one despondent/ dawn unstirred by harbingers.” But this is an enjambed line and so doesn’t give the ebb and flow usually associated with alliteration. This helps to emphasize the bleak tone Achebe is trying to achieve.This creates a sinner atmosphere. Achebe identifies the charnel house as the belsen concentration camp where Jews and other prisoners were killed and their bodies were often burned. 'Human roast' refers to the victims in the concentration camp as if they were being cooked.

4, Humanism: 

In the Humanism theme we find in two stanzas Achebe skillfully contrasts the “light” of love with the “dark” of death by mentioning that in this darkest of environments, the “charnel-house,” a storage place for corpses, there is the presence of love. He personifies love itself.

Achebe uses an exclamation point on the phrase “her face turned to the wall” because love can’t stand to look at the atrocities contained within. It may also be a reference to people being lined up against walls before being gunned down by firing squads, but that’s purely speculative.His description is not particularly flattering. The commandant’s only physical description includes his “hairy nostrils” but his actions are kind and very human. He brings chocolate home for his child. A kind gesture and not actions one would probably associate with a war criminal.

This is further emphasized by the lines “the very germ/ of that kindred love.” This is not the voice of the narrator but rather a peek into the psyche of the commandant, showing the narrator’s omniscience. It is chilling to think that the commandant views his softer side as a curse, or a “germ”. Achebe closes this stanza by using the phrase “perpetuity of evil” suggesting that evilness is enduring, everlasting. This leaves the poem on a very bleak note. 

5, Scavenger: 

In the theme of Scavenger we find in the third stanza how Vulture is important in this poem for scavengers. The third stanza then shifts its focus to the Commandant at Belsen Camp, who at the time is finishing work and going home for the day.

This is the thematic study of both poems.

Words: 1,999

Thinking Activity

Thinking Activity: Unit 1,  Comparative Studies

Hello everyone, i am Nidhi Dave a student of the department of English, MKBU. This blog is response of my Thinking Activity given by professor Dr. Dilip Barad sir. In this blog I'm going to discuss about the articles of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies. 

✳️Unit: 1. 1,Why Comparative Indian Literature?  

This Article is explained by Divya Sheta and Amena, students of the English department MKBU.

💠Abstract:

Comparative Literature is an interdisciplinary field; it studies literature across national borders, across time period, across language, across genes, across boundaries. It provides geographically and chronologically a broader perspective on the literary and cultural achievement of human kind than is possible from within a single literature alone.Comparative Literature provides readers a serious, sustained understanding of cultures beyond their own and helps them to become better global citizens.

✴️Key Arguments:

🔅Can an area of enquiry clearly demarcated by linguistic and political boundaries serve the basic demands of comparative literature?

🔅Does not the area identified as Indian literature impose certain restrictions on the investigator and precondition him?

🔅Why should a scholar of literature prefer Indian literature to comparative literature, which promises a greater scope and a wider perspective?

♻️Why Comparative Literature? by Sisir Kumar Das 

Das states that "Indian Literature or Literary studies still fragment into smaller linguistic units as we know the reason is multilinguality and multi religion or multicultural_nation which are extremely limited.

Indo-Anglian writers such as Sri Aurobindo and others have failed to provide us with a certain critical framework to study Indian literature together.

The study of the Indian languages by linking it with comparative literature still indeed to indicate the proper framework within which Indian literature can be studied.

 The term 'Comparative Indian Literature' is not self-explanatory and not only to define the term Indian literature but also to define the necessity of the qualifier.

Das marked that we must try to find out the exact nature of relation between comparative Literature and Indian comparative literature and also try to see it as an express necessity to study literary relation within a comparative framework.

The term Comparative Indian literature, like comparative literature, is not self explanatory, and it is necessary not only to define the term ' Indian literature'  but also to defend the necessity of the qualifier. Comparative literature emerged as a new discipline to counterct the notion of the autonomy of national literature. This is one of the reasons why every comparatist is so anxious to make a serious distinction between comparative literature and world literature.

The need for an academic enquiry into this condition of ‘comparitivism’ emerged in French and the Russian academic circles during the 1900s, wherein debates between General and Comparative Literature surfaced along with engagements related to ‘form’ and ‘content’. During the 19th century the need to construct national identities was felt across America, Greece, Poland, France and Italy, and ‘World Literature’ emerged as an expression and means of identifying with other national identities, spearheaded by Goethe who called it ‘Weltliteratur’. However, it must be noted that World Literature refers to a taxonomical category, whereby the collection of the finest specimens of literary productions across the world were being assimilated according to European sensibilities. Various ways in which Shakespeare was made available to British India and Africa would lead one to explore the ways in which his plays have been adapted or translated by the readers, which forms an important illustration of Reception Studies.Comparative Literature as a discipline was formed to provide its practitioners the opportunity to move beyond the boundaries of English and engage with the variety of literatures found in other European languages. The course was designed in such a manner that students gained an understanding of one regional language, Bangla and one classical language, Sanskrit, and later Tamil, the primary idea being to first situate other Englishes across the globe, and the second to have access to two distinct language families within India, via which other languages could also be approached.

Comparative Indian literature as a valid area of Comparative literature, I do so not because comparative parative literature in the West is exclusively a study of Western literature. The lesson we must learn from the Western comparatist is the lesson of vigilance against dilettantism. 

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 of multilingualism is now more or less appreciated by Indian scholars.  

In order to make literaty studies free from these psychological restrictions, we need to look at our literatures from whithin, so that we can also respond to the literature of other parts of the world without any inhibition or prejudice. Our journey is not from comparative literature to Comparative Indian literature, but from comparative Indian literature to Comparative literature.

✳️ Conclusion: 

After concluding this article we examine that Dev 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 interliterariness.It is here Dev perceives Indian literature, that is, not as a fixed or determinate entity but as an ongoing and interliterary process: Indian language and literature ever in the re/making. 

❇️Unit:1. 2, Comparative literature and Culture:

This Article is explained by Divya Parmar and Mayuri Pandya, students of the English department MKBU.

🔆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 a priori situation and conditions of diversity. He therefore argues that to speak of an Indian literature in the singular is problematic. Nonetheless, Dev also observes that to speak of Indian literature in the plural is equally problematic. Such a characterization, he urges, either overlooks or obscures manifest interrelations and affinities. His article compares the unity and the diversity thesis, and identifies the relationship between Indian commonality and differences as the prime site of comparative literature in India. 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. Dev 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 interliterariness. It is t/here Dev perceives Indian literature, that is, not as a fixed or determinate entity but as an ongoing and interliterary process: Indian language and literature ever in the re/making. 

✴️Key argument:

🔅A priori location of comparative literature with regard to aspects of diversity and unity in India.

🔅Interliterary process and a dialectical view of literary interaction Linguistic diversity.

🔅Is Indian literature, in singular, a valid category, or are we rather to speak of Indian literature in the plural? 

♻️Comparative Literature in India By Aniya Dev 

In this article, he discuss an apriori placement of comparative literature in terms of features of diversity and unity in India, a country with enormous language diversity and consequently various literatures. Because I believe that in the case of India, the study of literature should include the notion of the interliterary process and a dialectical view of literary interaction, my proposal entails a special view of the discipline of comparative literature. Let me start with a quick overview of linguistic diversity: prior censuses in 1961 and 1971 reported a total of 1,652 languages, while the most recent census in 1981 documented 221 spoken languages (excluding languages with fewer than 10,000 speakers).Of course, many of the 221 language groups are small, and only the eighteen major languages named in the Indian Constitution account for the majority of the population's speakers. In addition to the eighteen languages listed in the Constitution, the Sahitya Akademi (National Academy of Letters) has recognised four additional languages for their literary significance (Assamese, Bengali, Dogri, Indian English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kankani, Kashmiri, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Panjabi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, This number of twenty-two major languages and literatures, however, is misleading because secondary school and university curriculum sometimes incorporate additional languages spoken in the vicinity of the educational institution.

Gurbhagat Singh who has been discussing the notion of "differential multilogue" (see Singh). He does not accept the idea of Indian literature as such but opts for the designation of literatures produced in India. Further, he rejects the notion of Indian literature because the notion as such includes and promotes a nationalist identity. As a relativist, Singh accords literatures not only linguistic but also cultural singularities. With regard to the history of comparative literature as a discipline, he rejects both the French and the American schools as well as the idea of Goethe's Weltliteratur. Instead, he argues for a celebration of difference and has anticipated Charles Bernheimer's much discussed Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism. For Singh, comparative literature is thus an exercise in differential multilogue. His insistence on the plurality of logoi is particularly interesting because it takes us beyond the notion of dialogue, a notion that comparative literature is still confined to. Singh's proposal of diffe-rential multilogue as a program will perhaps enable us to understand Indian diversity without sacrificing the individualities of the particulars. Singh's notion of differential multilogue reflects a poststructuralist trend in Indian discourse today, a trend that manifests itself among others by a suspicion of the designation of Indian literatures as one. One of the reasons for this suspicion is that the key to the notion is held centrally, whether by an institution or a synod of experts leading to an accumulation of power. Poststructuralism is by no means purist; what matters more than anything else is the historical perspective that upholds difference. 

Jaidev, criticising the fad of existentialist aestheticism in some contemporary Indian fiction, develops an argument for this cultural differential approach. However, and importantly, Jaidev's notion of an Indian sensus communis is not that routine Indianness which we often encounter from our cultural ambassadors or in the West, that is, those instances of "national" and racial image formations which suggest homogeneity and result in cultural stereotyping. The concept of an Indian sensus communis in the context of Singh's differential multilogue or Jaidev's differential approach brings me to the question of situs and theory. 

Aijaz Ahmad's In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. Ahmad describes the construct of a "syndicated" Indian literature that suggests an aggregate and unsatisfactory categorization of Indian literature. Ahmad also rules out the often argued analogy of Indian literature with that of European literature by arguing that the notion of "European literature" is at best an umbrella designation and at worst a pedagogical imposition while Indian literature is classifiable and categorizable. Further, he argues that while European and African literatures have some historical signifiers in addition to their geographical designation, these are recent concepts whereas Indian homogeneity has the weight of tradition behind it. In Ahmad's argumentation, the problem is that in the "Indian" archive of literature, Indianness ultimately proves limited when compared with the differential litera-ture comprised in each of the twenty-two literatures recognized by the Sahitya Akademi. 

Rather, they constitute twenty-two different archives. An "Indian" archive of literature as represented by an "English" archive -- while non-hegemonious on the one hand by

removal from a differential archive but hegemonizing by a latent colonial attitude on the other also reflects the official language policy of the government: English, while not included in the Indian Constitution, is still recognized as a lingua franca of government, education, etc. For example, until recently the government sponsored the National Book Trust, an entity entrusted with the task of inter-Indian translation by a process of a first translation into English followed by translation from that into the other languages. Goethe's original idea of Weltliteratur and its use by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. 

Swapan Majumdar takes this systemic approach in his 1985 book, Comparative Literature: Indian Dimensions, where Indian literature is neither a simple unity as hegemonists of the nation-state persuasion would like it to be, nor a simple diversity as relativists or poststructuralists would like it to be. That is, Majumdar suggests that Indian literature is neither "one" nor "many" but rather a systemic whole where many sub-systems interact towards one in a continuous and never-ending dialectic. Such a systemic view of Indian literature predicates that we take all Indian literatures together, age by age, and view them comparatively. And this is the route of literary history Sisir Kumar Das has taken with his planned ten-volume project, A History of Indian Literature, whose first volume, 1800-1910: Western Impact / Indian Response, appeared in 1991.

However, the underlying and most important finding is a pattern of commonality in nineteenth-century Indian literatures. Das's work on the literatures of the nineteenth century in India does not designate this Indian literature a category by itself. Rather, the work suggests a rationale for the proposed research, the objective being to establish whether a pattern can be found through the ages. One age's pattern may not be the same as another age's and this obviously preempts any given unity of Indian literature. Thus, Das's method and results to date show that Indian literature is neither a unity nor is it a total differential.

Umashankar Joshi -- a supporter of the unity approach -- was the first president of the Indian National Comparative Literature Association, while the Kannada writer U.R. Anantha Murthy is the current president of the Comparative Literature Association of

India in addition to being the president of Sahitya Akademi.

The discipline of comparative literature, that is, its institutional manifestation as in the national association of comparatists reflects the binary approach to the question of Indian literature as I explained above. However, the Association also reflects a move toward a dialectic. This is manifest in the fact that Murthy's approach concerns a subtle move away from the routine unity approach and towards aspects of inter-Indian reading. In other words, the method of Comparative Literature allows for a view of Indian literature in the context of unity and diversity in a dialectical interliterary process and situation. There was a time when I spoke in terms of an extra consciousness on the part of individual langua-ge writers: for Bengali literature, for instance, I saw a Bengali+, for Hindi literature a Hindi+, for Tamil literature a Tamil+, etc.

✴️Conclusion:

Thus, inter-Indian reception presupposes that our situs is in our first text, that is, first language literature. This is crucial for there is no no-man'sland or neutral territory between Indian literatures.Finally, let me assure you that, obviously, the problematics of unity and diversity are not unique to India. However, in keeping with my proposal that the situs of both theorist and theory is an important issue, I demonstrate here the application of the proposal. If I had discussed, for instance, Canadian diversity, it would have been from the outside, that is, from an Indian situs. I am not suggesting extreme relativism, but 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. 

✴️Unit: 1, 3, Comparative Literature in India: An Overview of its History  

This Article is explained by Jheel Barad and Dhruvita Dhameliya, students of the English department MKBU.

🔅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 beginning 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 areas of culture and knowledge, particularly those related to marginalized spaces, along with the focus on recovering new areas of non-hierarchical literary relations.

♻️Comparative Literature in India:  An Overview of its History by Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta, Jadavpur University

☀️The Beginning:

Contemporary literature as a discipline, there were texts focusing on comparative aspects of literature in India. The idea of world literature gained ground towards the end of the nineteenth century when in Bengal. 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 literatures of the world to promote, as the eminent poet-translator Satyendranath Dutta in 1904 stated, “relationships of joy” (Dutta 124).

The talk by Rabindranath Tagore entitled “Visvasahitya” (meaning “world literature”), given at the National Council of Education in 1907, served as a pre-text to the establishment of the department of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University in 1956, the same year in which the university started functioning. 

Buddhadeva Bose, one of the prime architects of modern Bangla poetry, did not fully subscribe to the idealist visions of Tagore, for he believed it was necessary to break away from Tagore to be a part of the times, of modernity, but he too directly quoted from Rabindranath’s talk on “visvasahitya” while writing about the discipline, interpreting it more in the context of establishing connections, of ‘knowing’ literatures of the world. Bose, also well-known for his translations of Baudelaire, Hoelderlin and 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 ancient times in a particular tradition in order to make it a part of the 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. The first syllabus offered by the department in 1956 was quite challenging. There was a considerable section of Sanskrit literature along with Greek and Latin literature and then Bengali, its relation with Sanskrit literature and its general trajectory, and then a large section of European literature from the ancient to the modern period.

☀️Indian Literature as Comparative Literature: 

It was actually in the seventies that new perspectives related to pedagogy began to enter the field of Comparative Literature in Jadavpur.Indian literature entered the syllabus in a fairly substantial manner but not from the point of view of asserting national identity. It was rather an inevitable move – if comparative literature meant studying a text within a network of relations, where else could these relations be but in contiguous spaces where one also encountered shared histories with differences? In fact the rallying point of Comparative Literature studies in the country was around this nodal component of Indian literary themes and forms, a focal point of engagement of the Modern Indian Languages department established in 1962 in Delhi University. 

The focus on Indian Literature within the discipline of Comparative Literature led to the opening up of many areas of engagement. Older definitions of Indian literature often with only Sanskrit at the centre, with the focus on a few canonical texts to the neglect of others, particularly oral and performative traditions, had to be abandoned. One also had to take a more inclusive look at histories of literature in different languages of India which were discrete histories based on language and did not do justice to the overlap between social formations, histories and languages, and to the multilingualism that formed the very core of Indian literature. 

☀️Centers of Comparative Literature Studies: 

 In 1986 a new full-fledged department of Comparative Literature was established at Veer Narmad South Gujarat University, Surat, where the 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. It must also be mentioned that comparative poetics, a core area of comparative literature studies and dissertations, particularly in the South, was taken up as a central area of research by the Visvanatha Kaviraja Institute of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics in Orissa. 

During this period two national associations of Comparative Literature came into being, one at Jadavpur called Indian Comparative Literature Association and the other in Delhi named Comparative Indian Literature Association. 

The two merged in 1992 and the Comparative Literature Association of India was formed, which today has more than a thousand members. In the early years of the Association, a large number of creative writers participated in its conferences along with academics and researchers, each enriching the horizon of vision of the other.

☀️Reconfiguration of areas of comparison: 

The eighties again saw changes and reconfigurations of areas of comparison at Jadavpur University. In the last years of the seventies, along with Indian literatures, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude became a part of the syllabus with a few other texts from Latin American Literatures and then Literatures from African countries were included. Questions of solidarity and a desire to understand resistance to oppression along with larger questions of epistemological shifts and strategies to bridge gaps in history resulting from colonial interventions were often the structuring components of these areas in the syllabus.

There was again a shift during this period as the term “influence” began to be questioned by several scholars and particularly so in colonised countries where there was a tendency to look for influences even when they were non-existent. The focus therefore shifted to reception in books like the one by the present author entitled Bibliography of Reception of World Literature in Bengali Periodicals (1890 – 1990). In several articles as well, one on the reception of the novel in Bengal for instance, the receiver and not the emitter was in focus. The much talked about 'angst’ of the romantic poet was viewed negatively. The love for serenity and ‘health’ went back to the classical period and seemed an important value in the tradition. Again while Shelley and Byron were often critiqued, the former for having introduced softness and sentimentality to Bengali poetry, they were also often praised for upholding human rights and liberty in contrast to the imperialist poetry of Kipling. Contemporary political needs then were linked with literary values and this explained the contradictory tensions often found in the reception of romanticism in Bengal. It must be mentioned that Shelley, the poet of revolt, began to have a very positive reception when the independence movement gathered momentum. In another context, a particular question that gained prominence was whether Shakespeare was imposed on Indian literature, and comparatists showed, as did Sisir Kumar Das, that there were different Shakespeares. Shakespeare’s texts might have been imposed in the classroom, but the playwright had a rich and varied reception in the world of theatre. Parsi theatre was rejuvenated by the enactment of the comedies of Shakespeare, political theatre groups appropriated his plays, while critics in different periods interpreted Shakespeare in accordance with the needs of the time. From reception studies the focus gradually turned to cross-cultural reception where reciprocity and exchange among cultures were studied. For example, one tried to study the Romantic Movement from a larger perspective, to unravel its many layers as it travelled between countries, particularly between Europe and India.

☀️Research directions:

The late nineties and the early twenties were a period of great expansion for Comparative Literature research in different parts of the country with the University Grants Commission opening its Special Assistance Programme for research in university departments. Many single literature departments were given grants under the programme to pursue studies in a comparative perspective. 

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. 

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. The need to foreground the relevance of studying literature was becoming more and more urgent in the face of a society that was all in favour of technology and the sciences and with decision makers in the realm of funding for higher education turning away from the humanities in general. A one-day colloquium on Kolkata’s Chinese connections was held in collaboration with the H.P. Biswas India-China Cultural Studies Centre of Jadavpur University and a seminar on framing intercultural studies between India and China was held with the Centre and the department of International Relations, Jadavpur University. 

☀️Interface with Translation Studies and Cultural Studies:

Comparative Literature in the country in the 21st century engaged with two other related fields of study, one was Translation Studies and the other Cultural Studies. Comparative Literature’s relationship with Translation Studies was not a new phenomenon for one or two departments or centres, such as the one in Hyderabad University, which was involved in doing translation studies for a considerable period. Today the university has a full-fledged Centre for Comparative Literature offering courses, and research in Translation Studies is an important area. Almost all departments or centres of Comparative Literature today have courses on Translation or Translation Studies. Both are seen as integral to the study of Comparative Literature. Translation Studies cover different areas of interliterary studies. Histories of translation may be used to map literary relations while analysis of acts of translation leads to the understanding of important characteristics of both the source and the target literary and cultural systems. Other dimensions of literary studies are opened up when one sees translation as rewriting.Translation practices also bring students to engage deeply with other languages and other cultures, leading to insights into the nature of the comparatist’s preoccupations. The department of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University today has a Centre for the Translation of Indian Literatures.

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 continues to occupy the central space in Comparative Literature and it is believed that intermedial studies may be integrated into the literary space.

☀️Non-hierarchical connectivity

It is evident that Comparative Literature in the country today has multifaceted goals and visions in accordance with historical needs, both local and planetary. Several University departments today offer Comparative Literature separately at the M Phil level, while many others have courses in the discipline along with single literatures. As in the case of humanities and literary studies, the discipline too is engaged with issues that would lead to the enhancement of civilizational gestures, against forces that are divisive and that constantly reduce the potentials of human beings. In doing so it is engaged in discovering new links and lines of non-hierarchical connectivity, of what 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. In all its endeavours, however, the primary aim of some of the early architects of the discipline to nurture and foster creativity continues as a subterranean force. 

☀️Conclusion:

It's worth noting at this point that in the twenty-first century, Comparative Literature in the United States collaborated with two other related fields of study: Translation Studies and Cultural Studies. Different topics of interliterary studies are covered by translation studies. Translation histories can be used to identify literary relationships, while examination of translation actions can reveal key characteristics of both the source and target literary and cultural systems. In terms of Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature has always been interested in several facets of the subject, the most prominent of which being literature and its relationship to various arts. Cultural Studies may also play a role in a variety of multidisciplinary courses offered by the discipline.