Hello readers! I am Divya Parmar and I warmly welcome you all to read my blog. This blog is a response to the thinking activity which is given by Dr Dilip barad sir. In this blog I cover points like comparative studies, then I present some points like the abstract of three articles and key arguments. So let's read about Comparative Studies.
What is Comparative Studies?
Comparative is a concept that derives from the verb “to compare” (the etymology is Latin comparare, derivation of par = equal, with prefix com-, it is a systematic comparison). Comparative studies are investigations to analyze and evaluate, with quantitative and qualitative methods, a phenomenon and/or facts among different areas, subjects, and/or objects to detect similarities and/or differences.
The cross-cultural and interdisciplinary field of comparative studies provides students the opportunity for critical analysis of social and cultural processes and their expression in religion, literature, media, the arts, science and technology. Students in the comparative studies program develop strong skills in analytical and critical thinking and in written and spoken communication. Students broaden their understanding of cultural differences as they attend to the intersections of gender, ethnicity, race and class.
Focus area of Comparative Studies:
Comparative cultural studies, the comparative study of cultural production in different contexts. Students focus their work in particular areas (e.g., visual culture, popular culture, social and critical theory).
Comparative ethnic and American studies, the study of ethnicity and race in the Americas. Students analyze how the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and class have shaped American culture.
Comparative literature, the study of world literary traditions in cultural context. Students study the literature of different historical periods and geographical areas, including some foreign language study.
Folklore, the study of everyday forms of cultural expression. Students analyze the expressive cultures of groups—music, dance, story, food, architecture, craft, festival, custom—and how groups and the scholars who study them deploy these forms to affect relations of power.
Religious studies, the study of different religious traditions in cultural context. Students focus their work on relationships between religion and such areas as politics, science and technology, gender and sexuality, and race and ethnicity.
Science and technology studies, the study of science and technology as forms of cultural expression. Students analyze cultural, political and economic factors in relation to directions of scientific research and technological development.
Article no 1. "Why Comparative Indian Literature?" By Sisir Kumar Das
Abstract:
"Why Comparative Indian Literature" is a collection of essays edited by Amiya Dev and Sisir Kumar Das, which explores the relevance and importance of comparative literature in the Indian context. The book discusses the need for comparative literary studies in India, which is a country of diverse languages, cultures, and literary traditions. The essays examine the challenges and opportunities of comparative literary studies, as well as the potential for a new kind of literary criticism that is rooted in the Indian experience. The book also presents comparative readings of various literary works from Indian languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, and Kannada. Overall, the book argues for a more nuanced and inclusive approach to the study of literature in India, which takes into account the rich diversity of the country's literary traditions.
Key Points:
Comparative framework under the context of the relation between comparative literature and comparative Indian literature.
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 promise a greater scope a wider perspective?
Further, He discuss the goal of comparative literature and 'Weltliterature'. To visualize the total literary activities of man as a single universe. A comparatist has to extend the area of investigation not only beyond one language and literature, but to as many as possible. The main dilemma of the comparatist , then, is to reconcile his idea of literature as a single universe of verbal expression with his ability to study it in its totality.
This is one of the reasons why every comparatist is so anxious to make a serious distinction between comparative literature and world literature.
Goethe in a conversation with Eckermann on 31 January 1827; 'the epoch of world-literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.
Goethe wanted the common reader to come out of the narrow confines of his language and geography and to enjoy the finest achievements of man.
Western comparatist has kept himself restricted to Western literature. The contact between the literatures of the West and the East began very early in history.
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.
One can argue that comparative, Western literature is the study of different national literatures, while comparative Indian literature is the study of literatures of one nation, according to some, so one national literature written in many languages.
Multilingualism is a fact of Indian society and of Indian literature. This multilingualism appears bewildering to the foreign students of India, and certainly occasions a grave concern in our politicians.
In a 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.
Conclusion:
Our idea of comparative literature will emerge only when we take into account the historical situation in which we are placed. Our journey is not from comparative literature to comparative Indian literature, but from comparative Indian literature to comparative literature.
Article2 by Amiya Dev
Comparative Indian Literature
Article 3 by Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta
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.
The beginnings
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”.
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. A group of intellectuals in order to bring about a system of education that would be indigenous, catering to the needs of the people and therefore different from the British system of education prevalent at the time.
The idea of “visvasahitya” was
complex, marked by a sense of a community of artists as workers building together an edifice, that
of world literature. The notion of literature again was deeply embedded on human relationships, and hence the aesthetic sense was linked with the sense of the human. Buddhadeva Bose, one of the prime
architects of modern Bangla poetry, did not fully subscribe to the idealist visions of Tagore, for he be-
lieved it was necessary to break away from Tagore to be a part of the times, of modernity.
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.Buddhadeva Bose brought in a very significant modern poet, Sudhindranath Dutta, also well-known for his translation of Mallarmé and his erudition both in the Indian and the Western context, to teach in the department of Comparative Literature.
Despite certain impulses towards a decolonising process, the colonial framework was also evident in the pedagogic structure, in the large space given to English literature and the organization of the courses around the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Romantic and the Modern period. Of course, there were several other courses devoted to Sanskrit and Bengali literature. The epistemology of comparison emerged within this framework.
The project did not “bring into existence a new object/subject of knowledge” (Radhakrishnan 458 ) as such, but by laying out the terms of comparison it did start a chain of reflections that would constitute the materiality of comparison, an ongoing series of engagements with the multi-dimensional reality of questions related to the self and the other, to arrive at networks of relationships on various levels. The Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, which went on to become an important journal in literary studies in the country, came out in 1961.
Indian Literature as Comparative Literature
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?
Modern Indian Languages department established in 1962 in Delhi University. In 1974, the department of Modern Indian Languages started a post-MA course entitled “Comparative Indian Literature”.
The juxtaposition of different canons had led to the questioning of universalist canons right from the beginning of comparative studies in India and now with the focus shifting to Indian literature, and in some instances to literatures from the Southern part of the globe, one moved further away from subscribing to a priori questions related to canon formation.
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.
The task, comparatists realized was, as so aptly voiced by Aijaz Ahmad, to trace “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”.
Indian literary systems along with diverse inter-cultural relations that communities in different parts of India have with different communities outside the borders of the nation state.
Reconfiguration of areas of comparison
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.
Area Studies papers on African, Latin American, Canadian literatures and literature of Bangladesh were introduced. The introduction of Canadian Studies was linked with a grant in the area, but gradually a field of studies focusing on oral traditions emerged within the space of comparison.
The introduction of the semester system the division was abandoned and certain other courses of a more general nature such as Cross-cultural Literary Transactions, where Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora, were taken up, or sometimes in courses entitled Literary transactions one looked more precisely at the tradition of Reason and Rationalism in European and Indian literatures of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries.
Research directions
Several books and translations emerged out of the project. 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. A large focus, therefore, in this area was on oral texts and research on methods of engaging with such texts.
The second area in the Centre for Advanced Studies was the interface between literatures of India and
its neighbouring countries. This happened to be a completely untouched area as far as literature was concerned, apart from the study of certain well-known points of contact.
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 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.
Comparative Cultural Studies where key texts in the global field are juxtaposed with related texts from the Indian context.
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
Comparative Literature in the country today has multifaceted goals and visions in ac-cordance with historical needs, both local and planetary.
The enhancement of civilizational gestures, against forces that are divisive and that constantly reduce the potentials of human beings.
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
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.
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