Description:
Read an interview with Norbert Bachleitner.
In this 200th volume of Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft the editors Norbert Bachleitner, Achim H. Hölter and John A. McCarthy 'take stock' of the discipline. It focuses on recurrent questions in the field of Comparative Literature: What is literature? What is meant by 'comparative'? Or by 'world'? What constitute 'transgressions' or 'refractions'? What, ultimately, does being at home in the world imply? When we combine the answers to these individual questions, we might ultimately reach an intriguing proposition: Comparative Literature contributes to a sense of being at home in a world that is heterogeneous and fractured, rather than affirming a monolithic canon marked by territory and homogeneity. The volume unites essays on world literature, literature in the context of the history of ideas, comparative women and gender studies, aesthetics and textual analysis, and literary translation and tradition.
Review Quotes: "The volume Taking Stock offers a valuable overview of current trends in comparative literature [...]. Since this book is very broad in scope, nearly any scholar of literature and cultural history will find some topics, approaches, concepts, and references of interest. Given that the collected texts are for the most part, case studies, they can be viewed as heuristic examples as well."
-Igor Tyss, Institute of World Literature SAS, Slovak Republic, in World Literature Studies, Vol. 13 Iss. 2, 2021, pp. 99-101