WORLD LITERATURE AS THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE DEAD

Modern Language Quarterly, 2013

World literature can be seen as one of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “good things,” a great idealization of the capacities of the human spirit and at the same time a fierce contest for power and dominance. In this contest the question of minor literature invariably surfaces in relation to issues of canonicity and to world literature in general. References to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s work on Franz Kafka inevitably misread its revolutionary potential and become reductive. In the different European literatures, issues stemming from the aftermath of colonialism reveal the bankruptcy of the category of minor literature when one thinks about world literature. Several examples from lusophone writers and others point to the need to rethink the national categorization of literature. Instead of seeing some literatures as minor, Medeiros proposes seeing them as “eccentric,” questioning the division between center and periphery.

Journal of European Studies

Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, 2018

„Romanian Literature as World Literature”, Edited by Mircea Martin, Christian Moraru, and Andrei Terian, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018

Literatures as world Literature takes a novel approach to world literature by analyzing specific constellations-according to language, nation, form, or theme-_of literary texts and authors in their world-literary dimensions. world literature has been mapped and theorized in the abstract, but the majority of critical work, the filling in of what has beentraced, liesahead of us.LiteraturesaswoildLiteraturebeginsthetaskof filling in the devilish details by allowing scholars to move outrvard from their own area of specialization. The hope is to foster scholarly writing that approaches more closely the polyphonic, multiperspectival nature of the world literature we wish to explore.

2016

Europe: a mix of races, a continent torn by conflicts, a group of nations united by Christianity and more recently, the Euro. Under this canopy lies a myriad of works of art critically acclaimed as European Literature. The very character of Europeanism forms the basis of this distinction. Each author from Europe has written in his native language and everyone has been examining one’s times. The sense of belonging to Europe has been the platform from which each author has presented his own version of the scenario and offered his insights. There has been a constant dialogue between authors from each of these European nations. Creative writers base their art on some thought propounded by their gurus, men of genius whom they consider seriously, whether to refute their theories or to endorse them. Therefore, other than their nativity, nothing differentiates them from each other and all the authors from the continent are grouped together as European. If we look into the twentieth century alone, as this volume offers, the common experience of all the European authors has been that of the world wars and the revolutionary wars. With the political and economic scenario in view, many European thinkers have developed many philosophical ideas, some rooted in Christian doctrine and some rooted in scientific inventions. Modern European thought is a mix of many brilliant minds who have been grappling with nature and reason to explain away phenomena so varied and so bewildering such as the Nazi Movement or the advent of Communism. Modern European Literature addresses some of the basic problems forced upon beliefs rooted in Christianity. The death of god professed by Nietzsche after the development of genetics became an intellectual quicksand in which every brilliant mind fell. According to the Bible, God created man in His own image and created all the other things for man to enjoy. Man is god’s favourite creation. He has been situated at the centre of the universe to assess the rest of nature according to his whims and fancy or call it reason. Moreover, the purpose of life is to be morally good according to what the priests taught so that one can attain heaven after death. God as the higher intellect that governs human life became nullified by the theory of evolution of species where only the fittest survive. For the Western world comprising of the United Kingdom, European nations and the United States where Christianity is the major religion, every modern thinker is great for the bulk of writings, philosophical treatises that they have produced and which are meticulously preserved, studied and reproduced. But for an Indian mind, rooted in Hinduism, much of what Marx, Freud or Nietzsche has said is an additional subject of study forced upon by English education. The book is designed for an average Indian student who has not incorporated western ethics via Christianity since birth. Much of the confusion that Indian students feel regarding a philosophy such as Existentialism is because one encounters it in fragments in English and European literature, not as a given such as the Hindu ethics. For an Indian, God is manifest in the animals and plants and does not interfere in day to day decisions. For a Christian, God is the father who governs all our actions and each utterance, each action is judged as either faithful or blasphemous. A Hindu does not face the existential question of what is the purpose of life if it is not to please God. For a Hindu, life is a part of nature, like grass, and like any other animal one becomes earth after death. As given in the Bhagvad Gita, the concept of soul as a traveler from one body to another newborn makes it easier for a Hindu to swallow the bitter truth of death. Thus it becomes a struggle for an Indian to understand the chief concerns of the Western authors who questioned religion whenever there was a social crisis. It is also not unknown that most of the greatest writers of the twentieth century became strictly atheists. Such extreme apathy, extreme sense of futility and the extreme worry for mankind becomes a burden on the Indian mind which is content with little and happy to do one’s small part in the vast world. The sense of purpose of living ends quite satisfactorily if one has simply earned one’s respect in one’s immediate society. That includes the teachings of elders and priests. This is where the introduction to European literature and its wider concerns becomes a job, a deliberation. While studying Modern English Literature a student is briefed about the advent of realism, naturalism and a little about the politics of the century. The major thinkers, Marx and Freud, the scientific developments, whose advantages we all share, and the unhappy effects of the wars and catastrophes of the twentieth century are all part of English Literature. The same concerns in a more marked way make up the European consciousness. Their literature reflects economic as well as political concerns in many ways. A few areas which stand out as more specifically European in theory are surrealism, epic theatre, the theatre of cruelty, magic realism, meta theatre, existentialism and the communist occupation of many European nation states after the second world war. Political conditions such as totalitarianism, communism, anti-Semitism, exile, the holocaust, the scientist’s predicament and the common man’s predicament in the face of dictatorship are central to a European author’s work in the twentieth century. It is important to acknowledge that the history of the world has been created largely by the activities of the Europeans and therefore, their books are also part of our cultural baggage. In addition, there is a baggage of literary theories propounded by students of language which bog down the average reader. Someone who wants to enjoy a work of art is hugely frustrated when he is accosted with a flood of literary theories and asked to attack a text with critical tools. A student of English is generally taught to use many of these tools before one can read a text of considerable literary value today. Thus, the following essays have been designed to provide a vivid variety of readings of some of the most famous European texts translated into English for an Indian student. The essays are free of lines from western critics who are wont to quote and refer to many theories and many scholars and thereby confusing the subject of the text in hand. In our days, critical essays are like jigsaw puzzles, where each reference is supposed to link a thought and tease the synapses of a clever mind. References are virtually hyperlinks that take one into wider and wider scopes endlessly. In a way it is good to be able to let a student wander into greater mysteries of literature, but in doing so one gets further and further away from the actual work of art, one’s first reference. I have noticed that many brilliant students can perform well in the examinations without having read the text at all. They are habituated to learn the great comments by great scholars rather than great lines from the text. In view of the aforesaid problems I have tried to quote extensively from the texts rather than from the scholars. The aim is to give a complete account of the text instead of making oblique references to history and its erstwhile scholarly discourse. It will encourage the student to read the play or the novel with enjoyment and not merely for scrutiny. The following essays address the texts without tools, like a tolerant admirer who also understands differences. There was a time when the job of publishing was difficult and only those who had firm conviction about the worth of their words went out of the way to publish them. In this way only those works have been able to survive which have passed the test of time, which have proved their worth generation after generation. Until literature became a discipline at the beginning of the twentieth century, the need to comment on someone else’s work was felt only as an instigation from the work or the author. But now every scholar has to write critical essays, whether he feels compelled by his inner drive or not. It has become a means of earning one’s bread and butter. No wonder much of what a student gets to read in the library is forced reading, with little instruction. And one is likely to get lost in the maze of hyperlinks. It has been an imperative for scientific advancement that a student should learn everything that has been already discovered by one’s forefathers. The same imperative is now applied to a student of literature that one should read all that the other scholars have already said about a particular work of art; hence, the abundance of discourse. Books are full of citations and references. It definitely ruptures the unified experience of reading one volume. This argument does not lead to discourage secondary reading. The aim of this book is to help an Indian scholar to assess the whole of modern European consciousness in a small space. Beyond this, there is ample scope for further reading. In this book I have not included words of other scholars. I have only discussed all the concerns raised by the individual works of art. Needless to say, the choice of the nine texts discussed in the following sixteen essays is based on my own reading of experts in this area. These nine texts are selected from among the greatest classics of the century. History and philosophy have been woven intricately in the discussion of every text in this book. This book is an outcome of my own teaching experience in this part of the world. It is a gift to my students and to the community at large to encourage the study of European literature.

Sic: a journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation, 2020

The paper develops in a specific reading strategy of appropriation of Danilo Kiš's story Slavno je za otadžbinu mreti in Péter Esterházy's literary opus (first in the story Mily dicső a hazáért halni, published in Hungarian in 1986 with changes due to aspects of the text that are necessarily changed in translation, then in his Introduction to Literature and Celestial Harmonies), in order to offer possible answers to the following questions: What is the role of (in-)translation in the study of literature? What does the metaphor of elliptical refraction (Damrosch) mean as "the most convenient" description for world literature? If the stories of Kiš and Esterházy are the same, but written in different languages and received in different cultural, historical, and social contexts, can we refer to it as one literary work? If the author is different-is the literary work only seemingly the same? Who, in fact, is the author-if Esterházy read and used Kiš's story in translation? How does this vortex-like example contribute to our understanding of world literature, its problems and difficulties, neuralgic and "blind" spots? Who authors world literature canon? How do notions of origins and authenticity resonate in the field of world literature?

The Routledge Companion to World Literature, 2nd edition, 2022

World Literature Studies

World literature and world history have conjoined histories in Western and non-Western contexts and are now enjoying a comeback in the international academy. They share theoretical ground and objectives, have comparable trajectories of formation worldwide, and tend to attract a host of detractors similarly sceptical of 'generalists' and 'wishful encyclopaedists'. Although world literature and world history have developed slightly different models in Europe and the US, both fields, in their most general definitions, call to widen the cultural scope of study beyond national paradigms and revise the foundational civilisational narratives of the human collective.