comparative literature: a personal stance |
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The aspiration of comparativism has been accompanying me since an early stage of my academic career, creating a primary motivation for my polyglot competence that even today, in our post-philological times, is still regarded as indispensable basis for any serious researcher in this domain. More or less systematically, I publish in five languages, and I read in several more. The list is open, I still learn new languages in my spare moments.
It was also at an early stage - participating in "Mestrado em Literatura Comparada" at the University of Lisbon - that I got an initiation into comparative methodologies. The vastness of this adventure appeared to me as extremely tempting, and to the present day I have practised it for my genuine pleasure, not just to get any kind of academic recognition or privilege for it. I'm just someone who loves the world; I love travel, the languages of the world, the diversity of human experience expressible in each of them, and -as I wrote in one of my essays- the possibility of becoming someone else in each of those languages. On the other hand, my concept of comparativism has never been reduced to the perspective of literature or literary texts. It is rather a traversal concept applying to a range of cultural phenomena. The central comparative adventure that has tempted me since my early years of studies in Romance philology, before I could study Arabic in any systematic way, was to cross the multiple frontiers of the Mediterranean world, between the Christian-Romance domain and the Orient. This is a broad project that keeps me on my tiptoes till the present day, as I dream about leaning not only Arabic, but also Turkish and Farsi. Gayatri Spivak, who announced the death of the discipline in the 90ties, understood it mainly as a death of an Eurocentric paradigm. The new comparativism that reappears after the turn of the millennium is thus expected to be radically de-centered. My contribution to comparative literature is closely related to this planetary concept. This is why I put in the header of this site the expression "global literary studies" rather than the old-fashioned denomination "comparative literature". Nonetheless, I don't truly see the discipline in this double perspective of rupture and reemergence. In my main, non-Eurocentric perspective of integrating East and West, I conceive myself as someone who gives continuity, and hopefully a fulfilment, to such concepts as that of complementary "grammars of creation" as they once appeared to George Steiner. Certainly, my personal stance in comparative literature has a lot to do with quite an old-fashioned project of erudition; deep down in my heart, I am a traditionalist and a universalist, just like those people who made the best moments of the perennial school. And like them, not just a distanced scholar, but someone with a double belonging and a double inscription in overlapping cultural threads of tradition that I'm supposed to carry on and to integrate. At the same time, this personal double loyalty serves for an answer to the eternal question related to comparative literature: the reason and the legitimacy of any act of comparing. Especially if my temptation has always been to compare phenomena that other people saw as incomparable. Nonetheless, as I considered closely various objections that have been raised (more often in my Polish times), I've reached the conclusion that their nature, in most cases, was either ethnocentric or bluntly ideological. Any claim to treat anything as "beyond comparison" is essentially illegitimate. The universal tertium comparationis is simply man and the unity of the human condition, and beyond it, the unity of bios, the living life that make us comparable to a range of other living beings. |
selected papers & chapters |
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"Des Lettres de la religieuse portugaise aux Nouvelles Lettres portugaises : la conquête de la solitude à l'aube de l'âge moderne et son palimpseste féministe" ["From the Letters of a Portuguese Nun to New Portuguese Letters: the conquest of solitude at the dawn of the modern age and its feminist palimpsest"], Colloquia Comparativa Litterarum, vol. 6, no 1/2020, p. 44-58. ISSN 2367-7716
ejournal.uni-sofia.bg/index.php/Colloquia/article/view/115 Intertextual relation between the Letters of a Portuguese Nun attributed to Guilleragues and New Portuguese Letters written by Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Velho da Costa and Maria Teresa Horta is analysed as an adaptation to the changing cultural conditions of the epoch. In the 17th-century version, the female figure goes through a process of egotistic revitalisation. The disaster of a love relationship, just like a shipwreck in the essay of Hans Blumenberg, leads to radical individualisation and a conquest of solitude, a process that characterises the dawn of the modern age. To the contrary, the adaptation of the same literary figure by the Portuguese feminist writers appears as a reaction against the female solitude at the end of modernity. It is rather a “we” that is revitalised as a new experience of a couple or a community inhabiting a Utopian “house of females”.
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(Submitted:) “Mowa lokalna, mowa globalna. O językach literatury świata” [„Local tongue, global tongue. The languages of World Literature”], 2020. (Paper derived from my lecture given in Poznań, April 2019).
The aim of this article is to reflect on multilingual dimension of literature, its ability of transmitting key meanings across the frontiers of cultures, as well as on the status of languages creating literary systems. What makes the actuality of these questions is the growing pace of language death and the decrease of diversity of oral literatures of humanity. This is why it is necessary to close the gap between global literary studies and the endeavours at archiving the patrimony of traditional cultures, as well as studies on literacy and the phenomena accompanying the passage from locally transmitted oral literature to written literature in global circulation. Key hypothesis of this paper concerns the role of planetary literature and transindigenous studies in the preservation of unique conceptualisations of the world transmitted in traditional contexts - in spite of the death of tribal languages. 
“The mole reads the world: paradoxes of comparative literature in Poland”, Comparative Literature in Europe: Challenges and Perspectives, Nikol Dziub and Frédérique Toudoire-Surlapierre (eds.), Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019, p. 223-238. ISBN 987-1-5275-2226-8
This highly controversial chapter addresses the place of comparative literature in Polish academic culture. Taking a verse of Czesław Miłosz for the starting point, the author muses on the paradoxes of Polish culture that, on the one hand, produced great universalists, and on the other, falls short of comparative approaches and readings in world literature.
“Une traduction qui fait un manifeste. Art poétique de Verlaine et Sztuka poetycka de Miriam” [“A translation that makes a manifesto. Art poétique by Verlaine et Sztuka poetycka by Miriam”], Romanica Silesiana, no 12/2017, p. 270-277. ISSN 1898-2433 (print); 2353-9887 (electronic).
The Polish translation of Verlaine's Art poétique marks an important step in the process of acquisition of the symbolism as a new paradigm of poetic creation. The analysis presented in this paper puts in the limelight the problem of positioning the translated text in the receptive literary system. The analytic proposal implies the employment of the term “embeddedness” originally introduced by the historian Karl Polanyi to render the implication of the non-economic factors in the process of production. Analogically, the production of the literary texts is conditioned by factors situated at the frontier of literature. Those wishing to adopt a foreign aesthetics must vanquish the resistance of the local, traditionalist context. As the result, the translation is “embedded” as a manifesto, even if Verlaine's Art poétique is a parody of the genre and an expression of the poet's creative doubts rather than a truly prescriptive text. The auto-parodic dimension of the original poem disappears in the Polish translation by Miriam that becomes a rigorous ars poetica.
“Wszyscy jesteśmy Indianami (Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand, Deportowani z życia. Nowe głosy w narracjach literackich i ich kolonialne konteksty)”, Konteksty Kultury, vol. 14, 4, 2017, p. 484-487. ISSN 2083-7658, e-ISSN 2353-1991
"Written exercises. Ancestral magic and emergent intellectuals in Mia Couto, Lhoussain Azergui and Dorota Masłowska", Colloquia Humanistica, nr 5/2016, s. 143-156. ISSN 2081-6774
The article consists in a comparative reading of three novels: Um rio chamado tempo by Mia Couto, Le pain des corbeaux by Lhoussain Azergui and Paw królowej by Dorota Masłowska. In spite of the difference of the historical circumstances of Mozambique, Morocco and Poland, these three books meet at an intersecting point: the emergence of an intelligentsia that uses literacy and writing as an instrument to deconstruct the post-colonial concept of nation and to operate a trans-colonial renegotiation of identity. By the notion of trans-colonial, I understand the opposition against new kinds of symbolic violence that emerged after the end of the colonial period; here this new form of oppression is related to the concept of national unity – an artificial construct that leaves no place for the dualism or pluralism of cultural reality (two shores of the Zambezi river, Arab and Berber dualism in Morocco, “small homelands” in Poland). The young heroes of the novels grasp the pen in order to break through the falseness or the taboos created by the fathers, establishing, at the same time, the relation of solidarity with the world of the grandfathers. The act of writing becomes an actualization of the ancestral universe of magic. The settlement of accounts with the parental generation concerns the vision of nation built upon the resistance against the colonizer (it also refers to the Polish cultural formation, based on the tradition of uprisings and resistance against the Russians).
“Goytisolo w Marrakeszu. Pisarstwo transkulturowe jako wyjście z dylematów "małych literatur"” [“Goytisolo in Marrakesh. Transcultural writing as a way of breaking through the dilemmas of minor literature”], "Literatury mniejsze" Europy romańskiej, vol. 2, Mirosław Loba, Barbara Łuczak, Alfons Gregori (eds.), Poznań, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Adama Mickiewicza, 2015, p. 11-24. ISBN 978-83-232-2917-9
“Au-delà de la pitié. Guilleragues et Flaubert lus à la lumière de l'essai Naufrage avec spectateur d'Hans Blumenberg” [“Beyond the pity. Shipwreck with Spectator by Hans Blumenberg as a key to read Gilleragues and Flaubert”], Auteur, personnage, lecteur dans les lettres d'expression française, Marzena Chrobak, Jakub Kornhauser, Waclaw Rapak (éd.), Kraków, Księgarnia Akademicka, 2014, p. 249-256. ISBN 978-83-7638-420-7
“Powszechna ulotność. Haiku i haiga jako formy transkulturowe” [“Universality of the ephemeral. Haiku and haiga as transcultural genres”], Fragile, no 2 (24)/2014, p. 6-9. ISSN 1899-4261
"Why minor, not major?", Colloquia Humanistica, nr 2/2013, p. 13-16. ISSN 2081-6774
"'In the pleats of great languages': minor Romance literatures of Europe", Colloquia Humanistica, nr 2/2013, p. 293-296; ISSN 2081-6774. (Book review on: AA/VV, "Literatury mniejsze" Europy romańskiej, Poznań 2012).
“Ogród i Pustynia. O sztuce dobrego życia intelektualnego” [“Garden and Desert. On art of intellectual life”], Anthropos?, no 20-21/2013, p. 1-9. ISSN 1730-9549
http://www.anthropos.us.edu.pl/anthropos11/texty/lukaszyk.htm "Literatura w planetarnym (nad)użyciu. Przygody dzieła poza kontekstem kultury" ["Literature in planetary (ab)use: adventures of texts beyond the frontiers of their cultural contexts"], Litteraria Copernicana, nr 2(12)/2013, p. 94-103. ISSN 1899-315x
http://wydawnictwoumk.pl/czasopisma/index.php/LC/article/view/LC.2013.035/2731
“Upadki i wzloty Ikara. Studia nad wyobraźnią symboliczną w perspektywie najnowszej humanistyki” [“Icarus rises and falls. Studies on symbolic imagination in the perspective of recent humanities"], « Alors je rêverai des horizons bleuâtres... », Études dédiées à Barbara Sosień, Barbara Marczuk, Joanna Gorecka-Kalita, Agnieszka Kocik (eds.), Kraków, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2013, p. 377-385. ISBN 978-83-233-3561-0
“A la recherche des « grammaires de la création ». L’intégration intellectuelle des traditions orientale et occidentale” [“In search of the 'grammars of creation'. Intellectual integration of eastern and western traditions”], Pensées orientale et occidentale: influences et complémentarité. Études réunies par Katarzyna Dybeł, Anna Klimkiewicz et Monika Świda, Kraków, Księgarnia Akademicka, 2012, p. 201-210. ISBN 978-83-7638-185-5
“Komparatystyka w Portugalii: przemiany «mapy wyobrażonej» a studia literaturoznawcze” [“Comparativism in Portugal: changes on the imaginary map and literary studies”], Drogi i rozdroża współczesnej komparatystyki europejskiej, Alina Nowicka-Jeżowa, Krystyna Wierzbicka-Trwoga, Tomasz Wójcik (eds.), Warszawa, Dom Wydawniczy Elipsa, 2012, p. 70-77. ISBN 978-83-7151-083-0
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edited books |
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in search of non-hegemonic universalism(s) and the global idiom(s) of transcultural literary expressionresearch synopsis |
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One of my aims in the domain of comparative literature is to study the motivations and strategies used by the writers who, in the contemporary conditions of the globalization, aspire to transcend their inscription in the local culture. They try to transcend the boundaries of tradition and servitude that binds them – and limit them – to their ethnic or national context, wishing to participate in a larger, universalist sphere of communication. At the same time, they often strive to bring forth crucial elements of their original cultural heritage, making it accessible beyond the local frontiers. This is why I speak about the search for a new, “non-hegemonic” universalism, essentially different from the one deconstructed by the post-colonial studies. I play on the ambivalence of the English word “cultured”, connotative of what is learned in the process of cultural training; at the same time, the “cultured condition” constitutes a hindrance in the transcultural communication; this is thus a boundary to transgress through creativity.
This research is based on an extensive selection of texts collected worldwide; for this selection I partially rely on my previous experience and various research travels I have realised, striving to acquire books that are not visible in the dominant, English-speaking circuits of translation and literary studies. The texts I am searching for, originally created in a diversity of geographical contexts, fulfil a set of common criteria: 1). they attempt to address non-local readers, often in search of solidarity beyond the local situations of oppression, material shortage, mental limitations inherent not only to the colonial and post-colonial circumstances, but also to the oppression inherent to the traditional cultures, their gender structure, etc.; 2). they establish intertextual links or incorporate elements of heritage created in distant geographical and/or cultural locations in order to enlarge their expressive, intellectual or spiritual horizons; 3). they often transmit the key elements of minor or ultra-minor heritage to the global readers, using complex translingual strategies of writing; 4). in many cases, they rely on mystifications or hoaxes in order to hide or encrypt the locatable origins, often in protest against their automatic inscription in pre-defined national literatures and cultures. Methodologically, this project is based on the concept of transculture and transcultural writing (as defined by Wolfgang Welsch, Arianna Dagnino, Mikhail Epstein and others), as well as new, non-Eurocentric currents in comparative literature (Gayatri Spivak, David Damrish, Emily Apter and others). It takes into consideration the literary expression of global migrations as well as the strategies of the so called transindigenous writing (literary expression of ethnic groups that had never achieved decolonization, such as Maori writers in New Zealand, Native American, Native Siberian in Russia, etc.). In order to establish a new diagram of global connections, replacing the traditional map of national literatures, visual modalities of thinking and hypothesis formulation will be employed, according to the inspiration of comparativists and visual artists, such as Franco Moretti and Nikolaus Gansterer. BACKGROUND AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS RESEARCH Following the hypothesis of “dissolution of cultures” (Auflösung der Kulturen), proposed by Wolfgang Welsch (1992), recent humanities often deal with contents travelling between cultures without belonging entirely to any of them. New currents of literary creation, experimenting with transcultural and even translingual expression, form a challenge for the traditional schools of reading and literary criticism, not only those using the lenses of national literature or working with the Bloomian notion of universal canon, but also such currents as the post-colonial theory. Apparently, new writers active in various parts of the globe are determined to break free from the servitudes of their historical and geographical condition (including the post-colonial one), trying to address the readers in a common, global sphere of meaning, under new conditions of symbolic equality and unrestricted access to the humanity's variegated heritage. Some of those phenomena are more visible than others. English-speaking researchers, such as David Damrosch, could promptly put in the limelight some authors and works transgressing, in a striking way, the frontiers of local or national literary systems, treating foreign contents as their own, legitimately inherited tradition. The case of a Tibetan writer bringing forth new adventures of Sherlock Holmes, as well as that of a Caribbean author (Dany Laferrière) claiming to be a Japanese writer, have become well-known symbols of this new movement of crossing the frontiers in all directions. Quite similar strategy has been used by the Angolan writer Agualusa who has given, in his novel Nação Crioula, a new lease of life to the 19th century Portuguese literary figure of Fradique Mendes (originally created by Eça de Queirós and a group of his friends in Cenáculo). On the other hand, Emily Apter (2013: 330-334) analyses the case of Manituana (2007), a novel authored by a group of Italian writers who signs itself Wu Ming (a pseudonym signifying “no names” in Chinese). As Apter claims, their aim is not only to explore the anti-individualistic and dispossessive strategies of the “anonymous” writing, addressing the issues concerning the post-11th September America as well as the entire world, but also to resist the automatic classification as “Italian” literature. The particularity of my project is, among other aspects, that of making a good use of my rather exceptional polyglot talents (I can read in about 20 languages) to enlarge the focus of the dominant English-speaking literary studies. At the same time, I would like to attempt a systematisation of this new literature, answering in a comparative way the double question: 1). why should the writers transgress the limits of their locatable cultural position in order to pretend they are somewhere else or quite radically “nowhere”, in no recognizable locus whatsoever, and 2). how do they attempt to manage such a radical de-localization, trying, at the same time, to get through to the global reading public. In order to answer these questions in a more reliable and exhaustive way than it has been done till now, I would like to explore as many minor and ultra-minor texts as possible, paying special attention to those absent in the mainstream market of literary translation and global criticism. By ultra-minor writing I understand the attempts at crossing the threshold of orality and writing. The native writers usually struggle against such circumstances as the non-existence of a local reading public, as well as imminent danger of linguistic and cultural dissolution. The well-known global phenomenon of language death may be partially addressed by the development of translingual literary expression, transmitting to the global readers the idiosyncratic key concepts of the dying tongues, enveloped in the narrations expressed in any of the major languages. The writers who contribute to the creation of a new, global sphere of communication, exploring not only their own cultural heritage, but feeling fully entitled to the universal legacy of all the humanity, do not belong to nations and cultures that might be classified as central, dominant or hegemonic. On the contrary, they create their universalistic literature from the positions that may be seen as minor and peripheral. The poetic volume Zen limites (2016) by Filinto Elísio, an author from Cape Verde archipelago, may be cited as an example of such a creative appropriation of universal traditions, not only such as Buddhism Zen, but also such as the legacy of Omar Khayyam. Certainly, since 19th century, the poetic paradigm of the Rubaiyyat had been repeatedly explored outside the original context of Islamic Central Asia; this phenomenon was due, in the first place, to the appropriation of the poet in the dominant, colonial, British intellectual environment. Nonetheless the fact that this legacy is claimed in minor contexts such as Cape Verde is a new phenomenon. What is more, it ushers us into the new era of global connectivity, rather than “delinking” or decolonial options as defined by Walter Mignolo (2000, 2011). On the other hand, this construction of a new sphere of communication consists not only in the claims of minor and ultra-minor actors claiming the contents universalized by the former dominant traditions as their own. Even more crucial aspect of the new literature studied in this project is the introduction of new contents into the global sphere of communication, namely the contents issued from minor and ultra-minor cultures, that, so to speak, bring us new Khayyams of their own. Many of those cultures used to express themselves only through orality, often in languages that are currently under serious threat of extinction. The new literary movement often qualified as transindigenous (cf. Allen 2012) fosters the preservation and divulgation of these legacies, enriching our common understanding of the human. METHODS To put it shortly, the aim of my project is to study the strategies used by the writers who aspire to transcend their cultural inscription. The study of such phenomena clashes against many traditional views and concepts in the humanities, even against such basic presuppositions as the intra-cultural construction of meaning. In comparative literature, this new reality leads not only to the necessity of profound deconstruction of the traditional concept of national literature, but also, what is more crucial, to the necessity of elaborating new tools and conceptualizations for the description of the translocal nature of the new literary phenomena. The study of the translocal mechanisms of constituting the meaning permits to grasp the human potential of transgressing the limitations imposed by the cultural inscription. In current humanities, there is a need of creating a new language adapted for the description of transcultural phenomena. The first step in this direction has been made by Mikhail Epstein in his attempts at defining the “apophatic” aspect of transculture (cf. Epstein 2009). Less radical attempt at creating a vocabulary of transcultural literary studies has been proposed by Arianna Dagnino (2015). In my project, I will continue this work toward the creation of a new terminology, dealing with, among others, such problematic concepts as universalism; I will reflect on and discuss other possibilities, such as the notion of “pluriversalist” sphere of communication. (Term "pluriversalist" has been used, among others, by Walter Mignolo (2011); the aim of introducing such a neologism is to severe the link with the concept of universalism, considered as negatively charged, obsolete and definitively deconstructed by the post-colonial school. This is also the reason why I stress the non-hegemonic aspect of the new universalism, reinvented from the peripheries, that is the object of my research.) At the same time, I play on the ambivalence of the English word “cultured”, connotative of what is learned in the process of cultural training, that constitutes , at the same time, a boundary to transgress through transcultural creativity. In my former publications (Lukaszyk 2018), I proposed the term “cultured reading”, referring to the schematic, ossified paradigm of dealing with alien texts, causing a partial blindness to their meanings, acquired through an excess of monocultural academic training. In my project, I propose to deconstruct the “cultured condition” created by a certain kind of professional comparative criticism. (I treat this problem as larger and more generalized than just the Eurocentrism of comparative literature, exposed by Gayatri Spivak). In parallel to this search for new concepts, I would also like to engage into an experimental visual practice inspired by the ideas of “graphs, maps and trees” proposed by Franco Moretti (2005), as well as the project launched by the Austrian artist Nikolaus Gansterer (cf. Gantserer et al. 2011); this approach is also connected to older attempts at introducing the visual modality of thinking into the humanities (cf. Guattari 1989). The “dissolution of cultures” announced by Welsch (1992) leads to the emergence of complex diagrams of connections that transgress and transcend the “map” of national literatures connected to territories and languages spoken in those places. The de-localization of the new literature requires a new distribution of texts in a metaphorical, symbolic space. Its connection to the physical map of the world is a subtle, problematic issue that I will address through visual strategies of “drawing a hypothesis”, elaborated in the multidisciplinary project coordinated by Gansterer (2011). CORE BIBLIOGRAPHY Allen, Chadwick, Trans-indigenous. Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Apter, Emily, Against World Literature. On the Politics of Intranslatability, London – New York, Verso, 2013. Casanova, Pascale, La République mondiale des lettres, Paris, Seuil, 1999. Dagnino, Arianna, Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global Mobility, West Lafayette, Purdue University Press, 2015. Dagnino, Arianna, Transcultural Writers and Transcultural Literature in the Age of Global Modernity, “Transnational Literature” 2012, vol. 4, no 2. Damrosch, David, What Is World Literature?, Princeton – Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2003. Epstein, Mikhail, Transculture. A Broad Way Between Globalism and Multiculturalism, “The American Journal of Economics and Sociology” 2009, no 1. Epstein, Mikhail, The Transformative Humanities, A Manifesto, New York – London, New Delhi, Bloomsbury, 2012. Gansterer, Nikolaus et al., Drawing a Hypothesis. Figures of Thought, Wien – New York, Springer, 2011. Guattari, Félix, Cartographies schizoanalytiques, Paris, Éditions Galilée, 1989. Mignolo, Walter, Local Histories / Global Designs. Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000. Mignolo, Walter, The Darker Side of Western Modernity. Global Futures, Decolonial Options, Durham – London, Duke University Press, 2011. Moretti, Franco, Graphs, Maps, Trees. Abstract models for a literary history, London, Verso, 2005. Spivak, Gayatri, Death of a Discipline, New York 2003. Spivak, Gayatri, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, Cambridge, Mass. – London, Harvard University Press, 2012. Welsch, Wolfgang, Transkulturalität: Lebensformen nach der Auflösung der Kulturen, Paderborn, Fink, 1992. |
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