comparative literature: a personal stance |
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I've split my literary studies into two roughly delimitated areas: Comparative Literature and Global Literary Studies. One might argue it's the same (of course, the eternal question of comparing things, which is implicitly present in any act of reading, remains debatable). But I decided to think about Comparative Literature as something European and Eurocentric, even when it is done by someone like V. S. Naipaul. Let's keep it this way, why not? Comparative Literature deals with texts written in major languages and in major post-colonial traditions, in which local elements converge with the great intellectual flow coming from Europe. Sounds anachronistic? Be it, as long as I remain attentive to everything that is something else, something outside the scope of this discipline, just as a Berber song is outside the tradition that gives Moroccan or Algerian Francophone novels. The stream of tradition to which the Berber song belongs is as ancient and venerable, as major and dominant as the other one - if we shift the perspective. And I do it. But at the same time I keep my Comparative Literature, perfumed with lavender, in the same drawer where it used to be all the time.
I nurture a powerful personal affect for Comparative Literature. I grew up on the books written by George Steiner. 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 the indispensable basis for any serious researcher in this domain. More or less systematically (even if English becomes more and more dominant as the language of academic expression), I strive to publish in five languages, just for the sake of keeping a certain tradition alive. Of course, all of them are European languages, but the very fact has a certain identitarian value for me. Of course, I read in several more, including some tongues that are not European. And this is precisely what makes me a complete intellectual figure. I am just someone who loves the world; I love travels, the languages of the world, the diversity of human experience expressible in each of them, and the possibility of becoming someone else, even as far as my scholarly personality is concerned, in each of those languages. Those five or so European tongues that are closest to me form a home, and the concept of Comparative Literature forms the mahogany bookshelves in that imaginary home of mine, with all the dimension of tradition, and seriousness, and privilege, and the concept of being a Professor of Comparative Literature, as ponderous as the mahogany desk on which I might write my Oxonian-style essays. This is the stable point in shifting geographies, the axis mundi of my nomadian existence. 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, and visual arts in particular. It was also at an early stage of my intellectual formation - participating in the "Mestrado em Literatura Comparada" at the University of Lisbon - that I got an initiation into traditional comparative methodologies and fields of research, such as intermodality. The vastness of the adventure appeared to me as extremely tempting, and to the present day, I practice it for my genuine pleasure, as an excuse to write on art without being properly an art historian. 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 learning 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 a Eurocentric paradigm. The new comparativim that reappears after the turn of the millennium is thus expected to be radically de-centred. My contribution to comparative literature is closely related to this planetary concept. In parallel, I keep the denomination "global literary studies" for the area that deals with the plurality of humanity's ways of literary expression (not always to actually compare them, rather just see them as meaningful elements of a larger whole). Meanwhile, I equally cherish the old-fashioned denomination "comparative literature" that connects me to a given scholarly tradition. Privately, I am a person of a terribly conservative taste; comparative literature just comes so perfectly together with my love of solid bookshelves in dark wood. This is why I don't truly see the discipline in a double perspective of "death" and "rebirth". In my non-Eurocentric perspective of integrating East and West that came to me early as a sort of instinct, 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 sort of inverse universalist (I do not believe that European literature is good enough for everyone; I do believe that all literatures are good enough for a European like me). Just a little bit 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 (triple, quadruple...) belonging and a double (triple, quadruple...) inscription in overlapping cultural threads of tradition that I am supposed to carry on and to integrate. At the same time, this personal double loyalty serves as 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 the unity of bios, the living life that makes us comparable to a range of other living beings. |
selected essays in comparative literature
Books of the beginnings. The emergence of the idea of literature in V. S. Naipaul's A Writer's People
Acta Iassyensia Comparationis, no 30 (2)/2022. ISSN 2285-3871. [In progress].
The article is an attempt at answering the question how and why the individuals born in social contexts in which strong traditions of literacy are absent come to nurture literary aspirations. The answer is based on the autobiographical essay A Writer's People by the Nobel prize winner born in Trinidad, V. S. Naipaul. He relates the circumstances of his discovery of literature, in strong connection with the literary activity of his contemporary living on a nearby island, Derek Walcott, as well as his own father. Naipaul's further musings on the conditions of success and failure in literature lead him to analyse the milieus in which he was involved in England, as well as various minor and major texts of Indian and universal literature. As a conclusion, he points out at the gap between the pioneering and the derived, secondary texts written as an imitation of someone else's work. Also the link between the original writing and the private, deeply felt realities is accentuated.
The article is an attempt at answering the question how and why the individuals born in social contexts in which strong traditions of literacy are absent come to nurture literary aspirations. The answer is based on the autobiographical essay A Writer's People by the Nobel prize winner born in Trinidad, V. S. Naipaul. He relates the circumstances of his discovery of literature, in strong connection with the literary activity of his contemporary living on a nearby island, Derek Walcott, as well as his own father. Naipaul's further musings on the conditions of success and failure in literature lead him to analyse the milieus in which he was involved in England, as well as various minor and major texts of Indian and universal literature. As a conclusion, he points out at the gap between the pioneering and the derived, secondary texts written as an imitation of someone else's work. Also the link between the original writing and the private, deeply felt realities is accentuated.
Intimate microspheres in Fernando Pessoa and other refugees from History: notes on the topology of symbolic space and extracultural condition
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Acta Iassyensia Comparationis, 25 (1)/2020, p. 73-83. ISSN 2285 – 3871
The essay deals with the poetic creation of intimate space bubbles, as if isolated from the rest of the world reducible to a map dominated by History and the imperial mechanism as its driving force. The text in focus is Antinous by Fernando Pessoa, where such a microsphere of affect is built around an homoerotic relationship. The case of the poet living in the times of the advent of Portuguese fascism is put in the context of several East-European refugees from History striving to reconstruct their lost intimacies in the margin of the hegemonies that ousted them from their own countries (Cioran, Eliade, Miłosz). I claim that the subject constructing his intimate topology transgresses the limitations of his cultural inscription, that appears as disgracefully locatable, hemmed in History; he adopts an extracultural stance. The refugees from History, losing their language and the immediate contact with their national cultures, strive to communicate with a larger, universal dimension. In a way, such private, extracultural topologies run parallel to the imperial claim of universalism. Yet the microsphere of affect communicating with the universalist macrosphere introduces a qualitative difference, as it is built upon the authenticity of loss and longing, rather than drive for hegemony and control. 
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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”.
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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L’acte de l’écriture partagé, dont les Nouvelles Lettres portugaises sont le résultat, constitue une situation affective opposée à la confrontation avec le vide. Marianne reste isolée dans son univers de souffrance amoureuse ; les religieuses charitables de son couvent ne peuvent pas l’aider – tout au plus elles peuvent la ramener dans sa chambre, où elle plonge dans un état situé au-delà de toute solidarité et de toute communication. Les trois féministes portugaises échangent leur lettres. Barreno, Horta et Velho da Costa n'explorent pas la voix individuelle et en processus d'individuation, comme c'était le cas dans les Lettres portugaises primitives, mais se proposent, par contre, de redonner la voix à toutes les femmes réduites au silence dans la société patriarcale. La légitimité d'une telle opération discursive est basée sur l’hypothèse d'une participation profonde dans le même destin, le même naufrage collectif où les femmes n'espèrent plus d'être sauvées seulement à titre d'exception. Elles ne recherchent ni acceptent qu'une solution systémique. Ce qui est aussi une transgression délibérée, elles refusent de signer leur lettres et pour autant, de reconnaître la valeur de l'instance d'auteur entendue en termes typiquement modernes. Leur détermination à contester la figure d'auteur comme individu est devenue bien visible au Tribunal de Boa-Hora, au cours de la persécution judiciaire intenté contre les trois féministes par le régime salazarien.
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“EREGNAT EM ILON. Elitarne i jego koczownicy” [“EREGNAT EM ILON. The Elitist and her nomads”], Anthropos?, no 28/2019, p. 1-14. ISSN 1730-9549
This personal essay in resentment is an attempt at capturing the secret of the symbiosis between the elitist humanities cultivated at the high-ranking universities and the academic outsiders. The problem at its core is the persistent lack of eminence of Polish humanities in the international context (that the author interweaves with her personal lack of eminence in Polish context, creating a game of palindromes). Trying to indicate possible causes of this situation, the author comments on the marginalization (and self-marginalization) of the outsiders searching for new paths, the derived character of the approaches produced in Polish mainstream academia, as well as the narrowness of conservative corpus that Polish scholars work on; lacking originality is shown as a consequence of a relative poverty of new, unexplored materials. As an example of a dynamic, expanding corpus, studied in the leading academic contexts but not in Poland, the author brings about several examples of nomadic literature (the songs of Fulani shepherds, a novel by a Saudi writer, the modern poetry of Najd).
This personal essay in resentment is an attempt at capturing the secret of the symbiosis between the elitist humanities cultivated at the high-ranking universities and the academic outsiders. The problem at its core is the persistent lack of eminence of Polish humanities in the international context (that the author interweaves with her personal lack of eminence in Polish context, creating a game of palindromes). Trying to indicate possible causes of this situation, the author comments on the marginalization (and self-marginalization) of the outsiders searching for new paths, the derived character of the approaches produced in Polish mainstream academia, as well as the narrowness of conservative corpus that Polish scholars work on; lacking originality is shown as a consequence of a relative poverty of new, unexplored materials. As an example of a dynamic, expanding corpus, studied in the leading academic contexts but not in Poland, the author brings about several examples of nomadic literature (the songs of Fulani shepherds, a novel by a Saudi writer, the modern poetry of Najd).
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“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. „Między litością a współodczuwaniem. O uważnym czytaniu świata, który już nie zawsze daje się uchwycić w postkolonialnych kategoriach” [„Between commiseration and compassion. On mindful reading of the world that can no longer be captured through postcolonial lens], Konteksty Kultury, vol. 16(3)/2019, p. 324-335. ISSN 2083-7658, e-ISSN 2353-1991.
http://www.ejournals.eu/Konteksty_Kultury/2019/Tom-16-zeszyt-3/art/16212/ This contribution establishes a dialogue with the essay of Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand and her proposal of “mindful reading”. The author adds some further comments concerning the notion of mindfulness, getting back to the Buddhist origin of the notion. She also criticises Mroczkowska-Brand's readiness to speak of postcolonial studies Anno Domini 2020. Quite to the contrary, the author points at the exhaustion of typically postcolonial paradigms in such a rapidly changing world as ours. The persistence of postcolonial mentalities is often treated as a factor of stagnation, just like the eternal return to the Sykes-Picot agreement, shown as quite unfortunate in Fouad Laroui's novel, Ce vain combat que tu livres au monde. Other examples brought forth as an exemplification of the “post-postcolonial” changes in the contemporary world are two novels of Tsitsi Dangarembga, the writings of the Malay intellectual Farish Noor, the city chronicles of Kalaf Epalanga, as well as some texts from Guinea-Bissau (Andrea Fernandes, Tony Tcheka).
“„Literatury mniejsze” w perspektywie studiów afro-europejskich. Od niderlandzkiej inskrypcji Kronik abisyńskich Mosesa Isegawy do rewindykacji katalońskości przez Najat El Hachmi” [“Minor literatures in the perspective of Afro-European studies. From the Dutch inscription of Abyssinian Chronicles by Moses Isegawa to the Catalan vindication of Najat El Hachmi”], Niewłasne lektury. Od pisarstwa w języku wyuczonym do wielości kultur czytania, Ewa Łukaszyk, Krystyna Wierzbicka-Trwoga (eds.), Warszawa , DiG, 2018, p. 69-80. ISBN 978-83-2860-032-4
“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).
“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
“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
"W górę wodospadu. Integracyjne wyzwania studiów porównawczych" ["Swimming upstream. Integrative stakes of the comparativism"], Tekstualia, nr 4(31)/2012, p. 85-93. ISSN 1734-6029
In English translation: “Swimming Upstream. Challenges of Integration in Comparative Studies”, trans. by Justyna Burzyńska, Tekstualia EN, 1(1)2013 – A Special Selection of Articles (INDEX PLUS): https://tekstualia.pl/files/810307aa/lukaszyk_ewa-swimming_upstream.challenges_of_integration_in_comparative_studies.pdf
“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
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edited volumes
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Nie tylko salon. Wspólnotowe formy życia literackiego, Ewa Łukaszyk, Krystyna Wierzbicka-Trwoga (red.), Warszawa, DiG, 2016.
Wspólnotowe formy życia literackiego stanowią przeciwwagę zasadniczej samotności człowieka wobec tekstu, nieuchronnie wpisanej zarówno w akt pisania, jak i czytania. Uciekając od tego osamotnienia, czytelnik pragnie spotkania z autorem, improwizującym lub czytającym kuszące świeżością utwory, nim jeszcze ukażą się w druku. Autor zaś szuka potwierdzenia słuszności podjętych wyborów estetycznych w bezpośredniej reakcji kręgu słuchaczy. Wspólne czytanie lub słuchanie literatury kusiło ludzi od czasów starożytnych, a perspektywa debaty tworzyła siłę dośrodkową niezliczonych grup, od późnoantycznych collegia poetarum i renesansowych akademii aż po kręgi literackie nowoczesności. Zjawiska tego rodzaju mają zasięg globalny; dotyczą więcej niż jednego kręgu kulturowego. Niegdyś literackie spotkania znajdowały zakotwiczenie w pałacach i patrycjuszowskich domostwach, później zyskały coraz bardziej mieszczański i demokratyczny wyraz w kulturze kawiarnianej. Wreszcie w dzisiejszych czasach zajęły przestrzeń wirtualną w postaci blogów i społecznościowych serwisów literackich. Za każdym razem chodzi jednak o to samo: o budowę rozumiejącej, na swój sposób intymnej wspólnotowości wokół literatury, która staje się czymś więcej niż tekst. |
Niewłasne lektury. Od pisarstwa w języku wyuczonym do wielości kultur czytania, Ewa Łukaszyk, Krystyna Wierzbicka-Trwoga (red.), Warszawa, DiG, 2018.
Pisanie w języku wyuczonym, a nawet wielojęzyczność w obrębie pojedynczego dzieła to zjawiska niemal tak stare, jak sama literatura. Zepchnięte na margines w rozwoju literatur narodowych, powróciły w czasach nowoczesnych i ponowoczesnych. Toteż zwraca się coraz baczniejszą uwagę na postaci i teksty przekraczające granice ojczystych języków i literatur. Zmąceniu praktyk twórczych odpowiada pluralizacja kultur czytania, przekraczających nie tylko narodowe granice, ale i kulturowe nawyki związane ze słowem drukowanym, często w sytuacjach skrajnych, związanych z jego materialnym brakiem. Dawna wartość książki, niedostępnej czy zakazanej, skłania do refleksji nad łatwością (nie)czytania współczesnego. Zebrane tu szkice naświetlają zjawiska twórczości i recepcji w otwartym horyzoncie, zestawiając dzieła i sylwetki z literatury polskiej, europejskiej i światowej. KUP TĘ KSIĄŻKĘ >>> |
ongoing research
in search of non-hegemonic universalism(s) and the global idiom(s) of transcultural literary expression |
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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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The Journal of Literary Studies publishes and globally disseminates original and cutting-edge research informed by Literary and Cultural Theory. The Journal is an independent quarterly publication owned and published by the South African Literary Society in partnership with Unisa Press and Taylor & Francis. It is housed and produced in the division Theory of Literature at the University of South Africa and is accredited and subsidised by the South African Department of Higher Education and Training. The aim of the journal is to publish articles and full-length review essays informed by Literary Theory in the General Literary Theory subject area and mostly covering Formalism, New Criticism, Semiotics, Structuralism, Marxism, Poststructuralism, Psychoanalysis, Gender studies, New Historicism, Ecocriticism, Animal Studies, Reception Theory, Comparative Literature, Narrative Theory, Drama Theory, Poetry Theory, and Biography and Autobiography.
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