the unexplored richness of human literary expression
The universalist claim of the discipline called Comparative Literature (that supposedly died and was reborn in a new, less Euro-centric incarnation) has been criticised on countless occasion. This is why I feel the need of opening a new chapter in literary studies, dedicated specifically to verbal expression that is so dissimilar from our own genres that it hardly enters the focus of what is called Comparative Literature, a hegemonic discipline having its name written in capital letters.
Global literary studies is thus an area that studies the cantigas de harmonia chanted by women in Guinea Bissau in order to put an end to a quarrel. As well as the systems of versification in Mongolian poetry and the tales on sexual intercourse of humans and djinns told in Socotra. Treating them as literature in its full right, not just an ethnographic curiosity.
The question to be answered is how diverse and how similar are the forms of human literary expression, how many ways of playing with words actually exist, what is the extent of their richness and diversity. How translatable and how expressive they might be beyond the range of cultures in which they were born.
Global literary studies is thus an area that studies the cantigas de harmonia chanted by women in Guinea Bissau in order to put an end to a quarrel. As well as the systems of versification in Mongolian poetry and the tales on sexual intercourse of humans and djinns told in Socotra. Treating them as literature in its full right, not just an ethnographic curiosity.
The question to be answered is how diverse and how similar are the forms of human literary expression, how many ways of playing with words actually exist, what is the extent of their richness and diversity. How translatable and how expressive they might be beyond the range of cultures in which they were born.
my essays in global literary studies
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“Mowa lokalna, mowa globalna. O językach literatury świata” [„Local tongue, global tongue. The languages of World Literature”], Teksty Drugie, no 4/2021, p. 60-78.
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. |
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