Abstract
Recognition and comparison are main threads in the fabric of this book.1 Here, I wish to approach questions of understanding, seeing, knowing, context, and analogy from yet another angle. The need to know and the difficulty to know make knowledge a crucial issue. That is the case in literature, theory, and history, that is, in fictions, in ways of seeing, and in the past and accounts of the past. Poetry, criticism/theory, and history are the main ways in which I have explored these questions. But the quest is seldom linear or simple, although elegance and simplicity are ever the goals.
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Notes
On theory and Comparative Literature, see Richard Rorty, “Looking Back at Literary Theory,” in Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, ed. Haun Saussy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 63–68.
See, for instance, Jonathan Hart, Representing the New World: The English and French Uses of the Example of Spain, 1492–1713 (New York: Palgrave, 2001). Thanks to Rajnath, editor and publisher, for permission to reprint a revised version of “Recognitions, Otherness and Comparing Literatures and Histories,” Journal of Literary Criticism 12.1–2 (June/December 2008): 130–59.
Clifford Geertz, Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000, rpt. 2001), 16.
For a more detailed discussion, see Jonathan Hart, Interpreting Cultures: Literature, Religion and the Human Sciences (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Aristotle, The Rhetoric of Aristotle, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), 1354a, 3.
Aristotle, Aristotle’s Poetics, trans. George Walley, ed. John Baxter and Patrick Atherton (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 85.
Aristotle, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Arts with a Critical Text and Translation of The Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher, 4th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1911). See also the Internet version at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.1.1.html, Section 1, Part II
and Aristotle, Poetics, trans. H. Hamilton Fyfe (London: Heinnemann, 1927).
Aristotle, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Arts with a Critical Text and Translation of The Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher, 4th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1911). See also the Internet version at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.1.1.html, Section 1, Part VI.
Aristotle, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Arts with a Critical Text and Translation of The Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher, 4th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1911). See also the Internet version at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.1.1.html, Section 1, Part VI
Aristotle, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Arts with a Critical Text and Translation of The Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher, 4th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1911). See also the Internet version at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.1.1.html, Section 1, Part IX.
Aristotle, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Arts with a Critical Text and Translation of The Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher, 4th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1911). See also the Internet version at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.1.1.html, Section 1, Part IX.
See Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).
Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 15.
See Roland Barthes S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970); in translation New York, 1974 and London, 1975.
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957, rpt. 1973), 192.
Northrop Frye, Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays, 1974–1988 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992), 44.
See Jonathan Hart, Northrop Frye: The Theoretical Imagination (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 17.
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 293–95; the original published as L’Écriture et la différence (Paris, 1967).
See Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1979) and his Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
See, for instance, Jean Bessière, Quel statut pour la littérature? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001), 119–27.
Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader, trans. David Henry Wilson (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 21.
R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (1946; London: Oxford University Press, 1948, rpt. 1966), 282.
See Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (1946; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953, rpt. 1974), 554–57.
Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (1988; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 190–91, 489.
E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, 12th ed. (1950; London: Phaidon Press, 1972, rpt. 1973), 223–24.
Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1982), 54–80.
Aristotle, Aristotle’s Poetics, trans. George Walley, ed. John Baxter and Patrick Atherton (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 81, 83 [1451a–b];
see Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (1986; Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, rpt. 1992), xii., 40.
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978);
Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (1982; New York: Harper & Row, 1984);
Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, with J. J. M. Tobin, 2nd ed. (Boston, MA and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
Jean Bessiére, “Comparative Literature and Common Knowledge against the Ideologies of the Absolute Power of Literature,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 32.1 (March/mars 2005): 37–64, and his Qu’est-il arrive aux écrivains français? (Loveral: Éditions Labor, 2006).
See J. H. Elliott, “Final Reflections: The Old World and the New Revisited,” America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750, ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 398–99.
See Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (1982; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, rev. 1986), esp. 32–33, 64–104.
Tzvetan Todorov, “L’être et l’autre: Montaigne,” Yale French Studies 64 (1983): 118–19, see 113–44.
David Quint, “A Reconsideration of Montaigne’s Des cannibals,” America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750, ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995, 166–91).
Keith Thomas, “Anthropology and History,” Past and Present 24 (1963): 3–24;
see Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975);
Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984; New York: Vintage, 1985), 4; Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, 14–26; Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, Historical Methods, 186.
See Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, trans. A. P. Maudslay (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Cudahy, 1956), and Todorov, Conquest.
See Jonathan Hart, Columbus, Shakespeare and the Interpretation of the New World (New York: Palgrave, 2003).
See also Jonathan Hart, Empires and Colonies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008).
A. J. R. Russell-Wood, The Portuguese Empire, 1415–1808: A World on the Move (1992; Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 6.
For another view, see Ron Tyler, Visions of America: Pioneer Artists in a New Land (London: Thames and Hudson, 1983), 10–11.
See A. J. Woodman, Rhetoric in Classical Historiography (London: Croom Helm, 1988).
See Jonathan Hart and Terry Goldie, “Postcolonial Theory,” Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 155–58.
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© 2012 Jonathan Locke Hart
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Hart, J. (2012). Recognizing Otherness and Comparison. In: Fictional and Historical Worlds. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137012647_4
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