Abstract
Comparative literature has always presupposed transnationality, not only as it may be encountered in the circulations of texts and ideas, but also as it appears in the vocation of the critic. The critic engaged in a comparative study of literature, like Walter Benjamin’s translator, is positioned outside of the national, linguistic, or cultural forest, desperately trying to catch echoes of the foreign utterances with more or less familiar resonances.1 “National literature,” as Goethe put it in the early nineteenth century, “is no longer of any importance; it is time for world literature, and all must aid in bringing it about.”2 In this view of Weltliteratur, a certain unfamiliarity or lack of homeliness is required. To forego the national in favor of some international or transnational vision is to embrace alterity, the estrangement that comes with being “out of place,” which is also one of the most powerful experiences of the literary itself, as the great Russian formalists reminded us. To engage in the theory and practice of comparative literature is to confront this estrangement head on, not in order to make the transnational more familiar, but to marvel and delight in its implacable weirdness. In this sense, the critic approaches all texts as foreign, and criticism, rather than domesticating the strange experiences of the text, serves to evoke and even celebrate its foreignness.
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Notes
See Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 76.
Goethe, “On World Literature,” in Essays on Art and Literature, ed. John Geary, trans. Ellen von Nardhoff and Ernest H. von Nardhoff (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 224.
See Jerome Taylor, The Didascalion of Hugh of Saint Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
Erich Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” trans. M. and E. W. Said, Centennial Review 13.1 (1969), 17.
Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 186.
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 3.
For an example of one such approach to the spatial peculiarities of literary texts, see Bertrand Westphal, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces, trans. Robert T. Tally Jr. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
For an excellent account of just how much the experience in Istanbul influenced Auerbach’s work, see Kader Konuk, East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).
Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971), 29.
See Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 233.
See Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 161.
Steiner, Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language of Revolution (New York: Atheneum, 1976), 11.
Eagleton, Exiles and Émigrés: Studies in Modern Literature (New York: Schocken Books, 1970), 9.
Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 411.
Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 133.
Alex Thomson, Adorno (London: Continuum, 2006), 31.
Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. K. Tarnowski and F. Will (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 26–27.
Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 39.
George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 329.
Gilles Deleuze, “Nomad Thought,” trans. David Allison. The New Nietzsche, ed. David Allison (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1977), 149.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 17.
Said, On Late Style (New York: Pantheon, 2006), 8.
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© 2015 Robert T. Tally Jr.
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Tally, R.T. (2015). Mundus Totus Exilium Est: Reflections on the Critic in Exile. In: Tally, R.T. (eds) The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137487209_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137487209_11
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