Toward a Transcontinental Theory of Modern Comparative Literature

FAIN: FEL-258209-18

Shaden M. Tageldin
University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN 55455-2009)

Completion of a book-length study on the Arab-European origins of modern comparative literature.

As a discipline, comparative literature often ascribes its origins to Europe and the United States, overlooking other histories. Through the prism of Arab-European comparison, this project develops one possible transcontinental theory of the field. It traces the rise of modern comparative literature to a new regime of language—emerging in the shadows of empire and of modern scientific method, specifically empiricism—in which words increasingly were expected to be life-like, to visualize matter and to echo the actually spoken. Languages that once styled themselves larger than life—incomparable—came to share a new, modern sense—relativist and positivist—that language must mirror or echo life. This turn to nature, bonding word to world, redefined Arabic, European, and other literatures as comparable quantities.

Associated Products

Abu Shādī, Tagore, and the Problem of World Literature at the Hinge of Afroeurasia (Article)
Title: Abu Shādī, Tagore, and the Problem of World Literature at the Hinge of Afroeurasia
Author: Shaden M. Tageldin
Abstract: This essay traces the problem of world literature in key writings by the Egyptian scientist and littérateur Aḥmad Zakī Abū Shādī. Abū Shādī's early nod to world literature (1908–1909) intimates the challenge of making literary particularity heard in the homogenizing harmonies of a world dominated by English. That problem persists in his account of a 1926 meeting with the Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore and in an essay of 1928 inspired by that meeting: one of the first manifestos of _al-adab al-ʿālamī_ (world literature) in Arabic, predating the 1936 appearance of _al-adab al-muqāran_ (comparative literature). While Abū Shādī lauds Tagore's refusal to compare literatures East and West and insistence on the spiritual unity of all literatures, his struggles to articulate a world in which harmony is not an alibi for hierarchy suggest that neither comparative literature nor its would-be leveler—world literature—can shed the haunting specter of inequality.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-00403004
Primary URL Description: DOI for article in _Journal of World Literature_ 4.3 (2019)
Secondary URL: https://brill.com/view/journals/jwl/4/3/article-p350_4.xml
Secondary URL Description: BRILL URL for article in _Journal of World Literature_ 4.3 (2019)
Access Model: Subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of World Literature
Publisher: Brill

Hugo, Translated: The Measures of Modernity in Muḥammad Rūḥī al-Khālidī's Poetics of Comparative Literature (Article)
Title: Hugo, Translated: The Measures of Modernity in Muḥammad Rūḥī al-Khālidī's Poetics of Comparative Literature
Author: Shaden M. Tageldin
Abstract: In the Ottoman-Palestinian intellectual Muḥammad Rūḥī al-Khālidī's _Tārīkh ʿIlm al-Adab ʿind al-Ifranj wa-l-ʿArab, wa-Fīktūr Hūkū_ (1904, 2nd ed. 1912; _History of the Science of Literature among the Europeans and the Arabs, and Victor Hugo_), the figure of Victor Hugo marks the uneven chime and dissonance of select notes in Arabic and French literary epistemes and histories. Tracing Hugo's dictum that poetry inheres not in forms but in ideas to Arab-Islamic antiquity, al-Khālidī incarnates in Hugo the lost “nature” to which a fallen, “artificial” Arabic literature must return. In this regime of comparability, words must be cut to the measure of their meaning, and meter—poetic measure—tuned to the “natural” rhythms of speech. With al-Khālidī's translations of meter across time and language, this essay reads his translations of Hugo's theory and poetry (“Grenade”) to argue that the underlying concept of measure encodes a drive to equate the world's literatures and empires.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812923000573
Primary URL Description: DOI for article in _PMLA_ 138.3 (2023)
Secondary URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/hugo-translated-the-measures-of-modernity-in-muhammad-ruhi-alkhalidis-poetics-of-comparative-literature/DEE66FD71663A6355EC3311E777FD1EA
Secondary URL Description: Cambridge University Press URL for article in _PMLA_ 138.3 (2023)
Access Model: Subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: PMLA
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Abū Shādī, Tagore, and the Problem of World Literature at the Hinge of Afroeurasia (Book Section)
Title: Abū Shādī, Tagore, and the Problem of World Literature at the Hinge of Afroeurasia
Author: Shaden M. Tageldin
Editor: David Damrosch
Editor: Bhavya Tiwari
Abstract: Reprint, with minor emendations, of Shaden M. Tageldin, "Abū Shādī, Tagore, and the Problem of World Literature at the Hinge of Afroeurasia," in _Journal of World Literature_ 4.3 (2019).
Year: 2023
Access Model: Subscription only
Publisher: Brill
Book Title: World Literature and Postcolonial Studies
ISBN: 9789004547230

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