| FEL-258209-18 | Research Programs: Fellowships | Shaden M. Tageldin | Toward a Transcontinental Theory of Modern Comparative Literature | 1/1/2019 - 12/31/2019 | $50,400.00 | Shaden | M. | Tageldin | | | | University of Minnesota | Minneapolis | MN | 55455-2009 | USA | 2017 | Comparative Literature | Fellowships | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | 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. |