Companion to Comparative Literature

Ali Behdad is John Charles Hillis Professor of Comparative Literature and Chair of English Department at UCLA. He is the author of Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (1995) and A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States (2005). Dominic Thomas is Chair of the Departments of French and Francophone Studies and Italian at the University of California Los Angeles, where he is also Professor of Comparative Literature. He has edited several volumes on literary topics and is the author of Nation-Building, Propaganda and Literature in Francophone Africa (2002) and Black France: Colonialism, Immigration and Transnationalism (2007).

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• List of Contributors viii Introduction 1Ali Behdad and Dominic ThomasPart I Roadmaps 131 A Discipline of Tolerance 15Rey Chow2 Why Compare? 28David Ferris3 Method and Congruity: The Odious Business of Comparative Literature 46David Palumbo-Liu4 Comparisons, World Literature, and the Common Denominator 60Haun Saussy5 Comparative Literature in America: Attempt at a Genealogy 65Kenneth SurinPart II Theoretical Directions 736 The Poiein of Secular Criticism 75Stathis Gourgouris7 Vanishing Horizons: Problems in the Comparison of China and the West 88Eric Hayot8 Art and Literature in the Liquid Modern Age: On Richard Wollheim, Zygmunt Bauman and Yves Michaud 108Efraín Kristal9 A Literary Object’s Contextual Life 120Michael Lucey10 The Theater of Comparative Literature 136Sharon MarcusPart III Disciplinary Intersections 15511 What Pictures Tell Us about the Letter: Visual and Literary Practices in Latin America 157Jorge Coronado12 If There’s a Text in this Class, Where Did it Come From? Or, What Does Marilyn Monroe Have to do With The Sorrows of Young Man Werther? 176Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller13 Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline 193Todd Presner14 Comparing Pain: Theoretical Explorations of Suffering and Working Towards the Particular 208Zoë Norridge15 Comparativism, Transfers, Entangled History: Sociological Perspectives on Literature 225Gisèle SapiroPart IV Linguistic Trajectories 23716 Orphaned Language: Traumatic Crossings in Literature and History 239Cathy Caruth17 Contested Grammars: Comparative Literature, Translation, and the Challenge of Locality 254Simon Gikandi18 Comparative Literature and the Global Languagescape 273Mary Louise Pratt19 Persian Incursions: The Transnational Dynamics of Persian Literature 296Nasrin Rahimieh20 Rudimentariness as Home 312Mireille RoselloPart V Postcolonial Mobilities 33321 Afro-European Studies: Emerging Fields and New Directions 335Allison Crumly Deventer and Dominic Thomas22 The Comparative and the Relational: Meditations on Racial Method 357David Theo Goldberg23 Kidnapped Narratives: Mobility without Autonomy and the Nation/Novel Analogy 369Deborah Jenson24 Counterpoint and Double Critique in Edward Said and Abdelkebir Khatibi: A Transcolonial Comparison 387Françoise Lionnet25 How French Studies Became Transnational; Or Postcolonialism as Comparatism 408David Murphy26 Towards a Planetary Reading of Postcolonial and American Imaginative Eco-Graphies 421Sangeeta RayPart VI Global Connections 43727 Terrestrial Humanism: Edward W. Said and the Politics of World Literature 439Emily Apter28 Logics and Contexts of Circulation 454Brian T. Edwards29 “Worlds in Collision:” The Languages and Locations of World Literature 473Charles Forsdick30 The Trouble with World Literature 490Graham HugganIndex 507