[DOWNLOAD] "Indigenous Literature and Comparability (Essay)" by CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free

📘 Read Now     📥 Download

eBook details

• Title: Indigenous Literature and Comparability (Essay)
• Author : CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
• Release Date : January 01, 2011
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 86 KB

Description

There are many barriers to the comparative study of Indigenous and non-Indigenous literature. Nevertheless, recent developments in Indigenous literary criticism and publishing, and in the discipline of comparative literature itself, suggest that those barriers are gradually giving way to a rethinking of the relationships between those literatures and the cultures that produce them. One of the main impulses behind the comparative study of literature is the recognition that literary forms and practices are shared across cultures, and the desire to discover what exactly is shared and how that sharing takes place. Consequently, some comparative studies focus on universals such as the nature of literary language or the fundamental features of narratives. Many literary categories--poetry, drama, narrative, and the genres and sub-genres within those broader categories--can be studied across cultures. This type of approach has been seen as a salutary corrective to nationalism in the study of literatures and indeed as the only means of establishing a truly scientific approach to literature (see Chow 289). Defining and studying national literatures has been a part of nation-building since the nineteenth century, but comparative literature counteracts the tendency to claim national superiority or precedence on the basis of the imagined "genius" or specificity of a nation. Where a British scholar would trace the origins of the novel to Richardson or Defoe, a French scholar to Madame de Lafayette, and a Spanish scholar to Cervantes, a comparatist traces cultural interactions to demonstrate that the novel actually has multiple origins in different cultures. The traditional approach to comparative study has been under suspicion since the 1960s when poststructuralist theory began to discredit the notion of universality as a mask for Eurocentric hegemony exercised through master narratives and discourses. The antidote to those homogenizing pressures has been to lend greater value to differences than to the sameness of universals. In comparative literature, that shift of focus was acknowledged in the 1993 report of the American Comparative Literature Association entitled Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism with articles by US-American scholars in comparative literature. Henceforth--at least in the US--comparative studies would seek grounds for comparison within the realities of multiculturalism, which had itself emerged as a more potent counter-weight to nationalism than the idea of universals. The suggestion that multiculturalism--or, in current parlance and theoretical development "interculturalism"--should be a driver of comparative studies came as no surprise to Canadian comparatists, who had already been grappling with the multicultural nature of Canadian literature. E.D. Blodgett's entry on Canadian Comparative Literature in the Canadian Encyclopedia traces the development of the field from bicultural French-English studies toward more diverse studies premised not only on linguistic differences but also on cultural differences expressed within the same language. In Five-Part Invention, Blodgett sets out his vision of Canadian literature as a whole composed of French, English, ethnic, Native, and Inuit components. Theoretically, it should be possible to compare texts from any two or more of those groups, on the basis of a shared geographical space and history. Similarly, Steven Totosy de Zepetnek postulates in his frameworks of comparative literature and comparative cultural studies explicit criticism of and opposition to Eurocentrism and the national approach of comparative literature and propagates in application the inclusion of all "Other," thus including Indigenous literatures and cultures (see, e.g., Comparative Literature, "From Comparative Literature"). However, in reality while studies covering Quebecois, English, and ethnic texts in French, English, or heritage languages are common, they rarely involve compar

PDF Books "Indigenous Literature and Comparability (Essay)" Online ePub Kindle