Open Challenges, Hidden Stories. The Power of Literary Histories

Open Challenges, Hidden Stories. The Power of Literary Historie

From Comparatism to Comparativity: Comparative Reasoning Reconsidered

Comparative literature was born with the national paradigm of literary historiography in the early nineteenth century when literary studies, together with other historical and comparative studies, were institutionalized as a particular field of research and higher education. The cognitive pattern generated by this paradigm comprises both national literary studies and comparative literature. They are both instances of comparatism, solidly anchored in a national context as its basic and indispensable point of reference rather than in the border crossing life of literary texts. In contrast, the comparative reasoning of the twenty first century, as exemplified by the emerging interest in world literature studies, attempts to cultivate the comparativity of the literary texts themselves – their potential to engage with several possible contexts of comparison beyond the standard theories and methods of comparatism and without giving an axiomatic priority to one of them. In the traditional aesthetics of imitation, European and non European, the double nature of any text as being organized around both an external centre and a domestic centre is already an integral part of the definition of literature in view, first of all, of their degree of canonicity. Today, more radically, all literary texts, irrespective of canonical position but as part of their status and function as literary texts, are assumed to possess the capacity to be part of several textual and cultural contexts beyond that of their place and time of origin. The paper traces the history of comparative reasoning, leading both to the national paradigm and the nineteenth century inspired comparatism and to the consequences for modern literary studies, opening a broader view of the comparative potentials of texts across time and space

Sea, Identity and Literature

The sea is more than water and remote horizons. Since the beginning of literatures, the sea has sent waves of challenges to human existence through numerous stories and poems and continues to do so in all media. Everywhere the sea marks the limits of collective and individual human identity both on a social level as a question of survival, on an anthropological level as a non-human space we are bound to and on an ontological level as the boundary between life and death. The role of the sea in literature reaches far beyond maritime novels and heroic epics feeding on adventures at sea. In constantly changing cultural contexts it releases the basic question of human identity in all its complexity across time and space.El mar es mucho más que agua y horizontes remotos. Desde el inicio de las literaturas, el mar ha enviado sus olas de desafío a la existencia humana a través de numerosas historias y poemas, y lo sigue haciendo en los diversos medios comunicativos. En todas partes, el mar marca los límites de la identidad humana individual y colectiva tanto en un nivel social, como cuestión de supervivencia, como en un nivel antropológico en cuanto espacio no humano al que estamos ligados y en nivel ontológico como la frontera entre la vida y la muerte. El papel del mar en la literatura va más allá de las novelas marítimas y los poemas épicos que se alimentan de las aventuras en el mar. En contextos culturales que varían constantemente, plantea la cuestión básica de la identidad humana en toda su complejidad a través del tiempo y el espacio

Den vilde natur - og den villede

Mennesket har haft forskellige tilgange til naturen, forskellige naturopfattelser. Det er med dette udgangspunkt, at centret er grundlagt for at forske i menneskets forhold til natur. Det er også påvirket af tidens miljødebatter

Hvordan er teksten i verden?

Jørgen Bruhn: Romanens tænker – M.M. Bachtins romanteorier, Kbh.2005 (Multivers)

Humanistisk Forskningscenter — Odense Universitet: Menneske og Natur

Centerleder Svend Erik Larsen beretter følgende om den videre vej fra bevilling til center. I maj 1991 besluttede Statens Humanistiske Forskningsråd at iværksætte et tredje 5-årigt humanistisk forskningscenter inden for rammerne af det humanistiske centerprogram med igangsættelse 1. januar 1992. Den økonomiske basisbevilling blev sikret af forskningsrådet og Miljøministeriet i fællesskab, og Odense Universitet var værtsinstitution for centret. Centret fik kontorer og mødelokale i en selvstændig afdeling af Odense Kommunes kulturcenter Hollufgaard

Litteraturens teorier. Bette, By, Balzac

af Svend Erik Larse

”Jeg sidder i toget” – Rumlighed i forandring

The article asks the question whether the term ‘spatial turn’ implies the same reference to a fundamental paradigmatic shift as Kant’s Copernican revolution or the ‘linguistic turn.’ The answer is no. The article considers the topical interest in spatiality as a more loose recontextualization of basic notions of time and space of a long standing, more in line with a gradual change of meaning from antiquity to the present than with a conceptual revolutio