Comparative Literature and the Historical Imaginary

This book argues that increasingly transnational reading contexts of the twenty-first century place new pressures on fundamental questions about how we read literary fiction. Prompted by the stylistic strategies of three European émigré writers of the twentieth century - Conrad, Weiss and Sebald - it demonstrates the need to pose more differentiated questions about specific effects that occur when literary narratives meet a readership with a heterogeneous historical imaginary. In conversation with reception theory, trauma theory and transnational and postcolonial studies, the study shows how historical pressures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries require comparative literature to address not only implied but also various unimplied reading positions that engage history in displaced yet material ways. This book opens new analytical paths for thinking about literary texts as media of historical imagination and conceiving relations between incommensurable historical events and contexts. Challenging overly global and overly local readings alike, the book presents a sophisticated contribution to discussions on how to reform the discipline of comparative literature in the twenty-first century.

Auteur
Kaisa Kaakinen works as postdoctoral researcher in comparative literature at University of Turku, Finland. She completed her doctoral degree in comparative literature at Cornell University, USA, in 2013 and conducted dissertation research at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. Her publications deal with twentieth and twenty-first-century literature and the intersections of literature and history, and she has taught comparative literature at Cornell University, University of Helsinki and University of Turku.

Contenu

1. Introduction: Comparative Readings in the Twenty-First Century.- PART I: OUTLINING THE FUTURE: PETER WEISS'S DIE ÄSTHETIK DES WIDERSTANDS AND THE PARATAXIS OF HISTORY.- 2. Sensory Representations and Untimely Reference in Die Ästhetik des Widerstands.- 3. Coordinates of Comparison: Weiss's Poetics of Historical Relation.- PART II: "I WOULD NOT EVEN INVENT A TRANSITION." (RE-) CONTEXTUALIZING JOSEPH CONRAD.- 4. Imperial Comparison and Postcolonial Reading.- 5. Conrad as a Bridge.- PART III: ANALOGY AND THE NARRATION OF TRAUMA IN W. G. SEBALD'S AUSTERLITZ AND DIE RINGE DES SATURN.- 6. Repetition and Digression: Sebald's Narratives of Trauma.- 7. Configurations of the Present in Sebald.- 8. Conclusion: Present Futures.- Bibliography.-