Thinking Activity Unit 2 : Comparative Literature

 

Hello Readers 👋 

Welcome to my blog. In our syllabus of M.A. part-1 we had one paper on Contemporary literature and Translation Studies. In this paper we had a lots of articles. Dilip Barad assigned us this article in Group presentations Task. 

Comparative Literature in the  Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline   

                                     - Todd Presner  

👉Abstract 

After five hundred years of print and the massive transformations in society and  culture that it unleashed, we are in the midst of another watershed moment in human  history that is on par with the invention of the printing press or perhaps the discovery  of the New World. This article focuses on the questions like  it is essential that humanists assert and insert themselves into  the twenty - first century cultural wars, which are largely being defined, fought, and  won by corporate interests.

Why, for example, were humanists, foundations, and  universities conspicuously – even scandalously – silent when Google won its book  search lawsuit and, effectively, won the right to transfer copyright of orphaned books  to itself? Why were they silent when the likes of Sony and Disney essentially engineered the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, radically restricting intellectual property, copyright, and sharing? The Manifesto is a call to Humanists for a much deeper  engagement with digital culture production, publishing, access, and ownership. If  new technologies are dominated and controlled by corporate and entertainment inter ests, how will our cultural legacy be rendered in new media formats? By whom and  for whom?

👉Key Points 

• Comparative Media Studies  
• Comparative Data Studies  

• Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies

👉Key Arguments 

Nicholas Negroponte once asserted in his wildly optimistic book Being  Digital (Negroponte, 1995 ), for they always have an underbelly: mobile phones, social  networking technologies, and perhaps even the hundred - dollar computer, will not  only be used to enhance education, spread democracy, and enable global communication but will likely be used to perpetrate violence and even orchestrate genocide in  much the same way that the radio and the railway did in the last century (despite the  belief that both would somehow liberate humanity and join us all together in a happy,  interconnected world that never existed    (Presner, 2007 ).

Paul Gilroy  analyzed in his study of “ the fatal junction of the concept of nationality with the  concept of culture ” along the “ Black Atlantic, ” voyages of discovery, enlightenment,  and progress also meant, at every moment, voyages of conquest, enslavement, and  destruction. Indeed, this is why iany discussion of technology cannot be separated from  a discussion about formations of power and instrumentalized authority.

N. Katherine Hayles, I find myself wondering – as we  ponder various possible futures for Comparative Literature in the second decade of the  twenty - first century – how to rouse ourselves from the “ somnolence [of] five hundred  years of print ” (Hayles, 2002 : p. 29). Of course, there is nothing neutral, objective,  or necessary about the medium of print; rather it is a medium that has a long and  complex history connected to the formation of academic disciplines, institutions, epistemologies, and ideologies, not to mention conceptions of authorship and scholarly research.

Darnton ’s assessment seriously that we are now in the fifth decade of the  fourth information age in the history of humankind, it seems to me that we ought to  try to understand not only the contours of the discipline of Comparative Literature  – and for that matter, the Humanities as a whole – from the perspective of an information - and media - specific analysis, but that we also ought to come to terms with  the epistemic disjunction between our digital age and everything that came before it.

Walter Benjamin did in  The Arcades Project (1928 – 40; 1999), it is necessary, I believe, to interrogate both the  media and methodologies for the study of literature, culture, and society. The “ problem ” of Comparative Literature is  to figure out how to take seriously the range of new authoring, annotation, and sharing  platforms that have transformed global cultural production.

👉Analysis 

For Nelson, a hypertext is a:- Body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could  not conveniently be presented or represented on paper [ … ] Such a system could grow  indefinitely, gradually including more and more of the world ’ s written knowledge.   (Nelson, 2004: pp. 134 – 145)

Lev Manovich and Noah  Wardrip - Fruin, the field of “ cultural analytics ” has emerged over the past five years  to bring the tools of high - end computational analysis and data visualization to dissect  large - scale cultural datasets.

Jerome McGann argues with  regard to the first in his elegant analysis of “ radiant textuality, ” the differences  between the codex and the electronic versions of the Oxford English Dictionary.

James Boyle points out, there are many corporate entities eager to regulate the public domain and control the “ commons of the mind. ” 10 For Boyle, the real  danger is not unauthorized file sharing but “ failed sharing ” due to enclosures and  strictures placed upon the world of the creative commons (Boyle, 2008 : p. 182). Scholars such as McKenzie Wark and  Kathleen Fitzpatrick have even “ published ” early versions of their entire books on  Commentpress.

👉Conclusion 

This article mainly focuses on this twenty-first century in terms of digital humanities how we are doing comparative studies. After discussing various arguments, we come to know that to date, it has more than three million content pages, more than three hundred  million edits, over ten million registered users, and articles in forty - seven languages  (Wikipedia Statistics). This is a massive achievement for eight years of work. Wikipedia  represents a dynamic, flexible, and open - ended network for knowledge creation and  distribution that underscores process, collaboration, access, interactivity, and creativity, with an editing model and versioning system that documents every contingent  decision made by every contributing author. At this moment in its short life, Wikipedia  is already the most comprehensive, representative, and pervasive participatory platform for knowledge production ever created by humankind. In my opinion, that is  worth some pause and reflection, perhaps even by scholars in a future disciplinary  incarnation of Comparative Literature.

Thank you....