Singular Unverifiability

IF 0.4 3区文学 0 LITERATURE

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES Pub Date : 2023-05-01 DOI:10.5325/complitstudies.60.2.0253

G. Walker

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Abstract

abstract:Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Death of a Discipline powerfully linked the social-institutional conditions of literary reflection to the category of the geopolitical, in the hopes of a renewal of Comparative Literature, whose earlier aims at their best had been to shelter the international possibility of humanistic thought beyond the border. Yet, this discipline has often remained trapped by the only partial universality of its function, substituting for the world a microcosm of convivial European multilingualism and ambition of scope. Twenty years after its publication, Death of a Discipline notably upheld a space for the "singular unverifiability" that marks Comparative Literature at its best – not only the singularity of the written line, and the unverifiability of the reading of the literary text, but also the singular and the unverifiable as warnings against the positivist culturalism of the older area studies. In this sense, it must be taken as a profoundly affirmative text that still offers a vision of a genuine intellectual-institutional alternative: to open the theoretical humanities to the remote and fragile thinking of a genuine encounter with planetarity.

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奇异不可验证性

加亚特里·查克拉沃蒂·斯皮瓦克的《一门学科之死》将文学反思的社会制度条件与地缘政治范畴强有力地联系在一起，以期复兴比较文学，其早期的最大目标是庇护超越国界的人文主义思想的国际可能性。然而，这门学科经常被其功能的部分普遍性所束缚，取而代之的是一个充满欢乐的欧洲多语言和雄心勃勃的世界缩影。出版二十年后，《一门学科之死》尤其坚持了一个“单一的不可验证性”的空间，这标志着比较文学的最佳状态——不仅是书面文字的奇异性，文学文本阅读的不可验证性，而且是对旧地区研究的实证文化主义的警告。从这个意义上说，它必须被视为一个深刻的肯定文本，它仍然提供了一个真正的知识机构替代方案的愿景:向与行星真正相遇的遥远而脆弱的思想开放理论人文学科。

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来源期刊

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES LITERATURE-

CiteScore

0.50

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0.00%

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期刊介绍： Comparative Literature Studies publishes comparative articles in literature and culture, critical theory, and cultural and literary relations within and beyond the Western tradition. It brings you the work of eminent critics, scholars, theorists, and literary historians, whose essays range across the rich traditions of Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. One of its regular issues every two years concerns East-West literary and cultural relations and is edited in conjunction with members of the College of International Relations at Nihon University. Each issue includes reviews of significant books by prominent comparatists.