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Friction and Expansion: Comparative Literary Studies as Chimerical Form

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2019

Abstract

By generating friction with the concept of expansion, Aarthi Vadde’s Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016 intervenes in debates shaping comparative literature studies today. Analyzing the work that friction performs in this book sends us beyond the provocative and nuanced readings contained within its pages and sets it in conversation with critical and literary writings it does not address. Miming the ethos and using the practices of Chimeras of Form by expanding its trajectory, I show what frictions and itineraries of inquiry might emerge from its theorization of literature in a global age.

Type
Book Forum on Aarthi Vadde’s Chimeras of Form
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

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References

1 Vadde, Aarthi, Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar , 6, 30. Hereafter cited in text.

2 Heise, Ursula K., “Introduction: Comparative Literature and the New Humanities,” in Futures of Comparative Literature: ACLA State of the Discipline Report, ed. Ursula K. Heise, et al. (New York and Oxford: Routledge, 2017), 18 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

3 Vadde, Chimeras of Form, 15.

4 Two of the most influential studies that rely upon modernist works as key examples in their articulations of world literature are Damrosch, David, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003)Google Scholar and Casanova, Pascale, The World Republic of Letters, trans. Malcolm DeBevoise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004)Google Scholar .

5 Wicke, Jennifer, “Appreciation, Depreciation: Modernism’s Speculative Bubble,” Modernism/Modernity 8.3 (2001): 395 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

6 Hitchcock, Peter, The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 5 Google Scholar .

7 Gikandi, Simon, Maps of Englishness:Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997)Google Scholar .

8 Apter, Emily, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (New York and London: Verso, 2013), 3 Google Scholar .

9 Warwick Research Collective (WReC), Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 22 Google Scholar .

10 Vadde, Chimeras of Form, 18.

11 Ibid., 7.

12 Ibid., 57.

13 Ibid., 131.

14 Ibid., 151.

15 On the politics of difficulty in Lamming and Caribbean migrant fiction, see Brown, J. Dillon, “Exile and Cunning: The Tactical Difficulties of George Lamming,” Contemporary Literature 47.4 (2006): 669694 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

16 Vadde, Chimeras of Form, 7.

17 Ibid., 8.

18 Ibid., 50.

19 Ibid., 222.

20 Ibid., 136.

21 Ibid.

22 See Rizzuto, Nicole, Insurgent Testimonies: Witnessing Colonial Trauma in Modern and Anglophone Literature (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 153177 Google Scholar .

23 Vadde, Chimeras of Form, 25.