In early 2017, Wayne McGregor adapted Virginia Woolf’s novels into a ballet triptych entitled Woolf Works and performed it at Royal Opera House in London. One of the triptych’s sections, ‘Tuesday’, is based on Woolf’s most experimental poetic prose The Waves (1931). Virginia Woolf’s texts attracts me for their unique style—not just rich of fictional imaginations but also exquisite in poetic imagery and rhythm. Especially The Waves has the potential to be adapted into dancing due to the movement and rhythm the text entails. I was touched to learn that McGregor finally realized the choreography of The Waves. To a large extent, I believe this illustrate how human creativity can communicate through two conventionally different genres—literature and performance.
I am interested in studying the rhythm and performativity of similar text that blurs the boundary of conventional categorization of literary text and performing art. Similar examples also include Italo Calvino’s text Invisible Cities (1972) that has also been adapted into a contemporary opera by Christopher Cerrone and was performed in the Union Train Station in LA in 2013.
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It seems that the objects of comparative literature study could be all those issues related to culture. The texts we study are not only literature texts, but also those much broader including politics, media, entertainment, history, geography and even some hard science. So, it brings about a question of where is the position of literature in this comparative study. It seems that everything related to human being can be summarized and embraced into the discourses of culture. However, I think we may have the need to find the position of literature in this intercultural and cross-disciplinary study.
We can dig out many cultural elements from a literature text and try to interpret and explain literature texts from a perspective of culture, which I think can drag literature study approaching to daily life. But not every text we encounter could be understood as a literature text and put into the domain of literature study. What is the relationship between Literature and the world, is it a projection or a parallel universe? Literature works have different time span in narrative, for example, in Stoner Williams portrays lifetime experience while in Ulysses Joyce focuses on a day-long circumstance. Given the concept of time is artificial and the subjective feeling towards it varies, are the two identified works share equal effects in projecting our life? According to Derrida and Bergson that the duration of consciousness is differ from the objective time, thus in the larger views both works captured a certain part of a unrepresentative whole. Till here I found myself hard to continue the topic, and this gives me motivation in furthering my study in this area.
Aloyssios Wong Comparative Literature is born out of a resistance to the limitations of national literatures in an incredibly connected but paradoxically, fragmented planetary consciousness. Nowadays, this young discipline stands in the doorway of its greatest challenges to date, and the attitude towards these challenges remains engaged and deeply convinced of its importance.
What are these challenges then? The exact same ones that plague the cultural and social landscape:
How does comparative literature address these points?
All in all, it seems clear that what comparative literature faces is no easy feat, but it is an inspiring one that hints at the foundation on which it has been built: rooting for the underdog, for the voiceless and oppressed by political and social discourses. If we are to take these challenges interdisciplinary, the main method of comparative literature cannot be ignored: to question endlessly, to never be satisfied and in a very Socratic way, to argue without reaching a conclusive answer. By: Sara Cordovez Lopez Did you say you study comparative literature? What is that…do you like…compare books? As an undergraduate comparative literature student, this is a response I am met with regularly. To be completely honest, I didn’t really know what I was studying until a few weeks into my first term of lectures and seminars. I have gradually come to understand what studying comparative literature means, however a question I ask myself on a weekly basis is what I am going to do with what I’ve learnt; where I can apply this allegedly very niche set of knowledge; why study comparative literature?
After a short lecture by Professor Mads Rosendahl Thomsen I have accepted the idea that there is no clear answer. Comparative literature is applicable in so many different fields depending on one’s area of interest. So what does it mean to me? Well, in my eyes, comparative literature seems to be a way to study people; about what it means to be a person, how people have thought and might think in various times and places, how people respond to situations, how people communicate, and so on. Studying comparative literature means being able to contribute to various other fields with the perspective of someone who has access to examples of discourse, that is literature, across national borders and time; be it for instance studies of languages, current world crises, questions of digital age communication, or politics. This is without the assumption of any superiority above domain experts in various fields of study; it is rather an attempt to symbiotically reach ideas and conclusions about the world. Alice Signell Second Year, UCL (BA) Comparative Literature |
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