Quest of a Discipline: New Academic Directions for Comparative Literature

From the days of René Wellek’s ‘Crisis of Comparative Literature’ (1959) through the beginning of the twenty-first century that saw Gayatri Spivak’s provocative Death of a Discipline (2003), Comparative Literature as an academic discipline has endured like no other. This pioneering volume, Quest of a Discipline, offers challenging new directions to this field urging the readers to see the practice of Comparative Literature as a quest. It showcases the multicultural, multilingual India as the most potential site of quest today for the discipline of Comparative Literature.

The deliberations are divided into sections that deal with traditions, manifestoes of survival, the latest methodologies, and perspectives that comparatists from India, China, the Near West, Europe and America have brought into the discipline. Each section is prefaced with a short introduction that locates the interdisciplinary articles within the paradoxical wholeness of Comparative Literature. Challenging and unsettling many basic premises of comparative studies, the essays explore the possibility of redefining the scope of Comparative Literature by forging meaningful interfaces between the following fields:
Translation Studies
Performance studies
Film Studies
Media Studies
Dalit Studies
Women’s Writing
Comparative Poetics
Cartoon Art
Folklore