All the difference in the world : postcoloniality and the ends of comparison
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
All the difference in the world : postcoloniality and the ends of comparison
(Cultural memory in the present)
Stanford University Press, 2007
- : cloth
- : pbk
Available at 6 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [257]-268) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This book is about culture and comparison. Starting with the history of the discipline of comparative literature and its forgotten relation to the positivist comparative method, it inquires into the idea of comparison in a postcolonial world. Comparison was Eurocentric by exclusion when it applied only to European literature, and Eurocentric by discrimination when it adapted evolutionary models to place European literature at the forefront of human development. This book argues that inclusiveness is not a sufficient response to postcolonial and multiculturalist challenges because it leaves the basis of equivalence unquestioned. The point is not simply to bring more objects under comparison, but rather to examine the process of comparison. The book offers a new approach to the either/or of relativism and universalism, in which comparison is either impossible or assimilatory, by focusing instead on various forms of "incommensurability"-comparisons in which there is a ground for comparison but no basis for equivalence. Each chapter develops a particular form of such cultural comparison from readings of important novelists (Joseph Conrad, Simone Schwartz-Bart), poets (Aime Cesaire, Derek Walcott), and theorists (Edouard Glissant, Jean-Luc Nancy).
Table of Contents
Table of Contents Acknowledgements Preface CHAPTER 1 Grounds for Comparison Comparative Reaches Unimagined The Time of Comparison The Space of Comparison Incommensurability : Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison CHAPTER 2 Ungrounding Comparison: Conrad and Colonial Narration Imperial Comparison Marlow and The Rhetoric of Dissimilation Foiled Communities CHAPTER 3 The Empire's Loose Ends: Dissimilated Readings Dissimilation Dissimilation and Com-paraison Relation CHAPTER 4 Ruined Comparatives: Epic Similitude and the Pedagogy of Poetic Space in Derek Walcott's Omeros History and The Place Without People: Amnesia and Analogy Forgettable Vacations and Metaphor in Ruins Homeric Similes and Omeric Similitudes: A Contingent Excursus Pedagogy of Poetic Space ("Our Last Resort As Much As Yours, Omeros") Envoi CHAPTER 5 The Gift of Belittling All Things: Catastrophic Miniaturization in Aim' C'saire and Simone Schwarz-Bart Geometries of Blood The Plenitude of Smallness Irreducibility Catastrophe and Finitude The Horizon's Hero: Monocosm to Microcosm REFERENCE LIST Index
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