نامه فرهنگستان
سال سیزدهم شماره 4 (بهار و تابستان1393)

This article is the translation of the first chapter of Susan Bassnett’s Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction. In this chapter, Bassnett deals with the birth and development of Comparative Literature. Considering the origin of the term "Comparative Literature" and the circulation of its concepts at the beginning of the 19th century, she discusses such critical issues as the relation between culture and nationality, cultural interactions, the impact of particular and sometimes fraudulent works, the process of stabilizing national identity, the role of translation, the belief in the cultural and political superiority of Imperialism, chairs of comparative literature at European and American universities, the effort to define and assign subjects of study, comparative literature from French and German vantage points, the distinction between such terms as Comparative Literature, General Literature, and World Literature, the difference between languages, and the introduction of binary relations. Having introduced and discussed the issues mentioned above, she proceeds to shed light on the role they play in the blossoming and fruition of Comparative literature.

Comparative Literature at Oxford University. His Comparative Literary Studies: An Introduction (1973) has been an eminent classical work in teaching Comparative Literature in world universities. The fundamental principle of this book lies in the fact that we cannot know national literature without understanding the literatures of other nations. Prawer discusses the theories and methodology of Comparative Literature in ten chapters accompanied with practical examples. He starts his book with influence studies and meticulously moves to more recent fields of Comparative Literature such as translation studies, adaptation, thematology, motifs, genres, movements, periods, structure, "placing" and literary criticism. This short and useful book opens the way for organized research in Comparative Literature and is useful for students of Comparative Literature as well as Persian and foreign literatures and students of humanities who are interested in interdisciplinary studies. This article is the translation of the first chapter of this book which will be soon published as a textbook by SAMT Press.

Ever since the advent of Islam and its expansion throughout and beyond the Middle East, the Arabs have always been aware of comparative literature, but only to establish who counted as the most poetic or how one verse line measured up to or surpassed another; and that was due to the fact that the Arabic poetry was considered such a peerless phenomenon that even the thought of comparing it with other languages and literatures was out of the question. Comparative literature in its western sense, made its entry into the Arab world after the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798. Comparative literary studies in the Arab World were put in motion as early as 1904 in Cairo with the publication of al-Khalidi’s book on comparative literature, entitled Tarikh ‘ilm al-adab ‘ind al-ifranj wal-‘arab wa-Victor Hugo (The History of the Discipline of Literature among Westerners and Arabs and Victor Hugo), which led to a flurry of activities and publications related to comparative literature. Nevertheless, it never became an academic discipline in Arab universities and was just accorded the status of a course at advanced undergraduate or/and graduate level in departments of literature because the professors of Arabic departments not only misunderstood Comparative Literature, but also considered it a threat to the specificity and autonomy of Arabic literature. Comparative literature is on the rise in the Arab World at the very moment when, in the metropolitan centers of the West, it seems to have gone through a crisis; the reason is that the focus of the discipline in the Arab World is no longer on the French theory of influences, as it used to be. Comparative Literature, with its inherent potentials, offers one the opportunity to go beyond national borders and witness the similarities of different national literatures without centralizing one or marginalizing the other. The rise of nationalism, pan Arabism, and also the problematization of methods and theories of formerly colonizing countries explain for the increasing attention paid to comparative literature in the Arab World today.

Russia has a long history of comparative literature. Among the theoretical achievements of Russian comparatists, Veselovsky's theory of Historical Poetics can be pointed out. Comparative literature blossomed at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Russia and kept running parallel to other forerunner countries for some time, however; it gradually fell behind due to the overtly politicized content of Russian literature. Although comparative literature in the Soviet Russia shifted the attention of the comparatists away from the issue of influence to that of affinities, it was hardly distinguishable from the French school of comparative literature as far as the basics were concerned. Therefore, the blossoming season of comparative literature in the Soviet Russia can be considered the period of transition from the French to the American School. The comparatist who chooses the affinity between two literary phenomena as the subject of study must be careful to evade the trap of simplification by paying sufficient attention to the historical, social, cultural and political discourses that have informed the literary phenomena.

This article studies the appearance and development of comparative literature in Turkey. In the first part of the article, the researcher discusses how the culture of “comparisons” in Turkish classic literature is related to the geography of Islamic/Islamicate world, especially to that of the Persian or Arabic culture. The second part of the article is focused on how the comparative approach in contemporary Turkish literature has been defined in terms of the Greco-Roman, French, German and recently English cultures. Challenges and tensions resulted by the temporal and spatial discordance between Eastern and western cultures, classic and contemporary literary traditions and their impact on comparative literature in Turkey will be elucidated. This article reaches its conclusion by proposing an "on-border" hybrid identity for comparative literature in Turkey with regard to the questions of time and place, and also by providing a bibliography of original and translated researches.

There is increasing interest in the “sociology of translation”, agents of translation, and the agency of translators in Translation Studies. But more research is needed on the actual people involved in the production, distribution, and reception of translation, and also on the factors affecting these inter-relations. In this article, the focus is on the role of intermediaries involved in the process of the Persian translation and circulation of James Morier’s picaresque novel, The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824). Drawing on the political, social and cultural milieu of the 19th century Persia, the researcher contextualizes both the English and the Persian texts and shows how Mirza Habib Isfahani, the exiled interpreter, has intervened in the text in order to exercise his exilic agency. The translator’s interventions in the text show that for him the ethics of political progress was more important than the ethics of fidelity to the foreign text. The article also examines the agency of other translation agents: the English Major in charge of the editing and publication of the Persian translation in Calcutta; and a Persian dissident and copyist whose tragic death transformed his posthumous agency from a cross border copyist to a misidentified translator for more than 50 years.