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Death of a Discipline (The Wellek Library Lectures)
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 809
EAN: 9780231129459
ISBN: 0231129459
Label: Columbia University Press
Manufacturer: Columbia University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 136
Publication Date: April 05, 2005
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Studio: Columbia University Press
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Editorial Review:For almost three decades, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has been ignoring the standardized "rules" of the academy and trespassing across disciplinary boundaries. Today she remains one of the foremost figures in the study of world literature and its cultural consequences. In this new book she declares the death of comparative literature as we know it and sounds an urgent call for a "new comparative literature," in which the discipline is given new life -- one that is not appropriated and determined by the market.In the era of globalization, when mammoth projects of world literature in translation are being undertaken in the United States, how can we protect the multiplicity of languages and literatures at the university? Spivak demonstrates how critics interested in social justice should pay close attention to literary form and offers new interpretations of classics such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Through close readings of texts not only in English, French, and German but also in Arabic and Bengali, Spivak practices what she preaches.Acclaim for Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and her work:"[Spivak] pioneered the study in literary theory of non-Western women." -- Edward W. Said"She has probably done more long-term political good, in pioneering feminist and post-colonial studies within global academia, than almost any of her theoretical colleagues." -- Terry Eagleton"A celebrity in academia... create[s] a stir wherever she goes." -- The New York Times
Customer Reviews
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Rating:  - not the one intended
Contrary to what is all too kindly asserted by a few friendly reviewers, obscure rather than brilliant, mannerist and unquotable as its style is, Death of a Discipline makes one thing clear: the author thinks and wants to make us believe that Comparative Literature IS dead (and had been long comatose before she dealt it the last blow). Since she has later confessed or pretended that she refers to a very obsolete type of American Comparative Literature only, being ignorant of other critical sites, ... Read More
Rating:  - Death as a Future; or, Cheers to Death!
Gayatri Spivak's _Death of a Discipline_ does not argue, as the title may suggest, that a discipline--specifically comparative literature-- is "dead" as in it is at (and passed) the end; rather Spivak writes for a future (one that is vastly different than the one it may have if it does not -- in many senses -- "die") of the discipline that is currently called comparative literature. Spivak argues that comparative literature must engage in a "chiasmus" with area and cultural studies, and in this way ... Read More
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