Overview
- Provides a new model for how to read comparatively
- Takes into account the heterogeneity of our current, globalised reading context
- Opens up new discussions about the future legibility of historical narration in literary texts
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature (PMEL)
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Outlining the Future: Peter Weiss’s Die Ästhetik des Widerstands and the Parataxis of History
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Front Matter
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“I Would Not Even Invent a Transition.” (Re-)Contextualizing Joseph Conrad
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Front Matter
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Analogy and the Narration of Trauma in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and Die Ringe des Saturn
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Reviews
“Kaakinen’s rich study is lucidly and elegantly written throughout. The study is exemplary in its sustained correlation between formal analysis and historical signification.” (Jobst Welge, Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 57 (3), 2020)
“Kaisa Kaakinen’s book is a major contribution to the contemporary debates on comparability and incommensurability of world literature. In making a strong case for weak analogies, it develops a model for studying active audiences and heterogeneous historically situated reading positions in contemporary transnational modes of historical narration. Over and above the skillful, complex and imaginative analyses of various textual strategies for making historical comparisons in Conrad, Weiss and Sebald, the book powerfully performs its own weak analogies by bringing together authors as diverse as these in a new and compelling way.” (Eneken Laanes, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Tallinn University, Estonia)“Kaisa Kaakinen’s study forcefully contributes to the critical task of reconceptualizing practices of comparison for our age of increasing global connection along with inequality and violence. The well-chosen author trio of Weiss, Conrad, and Sebald allows Kaakinen to intertwine postcolonial paradigms with the field of transnational European literature, and to deploy twentieth-century texts towards a theory of reading for our world today. What happens, Kaakinen asks brilliantly, when a modernist poetics of gaps and ‘weak analogies’ meets heterogeneous―implied, unimplied, and unwelcome―audiences? In the interplay of connection across contexts with historical anchoring, these exciting readings demonstrate, the encounter unleashes a multidirectional imagination probing past and future relatedness.” (Claudia Breger, Professor of Germanic Studies, Indiana University Bloomington, USA)
“This is a major intervention into comparative methodologies, theories of transnational relations, and discussions about the future legibility of historical narration in literary texts. Kaakinen’s theory of weak analogies, as well as her development of the significance of the “overhearing” reader (the one who overhears conversations not directly addressed to the reader), will undoubtedly influence comparative literature scholars to come.” (David Kelman, Associate Professor, California State University, Fullerton, USA)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Comparative Literature and the Historical Imaginary
Book Subtitle: Reading Conrad, Weiss, Sebald
Authors: Kaisa Kaakinen
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51820-6
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-51819-0Published: 23 June 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-84749-8Published: 01 August 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-51820-6Published: 12 June 2017
Series ISSN: 2634-6478
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6486
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 261
Topics: European Literature, Comparative Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature