IWL Conference Contribution: Universality and Particularity

Blog: http://iwl2012universalityparticularity.blogspot.com/

Panel:
- introduction: Clara Rowland

- perspectives on universality/particularity:
Fabio Luis Cecchetto-Gasparin
Annemarie Fischer
Annette Vilslev
Michael Pifer

- concusion: Jonathan Liebembuk

AG Participants:
Chris Bush
Fabio Luis Cecchetto-Gasparin
Annemarie Fischer
Nilay Kaya
Danaé Koromvoki
Jonathan Liebembuk
Michael Pifer
Clara Rowland
Guillermo Severiche
Juliana Vilar Cardoso
Annette Vilslev

"Was die Welt zusammenhält" -

My dissertation traces the global pathways and dead ends of global issues. My research explores the paradox that some news stories have reached a higher probability of distribution than other, equally important issues in the cyber realm of the 21^st century.

By employing a narratology approach in order to capture the “narratable” versus the “unnarratable” (Gerald Prince), my dissertation investigates why certain global narratives become more pervasive than other, equally vital issues; notably with the novel dynamics of cyberspace.

Working with my advisors, Professor Brinker-Gabler (Comparative Literature), Professor Majer-O’Sickey (German Studies), and Professor Holmes (Anthropology), my dissertation roots within an integral and interdisciplinary approach of narratology, Media Studies, and ethnography.

The paradox of globalized communication is that the citizen is concerned most with global issues, but gets less informed and less concerned about them by the media. While acts of communication epitomize the global era, and the communicative is performative of the global (i.e. information is the most distributed good in this era of globalization), information has lost its performative potential (i.e. the über-availability of information has not translated into an equivalent degree of knowledge and of global response).

My dissertation shifts the focus from traditional media to cyber discourse.
The internet (r)evolutionizes the modes of (re)production and the communication model. Cyber communication is a complex–and circular–process of:

(i)                 oscillating between producer and user

(ii)               merging the message and the channel, and

(iii)             circulating a fluidity of textual structures (“palimpsests”).

My theoretical approach of narrative focuses the specific poetic nature and representation of an event/issue. Applying a center-periphery model of narratives,
I distinguish between highly productive narratives in the center of cyber discourse; as well as “unnarratable” (Gerald Prince) counterproductive narratives that remain on the periphery. The global topography of news distribution entails not only a question of availability (and imbalance) of resources, but founds within the proneness of the global audience to accept/decode specific narratives.

The Universal and/or/versus Tthe Particular

Pars pro Toto
Totum pro Parte
Connections and Dis-Connections
Similarities and Dis-Similarities
The Specific vs. The Common
Comparative Paradigms
Issues of Methodology

Hi,my name is Koromvoki Danaé. I m a second year Phd student in comprative literature at Paris-Sorbonne Paris IV University. I m interested in 19th and 20th century poetry, literary theory and translation. I m working on Giorgos Seferis, Odysseas Elytis and Nicos Engonopoulos and  specifically on their relation with greek tradition and french influences.

My name is Nilay and I'm a research assistant at Comparative Literature at Bilgi University. I've studied the works of Feyyaz Kayacan in the light of modernism through the problem of visuality. Currently I'm searching for my PhD project which would possibly focus on literature and film or the early modernist movement in Turkish novel.

Introduction

My name is Michael Pifer, and I'm a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. My research focuses on reading for avenues of literary 'interaction' within pre-modern Anatolian poetry.

Introduction

My name is Annette Thorsen Vilslev. I am a PhD fellow in Comp. lit. at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen: 

http://artsandculturalstudies.ku.dk/

My dissertation is about the writings of modern Japanese author Natsume Soseki. I compare his literature theory and novels and read them in the light of world literature and affect theory, which I believe allow for both close reading and more general discussions of how to include in the field of world literary theory also criticism from outside the EU or the US.

Introduction

My name is Jonathan Liebembuk, and I am a first year PhD student at the Graduate Center, CUNY, in New York in the Comparative Literature Department. My interests hover generally around philosophy, social theory, problems in literary and aesthetic theory, and rhetoric, with the particulars still in process.

Christopher Bush

Christopher Bush (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, UCLA 2000) is Associate Professor of French and is Program Director of Comparative Literary Studies. His research and teaching focus on comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to literary modernisms, especially the interactions between Euro-American and East Asian aesthetic theory, avant-gardes, and media.

His current book project, The Floating World: Japoniste Aesthetics and Global Modernity (under contract with Columbia University Press), challenges conventional notions of “japonisme” as a nostalgic reverie of a vanishing Old Japan. Reading Euro-American literary, critical, and cinematic uses of Japan in the context of Japanese modernization, the book argues for a tradition of “japoniste aesthetics” that represents a complex and self-conscious response to globalization, from the age of Impressionism to postmodernism.

http://www.frenchanditalian.northwestern.edu/people/faculty/bush.html

A glimpse of me

Hi, everybody!

My name is Fabio and I am currently an Assistant Professor at São Paulo State University - UNESP in Brazil. I have a Ph.D. in Literature from São Paulo University, USP, (Title: A recepção da tradução alemã de Grande Sertão: Veredas e a perspectiva da Weltliteratur de Goethe ([Reception of the German translation of Grande Sertão: Veredas in the perspective of Goethe´s Weltliteratur]), which had approched the question of Universality/Particularity. I have experience and expertise in Literature Studies, acting mainly on the following subjects: Comparative Studies (mainly concerning literature in boundary relations), Comparative Literature, Intercultural Germanistics, Literature Translation.

Hello,

I'm Guillermo Severiche, graduated from Universidad Nacional de Cuyo (Mendoza - Argentina) and a PhD Student at LSU (Louisiana State University - USA) in Comparative Literature. My research is about gender, body and economics in fiction. I'm focusing on Argentinian and Irish last 20 years, alternating between film and literature. So far, the writers I've selected are Colm Toibin (Ireland) and Sylvia Molloy (Argentina).

Introduction

Hi 

My name is Clara and I am Assistant Professor at the University of Lisbon, Portugal. My fields of specialization are Twentieth-century Brazilian literature, Comparative Literature and Interart Studies, with a particular interest in the work of João Guimarães Rosa and on issues of representation and materiality in Literature and other arts. In 2009 I finished my PhD in comparative literature and a revised version of the dissertation has just been published by UNICAMP in Brazil. At the centre of Rosa’s work, I argue, is an inquiry into the implications of writing, reflected in the tension between the tradition of oral storytelling and the book as a material object. I am also interested in intermediality issues: at the Center for Comparative Studies of the University of Lisbon, I coordinate an international project on the theoretical implications of the relations between writing and film (“False Movement: Studies in Writing and Film”). Working on thematic figurations of writing in film, I try to read tensions between media as negotiations of specificity  - in this sense informed by the issues that our universal/particular problematic dichotomy may trigger.

Hello!

My name is Juliana and I am a graduate student at Mackenzie University in São Paulo, Brazil.
Research:
The relationship between literature and the visual arts is very old and can be found in recreations such as the images made by Delacroix for Goethe's Faust and by Flaxman for Dante's The Divine Comedy. Lasar Segall's litographs inspired by the short story A Gentle Creature, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, show that this relationship is still remarkable in the twentieth century. The objective of my research is, based on the dialogical analysis of Dostoevsky's short story and Segall's litographs, observe the language that each of these artists used to create characters who express their own inner world.
Link:
Lasar Segall's Museum
http://www.museusegall.org.br

Introduction: Me, Myself and I

My name is Annemarie Fischer, and I am a PhD candidate at Binghamton University, State University of New York, USA. My dissertation explores the pathways and deadends of global narratologies.

Welcome to our Blog!
"The Universal and the Particular" is our AffinityGroupBlog within the 2012 Institute for World Literature in Istanbul at Bilgi University in Istanbul.
The Institute of World Literature serves as a think tank of distinguished scholars and prospering academic researchers from a variety of backgrounds. The IWL roots World Literature within a global home and serves as a concerted forum for exchange, exploration, research, and reflection.