Latta baraiya

Assignment Paper 206

Dystopian/Utopian Vision in A Dance of the Forests

Name : Latta Baraiya

Paper : African Literature

Roll no : 11

Enrollment no : 3069206420200003

Email id : lattabaraiya1204@gmail.com

Batch : 2020-22

Submitted to : Smt. S. B. Gardi Department of English, MKBU

Introduction

Very few critics have sought to study Wole Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests because of its apparent complexity; those who have done so consider it as a symbolic remark on Nigeria's geopolitical predicament. While such views may be correct, given that the play was written in 1960 to commemorate Nigeria's independence, the difficulty with such interpretations is that they ignore the play's structure, in which Soyinka links the past to the present in order to predict a dystopian future. While a utopian past and dystopian present are frequently presented as a narrative gesture that leads to a utopian future. According to Solomon Omatsola Azumurana,

Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests links the hopeless past with the fruitless present to project a bleak future. (Azumurana, Solomon Omatsola)

While the play's inspiration came from the betrayal of trust and optimism in the Nigerian socio-political context, the play's message is universal. Soyinka maintains that the atrocities that have defined human interactions in general are unavoidable in this regard. Nonetheless, by depicting the inevitability of these human crimes, Soyinka is compelled to seek a utopian future.

Dystopian/Utopian Vision in ‘A Dance of the Forests

This is the most recognized play of Wole Soyinka. The play was performed on the celebration of independence of Nigeria – 1960. The play was published in 1963. This iconoclastic work that irritated many of the elite in Soyinka's native Nigeria demands freedom from European imperialism. We see a portrayal of post-colonial Nigerian politics aimless and corrupt. Derek Wright points to the difficulty and elusiveness of the play when he states that it is "the most uncentered of works, there is no discernible main character or plot line, and critics have been at a loss to say what kind of play it is or if it is a play at all and not a pageant, carnival or festival"

The framework of a play is a significant factor in determining the playwright's aesthetic vision. But the structure which refer here is not the conventional dramatic structure of exposition, complication, climax, anti-climax, and denouement that is the paraphernalia of plays in general; but the plot structure that is distinctive to individual plays or artistic visions. Booker identifies this distinctive plot structure, especially as it pertains to dystopian/utopian artistic vision, when he avers that

"Utopia and dystopia are very much part of the same project in that both describe an other world, spatially and/or temporally removed from that of the author and/or intended readership" (Phillips, Richard)

While a utopian past and dystopian present is often enacted as a narrative gesture that concomitantly leads to a futurity that is utopian (Paul F. Starrs and John B. Wright 98), the reverse is the case in this play.

Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests is the hopeless past with the fruitless present to project a bleak future.(Azumurana)

Based on this negative reconstruction of the African past, which is antithetical to its glorification in the works of négritude writers, Soyinka insists, to borrow the words of that there is no "lost way of life and a lost course of pursuits" (Wiegman). This is so because in a work that searches for a utopian future, the past must be reconstructed in such a way that the living seek to recapture the past in the future.

But as Anyokwu observes "Soyinka" in this play "dramatizes man's proclivity to selectively 'edit' his past, turn a blind eye to the warts and welts of his ignoble past and choose to highlight the halcyon days instead" (Anyokwu)

The play is metaphorical commentary of the socio-political situation in Nigeria. If we see the structure of the play, Soyinka traces the past to the present to forecast a dystopian future.

Utopian past ➡️ Dystopian present ➡️ Utopian future

It means Soyinka wants to tell that, the past of Nigeria was utopian, where their people are living without any disturbance but the present is dystopian. Where people became selfish. They are killing people like Demoke. So Soyinka asked a question here: how will the future become utopian ? This expectation has not become true here.

Past and the present as the failure of the future

The plot of this play is one in which there is a “gathering of the tribes” in a festivity in which the living asks their gods to invite some of their illustrious ancestors. These illustrious ancestors are supposed to be reminders of a magnificent past. But instead of legendary ancestors,Forest Father/Head—the supreme divinity of the play, sends the living “two spirits of the restless dead” . It is this action of Forest Father that sets in motion the conflict of the play between the dead and the living, and between humans and the gods. But beyond these conflicts is the new world envisaged by Soyinka: a world in which, to borrow the words of Miller, all that is presently separated are united (Miller).

Aroni wants to reveal the sins of all people who have done wrong with dead women and dead men in past life. They did sins in their present life also. If their past and present is like this, how can they build a good future ? This question Soyinka tries to unfold. As Wiegman sees the apocalyptic or dystopic as a work "which writes the present as the failure of the future" and this is what obtains in A Dance of the Forests in which Soyinka stretches Wiegman's explanation/or observation by writing the past and the present as the failure of the future. This is evident, as already noted, from the past and present violent actions of Soyinka's major characters. This is a play therefore in which the past and the present conflate in a metonymic reenactment of violence and bloodshed. Soyinka traces the history of a hopeless past, and compares it with a defective present to forecast a bleak future. In the prologue to the play, Aroni (Lieutenant to Forest Father) states:

Even this might have passed unnoticed by Oro if Demoke had left araba's height undiminished. But Demoke is a victim of giddiness and cannot gain araba's heights. He would shorten the tree, but apprentice to him is one OREMOLE, a follower of Oro who fought against this sacrilege to his god. And Oremole won support with his mockery of the carver who was tied to earth. The apprentice began to work above his master's head; Demoke reached a hand and plucked him down. (Soyinka- A Dance of the Forests)

It is also significant that the Dead Man and Dead Woman have come not to celebrate with the living, but to judge them. As what they have done in past and in the present also they are not giving them justice. Even nobody takes the case of a dead man. They repeatedly implore "Will you take my case?" (Soyinka), which is also the opening statement of the play, is an indication that they have come to right the wrongs against them in their previous existence, eight centuries ago. As Miller rightly observes,

"dystopias [are] motivated out of a utopian pessimism in that they force us to confront the dystopian elements... so that we can work through them and begin again" (Miller).

In this sense, Dead Woman's observation that nothing has changed after eight centuries is in itself a call for a new beginning that would guarantee a promising future. What happened to them in the past is happening in the present also. The king and the members of courtship done wrong with dead man and dead woman. In the present at the end nothing has happened and they didn't get justice. We can say that the past is gone, the present is here, but the future is yet to come. By painting a dystopian past and present, and forecasting a gloomy future, Soyinka warns that the mistakes of the past and the present should be avoided for a better future.

Despite the dystopian images that populate Soyinka’s play, he still hints at the regeneration of the human world. For instance, the plot which is in itself dystopian,still has a utopian element implicated in it.

Conclusion

To wind up we can find that, it may be claimed that Soyinka's aesthetic rumination within the utopian literary genre is that the past should not be constructed in such a way that it is glorified and romanticised as a projection of a happy future. The past and present, according to Soyinka, must be criticised in order for the future to be hopeful. In the novel the author said that the past of the country was not glorified and the present is not hopeful. As may already be deduced, he criticises the past and present, and foresees a dystopian future in order to direct action that will prevent it from becoming a reality. As a result, Soyinka's apocalyptic terrain is inextricably linked to his utopian vision. longing for a better future.

Works Cited

Anyokwu , Christopher. “HOPE EGHAGHA AS POET: SATIRE, SELF AND SOCIETY .” SKASE Journal of Literary Studies, vol. 4, 20 Dec. 2012.

Azumurana, Solomon Omatsola. “Wole Soyinka’s Dystopian/Utopian Vision in a Dance of the Forests.” Tydskrif Vir Letterkunde, vol. 51, no. 2, 2017, pp. 71–81., https://doi.org/10.4314/tvl.v51i2.6.

Miller, Jim. “Post-Apocalyptic Hoping: Octavia Butler’s Dystopian/Utopian Vision.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, SF-TH Inc, 1998, pp. 336–60, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4240705.

Phillips, Richard. “Dystopian Space in Colonial Representations and Interventions: Sierra Leone as ‘the White Man's Grave.’” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, vol. 84, no. 3-4, 2002, pp. 189–200., https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0435-3684.2002.00123.x.

Soyinka, Wole. A Dance of the Forests: A Play. Oxford University Press, 1976.

Starrs, Paul F., and John B. Wright. “Utopia, Dystopia, and Sublime Apocalypse in Montana's Church Universal and Triumphant.” Geographical Review, vol. 95, no. 1, 2005, pp. 97–121., https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1931-0846.2005.tb00193.x.

Wiegman, Robyn. “Feminism’s Apocalyptic Futures.” New Literary History, vol. 31, no. 4, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000, pp. 805–25, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057637.

Translation Studies Unit 4

Hello everyone, I'm Latta Baraiya, a student of the department of English, MKBU. In this blog I'm going to discuss the articles on Contemporary Literature and Translation Studies. This task is assigned by our professor Dilip Barad sir. So let's begin with an article on Translation Studies.

8.Tejaswini Niranjana. “Introduction: History in Translation” Siting Translation: History, Poststructuralism and the Colonial Context.

Abstract :-

For a while now, some of the most urgent debates in contemporary cultural and literary studies have emerged out of the troubled interface of poststructuralist theory and historical studies. In its most basic formulation, the problem is that of articulating radical political agendas within a deconstructive framework. For a discipline like literary studies, the raison d'être of which is the analysis of representation, the critique of representation coming from within has engendered profoundly self-reflexive anxieties. She begins by addressing what she sees as deconstructive criticism's failure to address the problem of colonialism, as well as the neglect by translation studies to ask questions about its own historicity. Contemporary critiques of representation have not extended themselves to the point of questioning the idea of translation, of re-presenting linguistic meaning in interlinguistic transfers.

Key Arguments :-

Her purpose is to make a modest beginning by examining the “uses” of translation. The rethinking of translation becomes an important task in a context where it has been used since the European Enlightenment to under- write practices of subjectification, especially for colonized peoples.
Translation functions as a transparent presentation of something that already exists, although the "original" is actually brought into being through translation. Paradoxically, translation also provides a place in "history" for the colonized.
She was, therefore, discuss the pertinence of the critique of historicism to a world undergoing decolonization, given the enduring nature of Hegelian presentation of the non-West and the model of teleological history that authorizes them, a questioning of the model could underwrite a new practice of translation.
Another aspect of post-structuralism that is significant for a rethinking of translation is its critique of historicism, which shows the genetic (searching for an origin) and teleological (positing a certain end) nature of traditional historiography.
A critique of historicism might show us a way of deconstructing the "pusillanimous" and "deceitful" Hindus of Mill and Hegel. Her concern here is not, of course, with the alleged misrepresentation of the "Hindus." Rather, I am trying to question the with holding of reciprocity and the essentializing of “difference” (what Johannes Fabian calls a denial of coevalness) that permits a stereotypical construction of the other.
Conventionally, translation depends on the Western philosophical notions of reality, representation, and knowledge.

Analysis :-

It is in the context of this crisis that Tejaswini Niranjana's examination

of translation as critical practice is made possible. Her analysis seems to amplify and elaborate the possibilities of the claim made by other postcolonial theorists like Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, as well as

feminists such as Jane Gallop and Nancy K. Miller, that deconstruction can be used in politically enabling ways. Insisting that a questioning of humanist or Enlightenment models of representation and translation

"can underwrite a new practice of translation ... reinscribing its potential as a strategy of resistance",

Niranjana persuasively shows that a critique of presence can be taken to its limits and yet not incapacitate the interventionist critic.

Jones's disgust is continually mitigated by the necessity of British rule and the "impossibility" of giving liberty to the Indians. He brings up repeatedly the idea of "Orientals" being accustomed to a despotic rule. In his tenth annual discourse to the Asiatic Society, he says that a reader of "history" "could not but remark the constant effect of despotism in benumbing and debasing all those faculties which distinguish men from the herd that grazes; and to that cause he would impute the decided inferiority of most Asiatic nations, ancient and modern."27 The idea of the "submissive" Indians, their inability to be free, and the native laws that do not permit the question of liberty to be raised are thus brought together in the concept of Asian despotism.

Conclusion :-

Since it is part of her argument that the problematics of translation and the writing of history are inextricably bound together, She should briefly go over Spivak's main points regarding the "Subaltern historians. Their strategic use of post-structuralist ideas may help us see more clearly how the notions of history and translation she wish to reinscribe are not only enabled by the post-colonial critique of

historiography but might also further strengthen that critique.

9.E.V. Ramakrishnan, “Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of the Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry”, in Indigenous Imaginaries: Literature, Region, Modernity.

Abstract :-

Translation looked like something shaped Indian modernity. In the language of Bengali, Malayalam and Marathi how modernity comes through the Translation. This article examines the role played by translation in shaping a modernist poetic sensibility in some of the major literary traditions of India in the twentieth century, between 1950 and 1970. The chapter will study examples from Bengali, Malayalam and Marathi, to understand how such translations of modern Western poets were used to breach the hegemony of prevailing literary sensibilities and poetics modes. Many Indian poets such as Buddhadeb Bose, Agyeya, Gopalakrishna Adiga, Dilip Chitre and Ayyappa Paniker were also translators. Translation from Africa and Latin America poetry played a significant role in this phase of modernism. Neruda and Parra were widely translated into Indian languages during this phase.

An essay on T.S. Eliot in Bengali by Sudhindranayh Dutt, or scathing critique in Malayalam on the poetic practices of Vallathol Narayana Menon by Ayyappa Paniker, can also be described as ‘translational’ writing as they have elements of translation embedded in them.

Key Arguments :-

Critics such as Simon Gikandi, Susan Friedman, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, and Aparna Dharwadker have argued that Non-Western modernism are not mere derivative versions of European hegemonic practice.
R. Sasidhar writes, If European modernism was drawn between the euphoric and the reactive, in Kannada the precipitate modernism was drawn between. the Brahminical and the non-Brahmanical. Just as the euphoric and the reactive modernisms were part of the internal dynamics of modernism itself, so also the Brahmanical and the non-Brahmanical modernisms in Kannada were part and parcel of a modernism that came as a reaction to the Nehruvian environment.
One of the recurring themes in Sudhindranath Dutta's critical essays is the primacy of the word. In 'The Necessity of Poetry', he argues that the persistence of poetry through the ages in all societies, particularly among the unsophisticated and the primitive, attest to its necessity.

Analysis :-

The act of reading becomes an act of recovery when prescriptive protocols and absolutist dictums are subverted through an intimate involvement with the subliminal, the unwritten and the inarticulate embedded in literary texts. The book analyses the moral imaginaries that animate the works of Rabindranath Tagore, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, Mahasweta Devi, Amitav Ghosh, Bhalchandra Nemade, Anand, M. Mukundan, N. S. Madhavan, Agha Shahid Ali and Jean Arasanayagam as evidence of revisionist ways of radical rethinking that can propel us in the direction of an interdisciplinary domain of comparative humanities.

Conclusion :- Language became, for the modernists, the only reality that they could relate to. Their moment of recognition. enabled by the discourses of 'Western' modernism, was postcolonial in its essence. The self-reflexive mo(ve)ment was also made possible by the carrying across of not content or form, but an interior mode of being that questioned the prevailing limits of freedom.

Translation Studies Unit 3

6.Ganesh Devy, “Translation Theory: An Indian Perspective”, In Another Tongue: Essays on Indian English Literature.

Abstract :-

This article is talking about the importance of translation in transmitting literary movements across linguistic borders. In this article Ganesh Devi begins with Christian metaphysics and ends with the Indian metaphysics. Various acts of translation include the origins of literary movements and literary traditions. Translations are widely regarded as unoriginal, and the aesthetics of translation have received little attention.

‘Translation is the wandering existence of a text in a perpetual exile’

J. Hillis Miller

In Western metaphysics translation is an exile, a fall from the origin; and the mythical exile is a metaphoric translation, a post-Babel crisis. No critic has taken any well-defined position about the exact placement of translations in literary history.

Key Arguments :-

In this article we find Roman Jakobson in his essay on the linguistics of translation

proposed a threefold classification of translations:

(a) those from one verbal order to another verbal order within the same

language system

(a) those from one language system to another language system, and

(a) those from a verbal order to another system of signs.

In A Linguistic Theory of Translation, J. C. Catford gives a comprehensive declaration of theoretical formulation regarding the linguistics of translation, in which he attempts to distinguish several linguistic levels of translation. Because translation is a linguistic act, any theory of translation must originate from linguistics, according to his main premise: 'Translation is a linguistic operation: the process of replacing a text in one language for a text in another; hence, any theory of translation must rest on a theory of language - a general linguistic theory.'

Analysis :-

Various domains of humanistic knowledge were divided into three categories in Europe during the nineteenth century:

1.Comparative studies for Europe,

2.Orientalism for the Orient,

3.Anthropology for the rest of the world

Following Sir William Jones' 'discovery' of Sanskrit, historical linguistics in Europe became increasingly reliant on Orientalism. Further we can see the problem of translation. The translation problem is not just a linguistic problem. It is an aesthetic and ideological problem with an important bearing on the question of literary history. Literary translation is not just a replication of a text in another verbal system of signs. It is a replication of an ordered sub-system of signs within a given language in another corresponding ordered sub-system of signs within a related language

Conclusion :-

Comparative literature means that there are regions of significance that are shared across two related languages, as well as areas of significance that can never be shared. When the soul passes from one body to another, it does not lose any of its essential significance. Indian philosophies of the relationship between form and essence, structure and significance are guided by this metaphysics. The true test is the writer’s capacity to transform, to translate, to restate, to revitalize the original. And in that sense Indian literary traditions are essentially traditions of translation.

7.A.K. Ramanujan, “On Translating a Tamil Poem”, Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan, ed Vinay Dharwadkar.

Abstract :-

Article starts with the talk of world literature

Ramanujan ask the question,

'How does one translate a poem from another time, another culture,another language?

subject of this paper is not the fascinating external history of this literature, but translation, the transport of poems from classical Tamil to modem English; the hazards, the damages in transit, the secret paths, and the lucky bypasses.

Ramanujan took various examples of Tamil poems that he translated into English and he described difficulties that he faced during translation.

Key Arguments :-

Frost once said

“poetry as that which is lost in translation”.

Evans-Pritchard, the anthropologist, used to say: If you translate all the European arguments for atheism into Azande, they would come out as arguments for God in Azande. Such observations certainly disabuseus of the commonly-held notion of 'literal' translation.

Woollcott argued that English does not have left-branching possibilities, but they are a bit abnormal.

In Hopkins's and Thomas's poetry the leftward syntax is employed for special poetic effects-it alternates with other, more 'normal', types of English sentences. In Tamil poetry the leftward syntax is not eccentric, literary or offbeat. but part of everyday 'natural' speech.

Analysis :-

Translation is not only about text, it's about translation of time, other culture, other language. There are many problems while translation. Researcher Argues that any single poem is part of a set, a family of sets, a landscape, a genre. While translating the Tamil poem Ainkurunuru 203, He begins with the sounds. He found that the sound system of Tamil is very different from English. For instance, Old Tamil has six nasal consonants: a labial, a dental, an alveolar, a retroflex, a palatal and a velar-m, n, n, ñ, n, n-three of which are not distinctive in English.

How shall we translate a six-way system into a three-way English system (m, n, n)? Tamil has long and short vowels, but English (or most English dialects) have diphthongs and glides. For example : in Gujarati there are 13 vowels and 34 consonants & in English 5 vowels and 21 consonants. The language within a language becomes the second language of Tamil poetry.

He discuss that you have to readjust the structure while translation

For example :

Rama killed Ravana.
રામે રાવણ માર્યો.

You have to do addition in the target language. Because the source language has that absence. There are some words that are not translated for example some Lexicon - semantics words are not translated. Example Gujarati -Sanskrit word :Dharma.

Translation is possible with these things,

Universals: If such universals did not exist, as Voltaire said of God, we would have had to invent them. Universals of structure in both signifiers and signifieds are necessary fictions. The indispensable as ifs of our fallible enterprise.
Interiorised Contexts: One is also translating this kind of intertextual web, the meaning- making a web of colophons and commentaries that surround and contextualise the poem.
Systematicity: One translates not single poems but bodies of poetry that create and contain their original world.
Structural mimicry: The structures of individual poems, the unique figures they make out of all the given codes of their language, rhetoric , and poetics, become the points of entry. So one attempts a structural mimicry, to translate relations, not items not single words but phrases, sequences, sentences; not metrical Units but rhythms; not morphology but syntactic patterns.

Conclusion :-

The translation must not only represent, but re-present, the original. One walks a tightrope between the To-language and the From-language, in a double loyalty. A translator is an 'artist on oath'. This article argues against the view of Frost : poetry is not lost in the translation.

At the end we see the example of a Chinese emperor, who wants to make a tunnel in a mountain. They started work from both sides of the mountain. Engineer said both sides meet in the middle of the mountain. But one asked the question, what if they don't meet ? The counsellor answered, ‘if they don't meet, we will have two tunnels instead of one’.

So the translation work is like that, if the representation in another language is not close enough, but still succeed in ’carrying’ the poem in some sense, we will have two poems instead of one.

Comparative Studies Unit 2

4. 'What is comparative Literature Today ?' Comparative Literature : A Critical Introduction by Susan Bassnett.

Abstract :- Sooner or later, anyone who claims to be working in comparative literature has to try and answer the inevitable question : What is it ? The simplest answer is that comparative literature involves the study of texts across cultures, that it is interdisciplinary and that it is concerned with patterns of connection in literature across both time and space. Susan Bassnett gives a critical understanding of Comparative literature. She says that there is no particular object for studying comparative literature. Another thing is, we cannot give a definite term for comparative literature. Different authors of literature give various perspectives about comparative literature. The popular understanding of comparative literature means different cultures across the world, expressed in the history of literature.

key Arguments :-

Critics at the end of the twentieth century,in the age of postmodernism,still wrestle with the same questions that were posed more than a century ago:

“What is the object of the study in comparative literature? How can comparison be the objective of anything? If individual literatures have canon,what might a comparative canon be? How can be comparatist select what to compare ?Is comparative literature a discipline? Or is it simply a field of study ?”

Susan Bassnett argues that there are different terms used by different scholars for comparative literature studies. Therefore, we cannot put it in a single compartment for comparative literature.
The second thing she argues is that the west students of 1960 claimed that comparative literature could be put in single boundaries for comparative literature study, but she says that there is no particular method used for claiming.

Analysis :-

The comparative literature has been developed through the progress of the world and through various cultures of different continents. A different cultures of the continents have played a vital role in comparative literature studies, be it European, African, American and Eastern so on. Matthew Arnold in his Inaugural lecture at Oxford in 1857 when he said :

“Everywhere there is connection, everywhere there is illustration. No single event,no single literature is adequately comprehend except in relation to other events,to other literature.”

Goethe is termed Weltliteratur. Goethe noted that he liked to “keep informed about foreign productions’ and advised anyone else to do the same.It is becoming more and more obvious to me,”he remarked, “that poetry is the common property of all mankind.”

Benedetto Croce argued that comparative literature was a non-subject, contemptuously dismissing the suggestion that it might be seen as a separate discipline. Wellek and Warren in their Theory of Literature, a book that was enormously significant in comparative literature when it first appeared in 1949,suggest that :

“Comparative Literature …will make high demands on the linguistic proficiencies of our scholars.It asks for a widening of perspectives, a suppression of local and provincial sentiments, not easy to achieve.”

Conclusion :-

Comparative literature could not be brought under one umbrella unless it becomes a particular branch of the discipline of literature. There are a lot of efforts being taken to study comparative literature through a common language that is done in translation, which is understood by all people. Comparative Literature has traditionally claimed translation as a sub-category,but this assumption is now being questioned.The work of scholars such as Toury,Lefevere,Hermans,Lembert and many others has shown that translation is especially at moments of great cultural changes. Evan Zohar argued that extensive translation activity takes place when a culture is in a period of translation :when it is expanding,when it needs renewal,when it isin a pre-revolutionary phase,then translation plays a vital part.

5. Todd Presner, ‘Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline’ in Ali Behdad and Thomas eds. A Companion to Comparative Literature’

Abstract :-

After five hundred years of print and the massive

transformations in society and culture that it unleashed, we are in the midst of another watershed moment in human history that is on par with the invention of the printing press or perhaps the discovery of the New World. This article focuses on the questions like it is essential that humanists assert and insert themselves into the twenty - first century cultural wars, which are largely being defined, fought, and won by corporate interests.

Why, for example, were humanists, foundations, and universities conspicuously – even scandalously – silent when Google won its book search lawsuit and, effectively, won the right to transfer copyright of orphaned books to itself? Why were they silent when the likes of Sony and Disney essentially engineered the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, radically restricting intellectual property, copyright, and sharing? The Manifesto is a call to Humanists for a much deeper engagement with digital culture production, publishing, access, and ownership. If new technologies are dominated and controlled by corporate and entertainment interests, how will our cultural legacy be rendered in new media formats? By whom and for whom?

Key Arguments :-

Comparative Literature since they raise questions that have formed the methodological, disciplinary, and institutional foundation of a wide - range of academic fi elds in the Humanities, including history and art history, literary and cultural studies, and the humanistic social sciences, such as anthropology, archaeology, and information studies.
If new technologies are dominated and controlled by corporate and entertainment inter ests, how will our cultural legacy be rendered in new media formats? By whom and for whom? These are questions that Humanists must urgently ask and answer.
The question that we need to confront in the fourth information age concerns the specifi city of the digital medium vis - à - vis other media formats, the various kinds of cultural knowledge produced, the ways of analyzing it, the various platforms that support it, and, fi nally, the modes of authorship and reception that facilitate new architectures of participation and new architectures of power.
Who is an author? What is a work? What constitutes a text, particularly in an environment in which any text is readerly and writerly by potentially anyone?
Comparative Media Studies thus enables us to return to some of the most fundamental questions of our fi eld with new urgency: Who is an author? What is a work? What constitutes a text, particularly in an environment in which any text is readerly and writerly by potentially anyone?
Google has already digitized and indexed more than ten million books, allowing scholars to perform ever - more complex searches, discover patterns, and potentially export large datasets derived from the digital book repository into other applications (such as Geographic Information Systems) in order to pursue quantitative questions such as statistical correlations, publishing histories, and semantic analyses as well as qualitative, hermeneutical questions. Spurred by the work of Lev Manovich and Noah Wardrip - Fruin, the fi eld of “ cultural analytics ” has emerged over the past fi ve years to bring the tools of high - end computational analysis and data visualization to dissect large - scale cultural datasets. 8 Such datasets might include historical data that have been digitized, such as every shot in the fi lms of Vertov or Eisenstein, the covers and content of every magazine published in the United States in the twentieth century, or the collected works of Milton, not to mention contemporary, real - time data fl ows such as tweets, SMS messaging, or search trends. Because meaning, argumentation, and interpretative work are not limited to the “ insides ” of texts or necessarily even require “ close ” readings, Comparative Data Studies allows us to use the computational tools of cultural analytics to enhance literary scholarship precisely by creating models, visualizations, maps, and semantic webs of data that are simply too large to read or comprehend using unaided human faculties. My point here is not to pitch “close” hermeneutical readings against “distant” data mappings, but rather to appreciate the synergistic possibilities between a hyper - localized, deep analysis and a macrocosmic view.

Analysis :-

Comparative Media Studies

For Nelson, a hypertext is a:-

Body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper [ … ] Such a system could grow indefinitely, gradually including more and more of the world ’ s written knowledge. (Nelson, 2004: pp. 134 – 145)

Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies :-

James Boyle points out, there are many corporate entities eager to regulate the public domain and control the “commons of the mind.” 10 For Boyle, the real danger is not unauthorized file sharing but “ failed sharing ” due to enclosures and strictures placed upon the world of the creative commons (Boyle, 2008 : p. 182). Scholars such as McKenzie Wark and Kathleen Fitzpatrick have even “ published ” early versions of their entire books on Commentpress.

Comparative Data Studies:-

Lev Manovich and Noah Wardrip - Fruin, the field of “ cultural analytics ” has emerged over the past five years to bring the tools of high - end computational analysis and data visualization to dissect large - scale cultural datasets. Jerome McGann argues with regard to the first in his elegant analysis of “ radiant textuality, ” the differences between the codex and the electronic versions of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Conclusion :- This article mainly focuses on the twenty-first century in terms of digital humanities and how we are doing comparative studies. After discussing various arguments, we come to know that to date, it has more than three million content pages, more than three hundred million edits, over ten million registered users, and articles in forty - seven languages (Wikipedia Statistics). This is a massive achievement for eight years of work. Wikipedia represents a dynamic, flexible, and open - ended network for knowledge creation and distribution that underscores process, collaboration, access, interactivity, and creativity, with an editing model and versioning system that documents every contingent decision made by every contributing author. At this moment in its short life, Wikipedia is already the most comprehensive, representative, and pervasive participatory platform for knowledge production ever created by humankind. In my opinion, that is worth some pause and reflection, perhaps even by scholars in a future disciplinary incarnation of Comparative Literature.

Assignment Paper 206

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Comparative Studies Unit 2

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