Saugata BHADURI « From National Literatures to World Literature : Issues in Translation and Comparative Literature »

If, rather than being rooted in sectarian identity politics, reading strategies for literary and cultural practice have to be other-regarding, and not be cocooned within one’s self-same monolingual and monocultural universes, it calls for translation and comparative literature – where one goes beyond literary and cultural texts in one’s own language and reaches out to the other – to become mainstays of such a practice. To what extent would an emphasis on going beyond one’s own identitarian literary universes require one to align with the project of World Literature, considering further the question of access to ‘worlding’ and canonization in a deeply differential globalized world ? The role played by translation and comparative literature in leading pedagogic praxes beyond national monolingual literatures towards the ethical and other-regarding project of World Literature will be examined in this lecture with particular reference to the Bengali author Rabindranath Tagore’s views on the same.