East-West Fiction as World Literature: The Hayy Problem Reconfigured
Srinivas Aravamudan
Language: English
Pages: 37
ISBN: 2:00249520
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From: Eighteenth-Century Studies
Volume 47, Number 2, Winter 2014
pp. 195-23
--
This article focuses on the reception history of translations of Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan and how natural theodicy, empiricist experimentalism, and philosophical fiction influenced eighteenth-century England. Discussing the status of Ibn Tufayl’s ideas in relation to Edward Pococke, John Locke, Robert Boyle, and Daniel Defoe allows scholars to go beyond the East-West dichotomy and instead create an opening from eighteenth-century studies onto recent debates around world literature. Using Hayy as a prism, we can understand the opportunities as well as the drawbacks of a world literature paradigm, as theorized by Wolfgang von Goethe, Erich Auerbach, and more recent scholars.
--
Eighteenth-Century Studies is committed to publishing the best of current writing on all aspects of eighteenth-century culture. The journal publishes different modes of analysis and disciplinary discourses that explore how recent historiographical, critical, and theoretical ideas have engaged scholars concerned with the eighteenth century. Eighteenth-Century Studies is the official publication of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS).
Countries and Their Cultures, Volume 1: Afghanistan - Czech Republic
Cultural Architecture (1st Edition)
International Exposure: Perspectives on Modern European Pornography, 1800-2000
Understanding Organizational Culture (2nd Edition)
Leeven van Hai Ebn Yokdhan (Amsterdam, 1701). © British Library Board (696.a.13). tegrate East-West narratives into a broader literary history of the world? Reinhart Koselleck, the great exponent of Begriffsgeschichte, warns us that history exists alongside corollary periodization and spatialization. While the historian might disavow it, there remains a tacit presupposition of teleology in history. Teleologies announce themselves belatedly, and periods are seized as such only after the fact: the.
Similarity of linguistic situation among the pre-national literatures of early modernity as well as that of contemporary postcolonial literatures. Not regimented by nationalist straitjackets, “orphan” texts jostle together unevenly in loose inter-communicability. Therefore, to think about world literature as already extant in the early modern period contra Goethe, Marx, and Engels, is not at all anachronistic; on the contrary, it is a resizing of the translatio as more than just about Latin-based.
Century, she would discover a culture of experiment, not yet solidified into a tradition of English empiricism; she might note a continued receptivity to foreign texts in England, but not yet subject to the gatekeeping of genre protocols, moral vision, and geographical provenance; and she might very well access a commonwealth of letters from everywhere and nowhere, that had yet to become the realm of English, let alone British literature. Nonetheless, there would be the forward motion of the.
“Contacts, Comparisons and Contrasts” characterized the early modern period, as the Journal of Early Modern History suggests through the title of its opening issue. The period was much more open-ended than the culturally narcissistic idea of the “Renaissance” might communicate—hence the nomenclature of the “early modern.” See [Robert Boyle], “General Heads for a Natural History of a Countrey, Great or Small, Imparted Likewise by Mr. Boyle,” Philosophical Transactions 1 (1665–66): 186–89; Francis.
Mythical etiology, Hayy’s mother could have been a local princess who was spiriting away her child to avoid the consequences of revealing a secret marriage to a jealously possessive brother. When describing the spontaneous generation, fascinating in its very meticulous account of an entirely materialist gestation, Ockley makes sure to add an explanatory footnote blaming Ibn Sina as the origin for this “contrivance” and exonerates Ibn Tufayl of the atheistic implications of such an account.37.