Provocation and Negotiation: Essays in Comparative Criticism
Edited by Gesche Ipsen, Timothy Mathews, and Dragana Obradović
Rodopi/Brill, 2013


https://www.amazon.co.uk/Provocation-Negotiation-Comparative-Criticism-Literature/dp/9042037059



This collection of essays takes on two of the most pressing questions that face the discipline of Comparative Literature today: ‘Why compare?’ and ‘Where do we go from here?’. At a difficult economic time, when universities all over the world once again have to justify the social as well as academic value of their work, it is crucial that we consider the function of comparison itself in reaching across disciplinary and cultural boundaries. The essays written for this book are by researchers from all over the world, and range in topic from the problem of translating biblical Hebrew to modern atheism, from Freud to Marlene van Niekerk, from the formation of one person’s identity to experiences of globalisation, and the relation of history to fiction. Together they display the ground-breaking ideas which lie at the heart of an act as deceptively simple as comparing one piece of writing to another.



Reading that description now, in 2014, I’m struck by how much it still resonates with everything that appeals to me about comparing, about the need for it, and the urgency of it. I’ll always be haunted by the idea of something childish about it as well, as though comparing things were like wanting all your friends to like each other. But what a privilege it is as well to try and explore, to show rather than tell what drives an individual, how attachments and desires can enclose a person as much as allow them to reach out; and to imagine ways of understanding that flower in being allowed to wither.
This book is one of many that arose from the yearly symposia run by the The Hermes Consortium for Literary and Cultural Studies. Since 1998, it’s functioned as:
a collaboration of doctoral schools in Belgium, The Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, France, and USA that seeks to further an understanding of the European presence in the fields of literature, art and culture in an era of globalization, to promote interdisciplinary thoughts in the fields of literary and cultural studies, to explore changes in European self-understanding and self-criticism across the cultures and disciplines in and beyond Europe, and to develop co-operation between European as well as between non-European research environments.
https://hermes.au.dk/



It's been one of my greatest pleasures to work with students and lecturers together to try and achieve these aims. Each year is a new start. Since 2018, the volumes arising from each of these yearly workshops have been published by UCL Press, in Comparative Literature and Culture.
https://uclpress.co.uk/book-series/comparative-literature-and-culture/