contents99-3

Ernst GRABOVSZKI
The Impact of Globalization and the New Media on the Notion of World Literature
Abstract: Ernst Grabovszki discusses in his article, "The Impact of Globalization and the New Media on the Notion of World Literature," aspects of communication and scholarship in the humanities in the context of social processes resulting from globalization and the impact of new media. The author suggests that the process of communication, the processes of creativity, and the study of literature and the changes these areas are now experiencing owing to the impact of globalization and new media should be studied from a systemic and empirical point of view. Further, the article is an exposition of changes we observe with regard to the traditional model of literary communication contrasted with the new possibilities offered by the internet and the world wide web. His discussion includes his views on how this new situation results in new possibilities as well as requirements authors, distributors, and readers of literature today have to cope with.

Steven TÖTÖSY de ZEPETNEK
From Comparative Literature Today Toward Comparative Cultural Studies
Abstract: Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek proposes in his article, "From Comparative Literature Today Toward Comparative Cultural Studies," a theoretical approximation of already established and current aspects of the disciplines of comparative literature and cultural studies. His comparative cultural studies is conceived as an approach -- to be developed eventually to a full-fledged framework -- containing at this point three areas of theoretical content: 1) To study literature (text and/or literary system) with and in the context of culture and the discipline of cultural studies; 2) In cultural studies itself to study literature with borrowed elements (theories and methods) from comparative literature; and 3) To study culture and its composite parts and aspects in the mode of the proposed "comparative cultural studies" approach instead of the currently reigning single-language approach dealing with a topic with regard to its nature and problematics in one culture only. At the same time, comparative cultural studies would implicitly and explicitly disrupt the established hierarchy of cultural products and production similarly to the disruption cultural studies itself has performed. The suggestion is to prularize and paralellize the study of culture without hierarchization. The article contains brief descriptions of recent volumes in comparative literature across the globe and closes with a ten-point draft proposal of how to do comparative cultural studies.

Johannes F. WELFING
Nietzsche and the Knowledge of the Child at Play: On the Question of Metaphysics
Abstract: In his paper, "Nietzsche and the Knowledge of the Child at Play: On the Question of Metaphysics," Johannes Welfing raises the question of a Nietzschean metaphysical presence (did Nietzsche define the essence of life and of being and thus also implicitly establish an imperative about the way in which one should lead one's life, or did he refrain from all definition, truth, system or law whatsoever?). The controversy continues: while for some critics Nietzsche's philosophy is animated by a desire for truth, others emphasize the novelty of a philosophical project that questions the very premises on which it is based. In particular, the author attempts to establish, by referring to a specific excerpt from the Nietzsche text, that the paradigm of the Nietzschean child at play on the "beach of life" -- argument of an important, contemporary brand of Nietzsche interpretation that situates Nietzsche beyond the metaphysical tradition -- cannot be said to be truly based on the Nietzsche text. While focusing on both Alan Schrift's and Mihailo Djuric's argument that Nietzsche attempted to escape the metaphysical tradition by emphasizing the knowledge of the child at play, Welfing argues that for Nietzsche -- if knowledge is to secure the escape from the belief in metaphysical essence on the level of practical life -- this knowledge is generated by the body rather than by the rational mind.

William H. THORNTON
A Postmodern Solzhenitsyn?
Abstract: William H. Thornton undertakes in his article, "A Postmodern Solzhenitsyn?," to bring Solzhenitsyn in from the cold, critically speaking, by closing the gap between him and his many postmodern detractors. That gap has been premised on the rough equivalence of poststructuralism and postmodernism. The postmodern realism advanced in this study challenges not only Solzhenitsyn's critics but his own stated aversion to postmodernism.Operating on both a microhistorical and macrohistorical plane, Solzhenitsyn's literary historiography testifies to the awesome scope of the gulag while never losing sight of its human factor.The double vision of Solzhenitsyn's proto-postmodern referentiality, a simultaneous centering and decentering, is matched by his determination to keep the past as a creative force within the present and future. Here poststructural, anti-realist post-modernism becomes his adversary; for just as it attempts to comprehend the local in pristine isolation, never connecting the dots, so too it isolates the past. Solzhenitsyn accuses (anti-realist) postmodernism of recycling many of the same avant-garde tools of forgetfulness that were used ever so effectively early in the twentieth century to dismantle existing cultural values, and indeed the very category of the cultural as a setting for local meaning.

Jean WILSON
Identity Politics in Atwood, Kogawa, and Wolf
Abstract: Jean Wilson's article, "Identity Politics in Atwood, Kogawa, and Wolf," is a comparative study of three texts published in the early 1980s: Atwood's "Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother," Kogawa's Obasan, and Wolf's Cassandra. Identity politics figure prominently in all three literary works, whose common poetic project is one of demythologization and of enabling at the same time the emergence of a new, liberating articulation, a language perhaps "never heard before." These writings interrogate the construction of identities in a patriarchal culture and contribute to a more complex understanding of identity formation. All three works, albeit in different ways, challenge readers to consider identity interrogatively and to explore in new voices what it means to say "we," to say "they," to say "you," to say "I."