Comparative Literature and the Historical Imaginary

"Kaisa Kaakinen's book is a major contribution to the contemporary debates on comparability and incommensurability of world literature. In making a strong case for weak analogies, it develops a model for studying active audiences and heterogeneous historically situated reading positions in contemporary transnational modes of historical narration. Over and above the skillful, complex and imaginative analyses of various textual strategies for making historical comparisons in Conrad, Weiss and Sebald, the book powerfully performs its own weak analogies by bringing together authors as diverse as these in a new and compelling way." (Eneken Laanes, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Tallinn University, Estonia) "Kaisa Kaakinen's study forcefully contributes to the critical task of reconceptualizing practices of comparison for our age of increasing global connection along with inequality and violence. The well-chosen author trio of Weiss, Conrad, and Sebald allows Kaakinen to intertwine postcolonial paradigms with the field of transnational European literature, and to deploy twentieth-century texts towards a theory of reading for our world today. What happens, Kaakinen asks brilliantly, when a modernist poetics of gaps and 'weak analogies' meets heterogeneous-implied, unimplied, and unwelcome-audiences? In the interplay of connection across contexts with historical anchoring, these exciting readings demonstrate, the encounter unleashes a multidirectional imagination probing past and future relatedness." (Claudia Breger, Professor of Germanic Studies, Indiana University Bloomington, USA)

This book argues that increasingly transnational reading contexts of the twenty-first century place new pressures on fundamental questions about how we read literary fiction.This book argues that increasingly transnational reading contexts of the twenty-first century place new pressures on fundamental questions about how we read literary fiction. Prompted by the stylistic strategies of three European émigré writers of the twentieth century — Conrad, Weiss and Sebald — it demonstrates the need to pose more differentiated questions about specific effects that occur when literary narratives meet a readership with a heterogeneous historical imaginary. In conversation with reception theory, trauma theory and transnational and postcolonial studies, the study shows how historical pressures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries require comparative literature to address not only implied but also various unimplied reading positions that engage history in displaced yet material ways. This book opens new analytical paths for thinking about literary texts as media of historical imagination and conceiving relations between incommensurable historical events and contexts. Challenging overly global and overly local readings alike, the book presents a sophisticated contribution to discussions on how to reform the discipline of comparative literature in the twenty-first century.